My Lords, I start by acknowledging the many colleagues who were unable to speak today but who wrote to offer their support and I thank those who are present. I know that many noble Lords have made a considerable effort to be here and I look forward to their contributions.
In a moment, I will set out the Age Assurance (Minimum Standards) Bill, what it does and why it is so urgently needed, but before that I wish to say why I am here. In doing so, I declare my interests as set out in the register, particularly as chair of the 5Rights Foundation, which works to build the digital world that children deserve, and most recently as a member of the advisory council for the University of Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI and the Draft Online Safety Bill Joint Committee. My work means that, day in, day out, I see children being made the collateral damage of tech industry norms.
During the first lockdown, I was asked to visit a distraught head teacher whose pupil had received and shared a video of child sexual abuse so grotesque that I cannot describe it here. By the time we sat helplessly crying in the freezing playground, the video had been shared across London and was making its way up north. It was a primary school; the children involved were not even 10. I was with a child at the very moment it dawned on her that she had been groomed. Her so-called friend for whom she had performed intimate acts had filmed and shared videos of her with a network of adults thousands of miles away. Her spirit shattered in front of me.
Earlier this year, 5Rights published research showing that accounts registered as children were being targeted with material that no business should recommend to a child: emaciated bodies, violent misogynistic pornography, razor blades and gaping wounds, and even a message saying, “End it all”—and, sadly, some do. My inbox is a testimony to the grief and rage of bereaved parents who do not accept these norms that we are willing to tolerate or even justify as a cost of connectivity and innovation.
I am adamant that we do not use age assurance to dumb down the internet, invade privacy or lock children out of the digital world—it is essential for their growth and participation in our collective future. But it is failure writ large that children are routinely exposed to material and experiences that they do not choose or have the capacity to navigate. It is in the name of these children and their parents that I am here.
Age assurance is a misunderstood term. For the record, it is any system that purports to estimate or verify the age or age range of a user. The Bill is extremely narrow. It requires Ofcom to produce a code of conduct that sets out minimum standards for any system of age assurance. These are not technical standards. The Bill is technology-neutral but requires all services that provide or use age assurance to ensure that it is privacy preserving, proportionate and rights respecting. Specifically, it determines that age assurance be effective. Ofcom figures show that almost half of children in the UK between the ages of five and 12 are on social media, despite most sites having a minimum joining age of 13.
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for bringing this Bill and for her characteristic passion and commitment to this extremely important topic. Her work championing these issues has been so important and has undoubtedly led to the UK genuinely leading the world in digital safety. Today is another opportunity for us to do the same again.
Many people think that age assurance is all about pornography, but I think that we have a much broader and therefore potentially even more damaging digital age-assurance problem. It is a problem with the underlying social media and technology platforms themselves. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, go into any primary school year 6 classroom and ask the assembled 10 year-olds who is on social media—on TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp or Instagram—and almost all of them will say yes. Yet all these providers tell us that their products are not appropriate for 10 year-olds.
The evidence is mounting that the dangers of social media on young minds are substantial, so if the companies themselves tell us that 13—WhatsApp says 16—is the youngest that you should be to use these services, I suspect that that is the bare minimum. Yet we are living in a society where it is completely normal for the majority of children younger than 13 to be regular users of these products.
We do not tolerate this in the physical world; why should we tolerate it in the digital world? I will talk briefly about the physical world. Age assurance already exists there. I worked for much of my life in food retailing and, over the last 20 years, prevention of the sale of alcohol to underage children has changed beyond all recognition. When I was a teenager, sadly much more than 20 years ago, there was no impact on the publican, waiting staff, cashier or store owner if they sold me a beer. Now there is a material financial and criminal impact on them all if they are found selling alcohol to my underage children. As a result, they have developed effective age-assurance processes. We do not have hard age verification for selling alcohol in this country and do not all walk around with our passports in our hands, but we have an age-assurance approach.
My Lords, we are deeply indebted to the noble Baroness for bringing this matter before us in this Bill, and doubly in her debt for the extraordinary speech with which she introduced our proceedings. Indeed, on the strength of that alone, I think we could test the mind of the House, and I think I know what the result would be. Once I sit down, I will be praying hard that the Minister will find within him a way of answering her challenges that will satisfy the mind of the House, and I would not be in his place for all the money in the world.
