My Lords, I am mindful of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, to be brief. I add a note of welcome to the mechanism that has been set out.
In this legislation, we are initiating a fundamental change to the way in which category 1 providers will run their reporting systems, in that prior to this they have not had any external oversight. Ofcom’s intervention will be material, given that online service providers will have to explain to Ofcom what they are doing and why.
We should note that we are also asking providers to do some novel prioritisation. The critical thing with all these reporting systems is that they operate at such huge volumes. I will not labour the points, but if noble Lords are interested they can look at the Meta and YouTube transparency reports, where it is explained that they are actioning tens of millions of pieces of content each month, on the basis of hundreds of millions of reports. If you get even 1% of 10 million reports wrong, that is 100,000 errors. We should have in mind the scale we are operating at. Ofcom will not be able to look at each one of those, but I think it will be able to produce a valuable system and make sure that quality control is improved across those systems, working with the providers. Having additional powers to create an alternative dispute resolution mechanism where one does not exist and would prove to be useful is helpful. However, the slow and steady approach of seeing what will happen with those systems under Ofcom supervision before jumping into the next stage is right.
I also note that we are asking platforms to do some prioritisation in the rest of the Online Safety Bill. For example, we are saying that we wish journalistic and politician content to be treated differently from ordinary user content. All of those systems need to be bedded in, so it makes sense to do it at a reasonable pace.
I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, who cannot be here today, was also very interested in this area and wanted to make sure we made the point that the fact there is a reasonable timescale for the review does not mean that we should take our foot off the pedal now for our expectations for category 1 service providers. I think I heard that from the Minister, but it would be helpful for him to repeat it. We will be asking Ofcom to keep the pressure on to get these systems right now, and not just wait until it has done the report and then seek improvements at that stage. With that—having been about as brief as I can be— I will sit down.
4.30 pm