My Lords, I strongly support the amendment in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Stevenson, as well as my noble friend Lady Featherstone. The essence of the message from the noble Lord, Lord Knight, about the need for trust and the fact that you can gain trust through greater transparency is fundamental to this group.
The Joint Committee’s report is now a historical document. It is partly the passage of time, but it was an extraordinary way in which to work through some of the issues, as we did. We were very impacted by the evidence given by Frances Haugen, and the fact that certain things came to light only as a result of her sharing information with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We said at the time that:
“Lack of transparency of service providers also means that people do not have insight into the prevalence and nature of activity that creates a risk of harm on the services that they use”.
That is very much the sense that the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, is trying to get to by adding scope as well.
We were very clear about our intentions at the time. The Government accepted the recommendation that we made and said that they agreed with the committee that
“services with transparency reporting requirements should be required to publish their transparency reports in full, and in an accessible and public place”.
So what we are really trying to do is to get the Government to agree to what they have already agreed to, which we would have thought would be a relatively straightforward process.
There are some other useful aspects, such as the review of effectiveness of the transparency requirements. I very much appreciate what my noble friend just said about not reading transparency reports. I read the oversight reports but not necessarily the transparency reports. I am not sure that Frances Haugen was a great advert for transparency reports at the time, but that is a mere aside in the circumstances.
I commend my noble friend Lady Featherstone’s Amendment 171, which is very consistent with what we were trying to achieve with the code of practice about violence against women and girls. That would fit very easily within that. One of the key points that my noble friend Lord Allan made is that this is for the benefit of the platforms as well. It is not purely for the users. Of course it is useful for the users, but not exclusively, and this could be a way of platforms engaging with the users more clearly, inserting more fresh air into this. In these circumstances it is pretty conclusive that the Government should adhere to what they agreed to in their response to the Joint Committee’s report.