My interest is as chair of the board of the Central Foundation Schools of London, where our children are aged 11 and over, but faced with the most horrendous range of familiarity with material that is without any doubt harmful and leads to outcomes that are to do with not only sexualisation but violence on the streets. It is a problem of gargantuan proportions. The British Board of Film Classification found that more than half of 11 to 13 year-olds had been exposed to pornography.
What are the by-products of this? We know just what it can lead to, and the noble Baroness has pointed to some of those possible outcomes. She has such a wealth of experience and has given the Government the perfect guide for effective regulation. I see no reason why we should reject any element of the Bill. Indeed, the Secretary of State for DCMS told the Joint Committee on the draft online safety Bill that the Government wanted their digital legislation to be “watertight”. The antithesis of this is an online safety Bill that is void of any semblance of age assurance. I have no doubt that the committee's findings on this matter will bring this to the fore. “Watertight” must include adequate provision for age assurance.
Objectors to age assurance ring a tired bell. The issue of privacy is their central concern. This is not to diminish the value of online privacy and data protection. In my role on the Select Committee on Communications and Digital—I am delighted that others from the committee will be speaking later in this debate—I see the clear and present dangers of giving online companies our data freely and without constraints. The minimum standards within Clause 2 should have assuaged any fears anyone could have about unnecessary data gathering under the guise of age assurance. The clause offers appropriate parameters which would protect our privacy.
It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord and to support my noble friend Lady Kidron, with whom I have the pleasure of sharing an office, so I know quite how hard and consistently she has worked. As other noble Lords have said, that was a blinder of a speech, and I would not want to be in the Minister’s shoes trying to disagree with a single word she said.
I want to speak briefly about the pornography so easily available to young children, especially to young girls. With a few simple taps, you can access pretty much any sex you want. Much of it is rough and involves oral and anal sex. Men pull women around and jerk their head backwards; cameras linger on faces that are always smiling, always saying “Yes!”, always saying “More!”. As one 14 year-old was quoted as saying, “It’s actually amazing how all the women and girls look like they are having a really good time”. The picture that is painted is entirely from the male point of view. This is not loving sex or caring sex; there is no sense of a relationship. This is, all too often, purely about domination and aggression.
It is so prevalent and so easy. It is not actually surprising that many online porn sites have become the primary source of sex education for children. One survey carried out in the US among 2,000 teenagers showed that 720 of them reported that porn sites had taught them everything they thought they needed to know about sex, sexual technique and behaviour—far more knowledge than they ever gained from their friends, schools or parents.
Frankly, good sex education in schools, apart from basic information about contraception, is woefully lacking. For some, there really is nowhere else to go. However, if the internet porn world becomes your go-to point, it acquires glamour and a kind of cool. In the end, it becomes sort of glamorous for a young boy to think of a woman as a slut or a whore, and to show her no respect. Often, a woman pretends to protest in online films but then gives in and maintains that she enjoys it. Even when a man might be seen to be choking a woman, in the end, it is also seen as, “Well, they like a bit of rough, don’t they?” Most parents are in complete denial about this. Many children say after viewing pornography that they find it disturbing and believe that it influences how they behave.
My Lords, in looking at the Bill, I decided to ask some young people who would be affected by such legislation. I am most grateful to the global citizenship class at Westminster Academy, whose year 8 ran a discussion group on the Bill. These young people use the internet and internet services to access information, research topics of interest, for homework, for entertainment, to socialise with friends and family, for games and more widely, such as for shopping. They are well aware of the risks that they face through easy access to inappropriate content because there is no real way to check that they are accessing age-appropriate content. Pop-ups lead them to inappropriate content or websites, and they encounter language and grossly explicit content that they know is inappropriate.
However, in their discussion, they were worried that age assurance could restrict their access to some social media, and therefore to friends. They feared losing access to some of their favourite platforms and social networks. They thought that some people might use other people’s devices or documents to bypass an age-assurance process, and that some might even protest if they were restricted from accessing things freely. Consent fatigue concerned them, and they questioned whether there are implications for freedom of speech in restricting access to information that might be controversial.
