It has let me know as well. In a way, the amendment seeks to formalise what is already an informal mechanism. I was minded initially to support Amendment 56 in the name of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones and the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson.
This landscape is quite varied. We have to create some kind of outlet, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, rightly said. That parent or individual will want to go somewhere, so we have to send them somewhere. We want that somewhere to be effective, not to get bogged down in spurious and vexatious complaints. We want it to have a high signal-to-noise ratio—to pull out the important complaints and get them to the platforms. That will vary from platform to platform. In some ways, we want to empower Ofcom to look at what is and is not working and to be able to say, “Platform A has built up an incredible set of mechanisms. It’s doing a good job. We’re not seeing things falling through the cracks in the same way as we are seeing with platform B. We are going to have to be more directive with platform B”. That very much depends on the information coming in and on how well the platforms are doing their job already.
I hope that the Government are thinking about how these individual complaints will be dealt with and about the demand that will be created by the Bill. How can we have effective mechanisms for people in the United Kingdom who genuinely have hard cases and have tried, but where there is no intermediary for the platform they are worried about? In many cases, I suspect that these will be newer or smaller platforms that have arrived on the scene and do not have established relationships. Where are these people to go? Who will help them, particularly in cases where the platform may not systemically be doing anything wrong? Its policies are correct and it is enforcing them correctly, but any jury of peers would say that an injustice is being done. Either an exception needs to be made or
there needs to be a second look at that specific case. We are not asking Ofcom to do this in the rest of the legislation.