My Lords, I welcome the government amendments in this group, which set out the important role that age assurance will play in the online safety regime. I particularly welcome Amendment 210, which states that companies must employ systems that are “highly effective” at correctly determining whether a particular user is a child to prevent access to pornography, and Amendment 124, which sets out in a code of practice principles which must be followed when implementing age assurance—principles that ensure alignment of standards and protections with the ICO’s age appropriate design code and include, among other things, that age assurance systems should be easy to use, proportionate to the risk and easy to understand, including to those with protected characteristics, as well as aiming to be interoperable. The code is a first step from current practice, in which age verification is opaque, used to further profile children and related adults and highly ineffective, to a world in which children are offered age-appropriate services by design and default.
I pay tribute again to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and I associate myself with the broad set of thanks that the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, gave in his opening speech. I also thank colleagues across your Lordships’ House and the other place for supporting this cause with such clarity of purpose. On this matter, I believe that the UK is world-beating, and it will be a testament to all those involved to see the UK’s age verification and estimation laws built on a foundation of transparency and trust so that those impacted feel confident in using them—and we ensure their role in delivering the online world that children and young people deserve.
I have a number of specific questions about government Amendment 38 and Amendment 39. I would be grateful if the Minister were able to answer them from the Dispatch Box and in doing so give a clear sign of the Government’s intent. I will also speak briefly to Amendments 125 and 217 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, as well as Amendment 184 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. All three amendments address privacy.
Government Amendment 38, to which I have added my name, offers exemptions in new subsections (3A) and (3B) that mean that a regulated company need not use age verification or estimation to prevent access to
primary priority content if they already prevent it by means of its terms of service. First, I ask the Minister to confirm that these exemptions apply only if a service effectively upholds its terms of service on a routine basis, and that failure to do so would trigger enforcement action and/or an instruction from Ofcom to apply age assurance.
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Secondly, will the Minister further explain how these exemptions impact on the child safety duties for priority content, which is not prohibited but must be age appropriate, or how they might account for aspects of the service that create harm but are not associated directly with the content? In trying to work out the logic, it appeared to me that either a company would have to identify the end user was a child by means of age assurance, but perhaps not the highest bar, or it would have to design a service that was not harmful to children even if that harm was not primary priority content. It would be good to hear what the intention is to make sure there is not—inadvertently, I am sure—a loophole by which companies can fail in their duties by ignoring children on their service because they do not allow primary priority content.
Amendments 49 and 93 would ensure that
“a provider can only conclude that children cannot access a service if age verification or age estimation is used on the service with the result that children are not normally able to access it”.
Somewhat related to my previous question, can the noble Lord confirm that a service—for example, a financial service provider that offers adult-facing products, or a gambling site that requires adults to identify themselves—will be taken as having age-verified so that age verification is no longer necessary?
I welcome the 18-month deadline for Ofcom to produce guidance on child access assessments, but can the Minister confirm that the timeframe is a backstop and the Government’s ambition is to get age assurance much quicker? Also, when he responds, will he confirm that Schedule 4 will be published as part of the child safety code, which is why it is not mentioned in Amendment 271? While I enthusiastically welcome the code of practice, it is simply the fact that many adults and children have concerns about privacy and security.
Amendments 125 and 217 address a gap in the Bill by making it clear
“that data collected for age assurance must be stored securely, deleted as soon as possible and not used for other purposes”.
Similarly, Amendment 184, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, addresses the privacy issue in a detailed way that may be better suited to Ofcom’s fully fleshed out code of conduct but none the less speaks to the same gap. I do not expect the Minister to accept these amendments as written, and I understand that there is an overarching requirement for privacy in the Bill, but in the public discourse about the online world, safety is always put in binary opposition to privacy. If the Government were to acknowledge in the Bill the seriousness of the need for privacy and security of information relating to age verification and estimation, it would send a clear message that they have understood the validity of the privacy concerns and be an enormous contribution to ending the unhelpful
binary. I hope that on this matter the Minister will agree to take these amendments away and include wording to the same effect.
Finally, last week, at the invitation of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester, the Minister and I attended an event at which we were addressed by children about the pressures they felt from social media. I thank all the young people present for the powerful and eloquent way in which they expressed the need for politicians and religious, civic and business leaders to do more to detoxify the digital world. If they are listening, as they said they would, I want to assure them that all of us in this Chamber hear their concerns. Importantly, when I asked Oliver, aged 12, and Arthur, aged 13, what one thing we could and should do to make their online world better, they said, “Make age checking meaningful”. Today, we are doing just that.