Armed with this information, I challenged the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on behalf of these young people. I realise that they had perceived it as being restrictions on the end user, perhaps because they are so used to internet providers ignoring their needs and putting all the responsibility on their young shoulders. The noble Baroness generously responded to their all concerns in detail, and I know that the class are following this debate in earnest.
We must put the responsibility on the internet providers, not children and young people. These young people need to be accessing a responsible internet that has governance standards and uses the best technological advances to keep content age appropriate across all socioeconomic groups, recognising that there is a range of developmental stages in any group. Internet providers have enormous power; with that power comes great responsibility but, at the moment, responsibility is being sacrificed on the altar of profit, leaving those of malintent encouraged and able to exploit. Information, entertainment, research, socialising, shopping and online games—all activities that young people learn from and enjoy—should be unhindered by pop-ups that steer them to dark, violent places and places that make them feel inadequate if they do not engage in abnormal or dangerous practices, or are not in possession of some sort of status symbol.
My Lords, in my 20 years in the House I have heard every possible excuse from Ministers for not doing what they obviously should do: something will cost too much money, there is not the legislative time, or it breaches international obligations. Anybody in this House could recite such a list. However, I have come across very few Bills that seem to be proof against such excuses.
The Bill which the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has worked so hard to lay before us, addresses a real and present harm, not to adults, who, arguably, can look after themselves, but to our children and grandchildren. As I stand here, I think of my beloved grandchild, Marli Rose, who is five-years old. When she is twice the age that she is now, she could be exposed to this kind of stuff, and my blood boils. It has not happened: there is still no single regulatory or statutory code that sets out rules or standards for age assurance in the UK. All we have is a bit of guidance from DCMS and the design code. Previous legislation on age verification is effectively defunct.
If we wanted proof of the Government’s sheer lack of umph on this subject, we got it this week. To a blast of trumpets, Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, announced new money to help tech companies combat child exploitation and abuse online. Great, but how much was it? It was £500,000, which does not even buy you the services of Sir Geoffrey Cox for six months. Of course, the noble Baroness’s Bill and the age verification that it seeks has some enemies. There are extreme libertarians such as the Open Rights Group, for whom American-style free speech trumps all other values. More insidiously, there are companies that benefit from the freedom to distribute their material to kids, in particular pornographers.
There is a perfectly reasonable argument, which we will not have now, as to whether pornography for adults should be legal. There surely cannot be even a second’s argument over how it must be prevented, to the maximum possible extent, from reaching children, for the reasons that noble Lords have already explained to the House. Yet 62% of 11 to 13 year-olds who reported having seen pornography described their viewing as mostly unintentional. Never mind stopping them seeing it when they want to, we cannot even stop them seeing it when they do not want to. Given that age verification now often consists of no more than ticking a box, that is hardly surprising.
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey. I have really enjoyed the contributions that we have heard already today. Like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, on introducing this Bill and explaining it so clearly.
The Communications and Digital Committee, which I chair, has been examining digital regulation and I have been quite clear in my own mind, and in talking about the work of our committee, that we must be ultra-vigilant in ensuring that proposals to regulate in the digital space neither put at risk the fundamental right to freedom of expression or undermine privacy. In our recent report on freedom of expression online, we were quite critical of some aspects of the proposed online safety Bill which we believe do just that. However, we also said:
“Children deserve to enjoy the full benefits of being online and still be safe.”
We do not just mean minimising harm; we want the internet to be a positive place for children and adults.
For children, we want the internet to be a place where safety is paramount, a place that we—adults—design for them, so that at every stage of their childhood their lives online are rich, rewarding and educational, where they are supported in their emotional development, helped to learn, play and socialise confidently, and are protected from harm. For adults, we want an environment where content that Parliament has made illegal is swiftly removed, where they have control of what they see, and where they can express themselves freely in an environment designed to encourage civility rather than to heighten conflict. That is what we seek to achieve: an internet that works for everyone, adults, and children.
I am not a doom-monger. The internet and the digital spaces that it has provided have bought huge benefits to society, as the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, so movingly described regarding that amazing technology which we saw, effectively giving blind children the opportunity to participate in the same world as the rest of us. However, only if we treat adults as adults and children as children can we deal with the darker side of the internet and improve all our lives online.
