UK Parliament / Open data

Online Safety Bill

Proceeding contribution from Lord Knight of Weymouth (Labour) in the House of Lords on Wednesday, 19 July 2023. It occurred during Debate on bills on Online Safety Bill.

My Lords, I have good news and bad news for the Minister. The good news is that we have no problem with his amendments. The bad news, for him, is that we strongly support Amendment 245 from the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Coates, which, as others have said, we think is a no-brainer.

The beauty of the simple amendment has been demonstrated; it just changes the single word “and” to “or”. It is of course right to give Ofcom leeway—or flexibility, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, described it—in the categorisation and to bring providers into the safety regime. What the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said about the smaller platforms, the breadcrumbing relating to the Jake Davison case and the functionality around bombarding Zoe Lyalle with those emails told the story that we needed to hear.

As it stands, the Bill requires Ofcom to always be mindful of size. We need to be more nuanced. From listening to the noble Lord, Lord Allan of Hallam—with his, as ever, more detailed analysis of how things work in practice—my concern is that in the end, if it is all about size, Ofcom will end up having to have a much larger number in scope on the categorisation of size in order to cover all the platforms that it is worried about. If we could give flexibility around size or functionality, that would make the job considerably easier.

We on this side think categorisation should happen with a proportionate, risk-based approach. We think the flexibility should be there, the Minister is reasonable—come on, what’s not to like?

About this proceeding contribution

Reference

831 c2344 

Session

2022-23

Chamber / Committee

House of Lords chamber
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