My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for initiating this debate and putting the Bill before the House. I pay tribute to 5Rights and the fantastic work it is doing. I should put on record that I am a governor of Coram, which was founded in 1739 and is the oldest children’s charity in the UK—we have been fighting for children’s rights for rather a long time, and, thankfully, for rather a long time before the internet was dreamed up.
Yesterday, the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I had the pleasure of going to Wandsworth and spending three hours at a very large girls’ school there, called Burntwood School. It has about 1,800 pupils. It is incredibly diverse. Believe it or not, no fewer than 70 languages are spoken by the 1,800 pupils. Part of the visit was a question and answer session with around 100 of the girls. One of the questions they asked us was about internet safety and what we felt about it, so we were able to talk a bit about the online safety Bill and I was able to say that I would have the privilege of speaking in today’s debate.
Later on, we were talking with the teachers, who said that, during the pandemic, when everybody was in bubbles and the children were perhaps relying on social media more than usual, they decided that they needed to do a bit of homework. Somewhat to their surprise, they found that the legal age below which you are not meant to use WhatsApp is 13. It turns out that that is an unexpected negative Brexit dividend; if we were still in the EU or the European Economic Area, the minimum age would be 16, but one of the freedoms we have won in leaving the European Union is that the age has dropped to 13.
I thought I would use WhatsApp as an example because, although I know it is against the rules to ask noble Lords to put their hand up if they are on WhatsApp, I anticipate that it is probably the social media or communication app that most of us use—I am sure that most of us are in one or two groups.
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The Bill will ensure that any age-assurance system protects the privacy of users by taking no more information than is needed to establish age and not using that information for any other purpose, and that age assurance will be secure. If it is to be trusted, the storage, traceability and disposal of data must be subject to transparent and measurable standards. It provides that age assurance is proportionate to risk. It would be foolish to require a child to present their passport to explore the world of Peppa Pig, but it remains a travesty that 80% of pornography sites have no form of age barrier at all—not even a tick box.
The Bill will ensure that age assurance is appropriate to the capacity and age of the child, anticipating that some children will lie about their age. Equally, it will provide appropriate mechanisms for users to challenge decisions. If a child’s age is wrongly determined or an adult is mistaken for a child, there must be robust routes to redress. The Bill demands that age assurance be compatible with data legislation. I have spent the last four years working to ensure that the age-appropriate design code offers children a high bar of data protection in the certain knowledge that data protection makes children safer. That is why privacy is at the heart of this Bill. But as technology changes and we enter a world of virtual and alternate realities, as envisaged by Facebook’s punt on the metaverse, data law will change. Any regulation must keep one eye on the future.
Let me be utterly clear: age assurance is not a silver bullet that will fix all the ills of the digital world, but without it we cannot deliver the promises or protections to children that we have already made, neither to those underage nor to those between 13 and 17 who are so poorly protected in a digital world that treats over-13s as adults.
Nor is this a choice between user privacy and child safety. The sector’s enormous wealth is predicated on having a detailed knowledge of its users. As one child said to me, “How do they know I like red Nike trainers, but they don’t know I’m 12?” It is convenient to know that a child likes Nike trainers, because that drives advertising revenue. However, it is inconvenient to know that he is 12, because if you know that, why on earth is your algorithm recommending dating apps or extreme content, or sending him messages that suggest that he kill himself?
The Bill does not prescribe the technology that companies should use. AI, image or speech analysis, parental controls, cross-counter authentication, know your customer checks, capacity testing and age tokens from trusted partners all have a place. What we do not have is rules of the road, resulting in every provider, business or social media company making them up to suit itself.
When the Minister stands up, I anticipate that he will say that the department is working on a voluntary standard for age-assurance providers, but a voluntary standard needs volunteers. It will simply make the good guys better and leave the bad guys as they are. He may also be tempted to suggest that the online safety Bill will deal with this. I have read the Bill many times and there is no mandatory code of conduct for age assurance. Even if Parliament insists, which I believe it will, the earliest that a code could be operational by this route is 2024. The Digital Economy Act brought age verification for commercial pornography into law in 2017, but this is yet to be implemented. A child who was 11 in 2017 will be an adult by 2024.
Perhaps the Minister will say that this modest Bill is too broad as it touches on privacy, which is the domain of the ICO. This profoundly misunderstands the construction of the digital world. Data is the engine of the attention economy. Not only age assurance, but many of the codes in the online safety Bill, will require co-regulation, or they will fail.
I thank the noble Lord the Minister, the Minister for Technology and Innovation and the Secretary of State for their time. I wish to make it clear that I do not doubt that we all agree on the destination. But this is an issue that has concerned us for a decade. Legislation has been in place for four years and promises have been made by six Secretaries of State. Meanwhile, every day, children pay the price of a wilfully careless industry, sometimes with their lives.
If, when the Minister answers, he is able to give the Government’s full support, he has my deepest apologies for anticipating his words wrongly. However, on the basis that he will not, I ask him to answer this challenge. Which one of the 50% of 10 year-olds, approximately 400,000 children, currently on TikTok does not deserve immediate protection? Which one of the children receiving child sexual abuse material so horrific that it cannot be forgotten or unseen in a lifetime does not deserve immediate protection? How many children does he anticipate will be radicalised, grow into violent sexual norms, lose sleep or confidence or be pushed into cycles of self-harm and depression during the two years that the Government are willing to delay, when Ofcom has the staff and money, and could have the mandate, right now? What would he say to the parents of Molly and Frankie and other parents who have lost children about putting at risk even one more child who could be given a service suitable for their age? Which Facebook whistleblower revelations or headlines about Instagram, OnlyFans, YouTube, TikTok and Omegle—to name just a few—have given the Government confidence that industry will meanwhile do the right thing?
I ask the House not to amend the Bill, in order to give mandatory privacy-preserving, trusted age assurance a swift passage. I say to the Government: this Bill deserves more than their sympathy; it deserves their support. I beg to move.
Think 21 was, I believe, first launched in Wetherspoons in 2005, when signs were put up and staff were trained to look for people who looked under 21 and ask them for identification. That evolved to Think 25, as it is quite hard to tell the difference between an 18 year-old and a 21 year-old. Working together, food retailers and the hospitality industry have built systems, processes, training and communication that are much more effective than when I was young. That has not meant a loss of privacy or a material change to access to alcohol for adults—quite the opposite.
I would argue that the age-assurance tools available to social media and technology companies are much more sophisticated than those available to food retailers or pubs—at least, that is the premise on which the whole multibillion pound online advertising industry is based. I have every confidence that the truly brilliant behavioural scientists and software engineers currently focused on profiling our behaviour to sell us more things could switch their focus to ensuring that only people of the appropriate age are using their platforms—if they had to. The critical question is: why have they not? Sadly, I fear it is just so much easier not to try. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, it is better not to know how old someone is so you can claim ignorance; or, better still, to argue that it is the parents’ responsibility to prevent their younger children from straying.
Unlike the more mature and established food and hospitality sectors, unforced collaboration on projects with no financial gain does not come easily to the global tech giants. In fact, those of us who have worked on child internet safety over the past 10 years, including me, have all found that it is only when you legislate that you get real, concrete change in this space, as the age-appropriate design code championed by the noble Baroness has so ably demonstrated. What we have also learned from the age-appropriate design code is that it is possible to define standards in the digital space, and that good regulators can do that in such a way that it sparks real innovation and creativity in the sector that they regulate.
Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I fear that the Government will be tempted to agree with the principles of the Bill but will argue that it should all be picked up as part of the draft online safety Bill. I do not think that is the right approach. When you build new functionality into digital platforms, you make those changes in a series of releases—bite-size changes that can be developed, tested and implemented in a relatively short space of time and that deliver real benefits to users, one after another. That is why you have a series of releases of software upgrades on your mobile phone, rather than one big change every few years.
We should be taking the same approach to digital safety. Rather than waiting for the single, enormous project that always takes longer than you think it will, costs more and fails to deliver on the overarching vision, where we have clearly identified improvements that can be set out and then built into products and are consistent with our overall direction, we should get on with them. Age assurance is a known and tightly defined issue with known, real harms happening every day. The sooner tech companies have certainty of the minimum standards expected of them, the sooner they can commence the innovation and development needed to comply, and we have seen from the age-appropriate design code that genuine improvements from those tech platforms are forthcoming.
We have been debating digital age verification and age assurance in this House for many, many years now. It is time to stop debating and act. I urge the Government to support this Bill not just in principle but in practice, so that Ofcom and the tech sector can get started now in ensuring that our children use only age-appropriate services, rather than wait longer still. Our children have waited too long as it is.
Some of our online industries intended for adult consumption seem to be aware of the need to regulate in line with the recommendations in the ICO’s age-appropriate design code. The legally recognised gambling industry continues to do a reasonably good job on age assurance and preventing those who are underage from accessing it. But there are problems, and these go unchecked because of the lack of a government line.
We simply cannot trust the internet and the huge companies that dominate it to regulate themselves. There is a toxic culture of acceptance that, to have a certain level of privacy and freedom online, we must sacrifice our children’s innocence and subject them to harmful media. I hope all noble Lords will join together in understanding that, in the light of the proposals in the Bill, a way can be found to avoid such an outcome. It is, perhaps, icing on the cake that, if we take the Bill’s proposals forward, it will help us to achieve a legislative framework that will show other nations the way to protect children, at a time when the internet is gaining an ever-tightening hold on the societies we live in.
Gosh, I wish we could vote now: I would have my coffee after saying “Content”. I will leave those ideas for the consideration of the House.
For girls, of course, it has a very negative effect on body image. All the girls in pornography films are pretty, but they are also always thin. This reinforces one of our evil body images—that thinness is the secret to attraction. It also reinforces the notion that, to be attractive to men, you have to be willing—indeed, you have to be so willing that not even a basic chat-up line is involved, with not even a cup of coffee to get you into bed.
I do not believe that we yet know the full extent of the damage that this easily accessible online pornography is doing to our youngsters in the long term as they grow into adults. However, I know that any narrative that suggests to young women that it is right for them to be subservient to men in any respect, but especially in a sexual sense, will have lifelong damaging effects. Despite the brilliance of the women’s movement, women are still less likely to put themselves forward and demand equal pay, and they still do worse in the workplace. If you grow up believing that you have to do everything that the man wants in these extremely intimate circumstances, it will spill over into all corners of your life. I find it sad and frightening.
Online porn, freely available to all young girls, seems to me, from a feminist point of view, probably the most gigantic step backwards that has happened in 50 years. A girl can click on a site at the age of nine or 10 and find a slightly older woman in the throes of being gang-raped and professing that she thinks it is wonderful; she is probably the young girl too embarrassed to discuss it. I think back to my own childhood. I was absorbed by ponies until I was about 14, when I started to think a bit about boys. I wonder whether I would be the same person I am today had I had online porn.
I got my first job when I was 19, on an underground newspaper called Friends on the Portobello Road. It was a sort of hippy hang-out, and we were all meant to be cool and alternative. However, as I quickly discovered, it was not much different, at least from a woman’s point of view. If you wanted to be cool, you also had to be freely available for sex. It was that dislike, and my understanding of that extreme double standard—was this really a new way of living, or just a great way for the guys to have more fun?—that led to me joining a women’s group. We started a magazine called Spare Rib, which came out 50 years ago next July.
If I had been watching internet porn from the age of 11, I wonder where my self-confidence would have been. Where would my feeling that I could stand up and say, “Hang on, I don’t agree with this. I don’t want to be like this”, have been? I am genuinely not saying this just because it is a convenient thing to say in a debate I want to support. I believe in age assurance and very much believe in what the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said: we do it for cigarettes and alcohol, so we have methods to do it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, laid out so brilliantly, it is not that difficult. It is perfectly possible, and the Government have no excuses. However, it seems to me that we have let a very dangerous thing loose in the world; personally, I am incredibly glad that my path did not cross its path. I do not want to see any more girls have to do that.
Parental controls are completely inadequate. Many children and young people are in homes where age-appropriate needs are not addressed for a wide variety of reasons. Age assurance would ensure age appropriateness of internet content through a framework of governance standards to which internet providers can adhere. Age assurance would protect vulnerable children from predatory targeting and online grooming, and would make use of the internet safer and more enjoyable for young people.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Harding of Winscombe, pointed out, the developing brain is particularly susceptible to addiction messaging. Combined with their changing physical and emotional development, this leaves young people at high risk of being drawn unwittingly into dangerous situations and becoming addicted to them. It distorts their emotional, sexual, personal and relational development. How often do we hear of the antecedents of a tragedy being discovered after the event through seeing the history of the young person’s internet usage and where it led them?
Young people have nothing to fear from minimum standards—standards to which these hugely wealthy internet companies must adhere—being set as age assurance leads to age-appropriate content becoming the norm. However, children and young people have much to fear from the wild jungle of predators who ignore their needs for financial gain, exploitation or obscene satisfaction. The Bill will not stifle young people such as those who so generously shared their thoughts for our debate. It will help them to blossom and enjoy life more, allowing them to explore with a little more safety. The Bill is urgently needed and long overdue.
Those who profit from this fall back on an excuse: namely, the alleged technological difficulty of doing it. I was with the Communications and Digital Committee, so marvellously chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, this week. We went up to Cambridge to see the cutting edge of tech in action. We saw a moving Google project, which had in effect equipped a blind child, so that they had many of the perceptions of a sighted child, being able to catch and throw a ball. This was extraordinarily moving, but it also exposes the excuses put up by those delaying introducing proper age verification for the smokescreen that they are. If you can get a blind child to see a ball, surely you can stop a sighted child from seeing pornography every day. AI is galloping towards age verification from a person’s voice alone.
Let us be honest: it is not really being able to do it that is the problem; it is not really wanting to do it that is the problem. From some companies’ point of view, it would hit their bottom line, and from the Government's point of view—not of course, because they are against it—because they are trying to tuck away every advance in the globe into the online safety Bill box. I may be unfair, but I do not doubt for a moment that Ministers are in favour of age verification to protect our children. Maybe DCMS Ministers, of whom I am sure that the Minister is one, and their trusty civil servants, toss in their beds every night puzzling over how to introduce it, prioritising it in their minds over pet policies such as privatising Channel 4 or defunding the BBC. Maybe it is their top priority. All right, let the Minister today explain the dither and delay that has so far characterised the Government’s approach to this; let him demonstrate that the Government really have their teeth into this one. If he does so, we will be delighted and this Bill will be redundant. Otherwise, let us give this Bill a Second Reading, pass it rapidly into law and get age verification done.
We can only treat children as children, and provide them with the rich, rewarding, positive place that I have described, if we know who they are. It is astonishing that, as currently drafted, the online safety Bill does not tackle commercial pornographic websites by blocking access to them by children. I hope that my noble friend the Minister can tell us that this omission will be addressed.
However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, has so carefully explained, age assurance encompasses a range of systems that services use to estimate the age of its users. The 5Rights Foundation sets out 10 different approaches to age assurance. The system used by services will obviously need to take into account two factors: the likelihood of children having access and the potential for them to be harmed if they do. Therefore, a great degree of certainty would be required by a service providing pornographic content and much less certainty for a website designed for use by children, that might simply want to serve them content that is most appropriate to their age.
Here we come to the most important point about the Bill. Platforms and services are already using age assurance technology. They seem to know our ages and everything else about us when they are flogging us stuff. The same underlying technology is already used to create age appropriate environments and will be used by platforms and other online services to meet the requirements of the age-appropriate design code and other safety requirements in the future. So as my noble friend Lady Harding pointed out, this Bill does not introduce age assurance; it simply introduces a regime to ensure that minimum standards are met and that privacy is preserved.
Time and again, the giants of Silicon Valley have demonstrated that they have very little regard for our right to freedom of expression, removing content based on their own business interests, political preferences and whims, and they most certainly cannot be trusted with our privacy. However, I have no doubt that we can square this and that we can protect children while preserving privacy.
Technology is constantly advancing. The objective I have set out of creating a vibrant, positive place for children, while protecting them from harm, can be achieved without the kind of platform-controlled, privacy-invading, age-verification and identity-checking approach we were considering just a couple of years ago. But we need to get on with it, because age assurance is happening now, and we need these measures to protect our privacy.
A Bill which requires minimum standards for the use of these systems, with safeguarding privacy at the heart of those standards—something I can support—seems to me to be a very simple measure. I hope the Government can support it too.