It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ryan. I congratulate the Petitions
Committee on its impressive work. I thank the hon. Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) for her speech and for leading that work on the Committee’s report. I assure her that the Government take this issue extremely seriously. I echo her thanks and congratulations to Katie Price and her family on the crusading work they have done. They should never have had to do it in the first place, but they were courageous enough to confront these awful issues on behalf of her son, Harvey.
I have been very affected by the things I have heard in the debate. I had heard some of them before, but some of the content of the debate was new to me, and it is all very shocking. The purpose of the debate has been to look at the effect of horrendous abuse on people with disabilities. Although, obviously, it has not been confined to people with disabilities, until this petition and the Committee’s report, there had not been enough exposure of the true extent of the abuse of people with disabilities.
The hon. Lady alluded to the advice to go offline, which seems to have been handed out to many people with disabilities who have been abused online. That is outrageous advice. No, they should not go offline. She made clear the tremendous benefits that the internet has brought people with disabilities. They should be free to access those benefits, and to come and go online like everybody else, without fear of harassment, abuse or intimidation. It is the internet that has to change, not the experience of people with disabilities.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) has done an excellent job representing the Price family, who are his constituents. He is quite right that this awful abuse and bullying has been with us since the dawn of humanity, but unfortunately, since the dawn of the internet, which is a recent phenomenon, it has been amplified and made far worse. The 24/7 nature of the internet, and the speed and ease with which images and abusive content can be replicated around the world at the touch of a button, have made the phenomenon of abuse—we are here to talk particularly about the abuse of people with disabilities—far worse. I quite agree that social media platforms should operate a policy of zero tolerance of hate speech, and I will come on to the steps that we are taking through the online harms White Paper to ensure that they do that.
The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) mentioned something I know very well: that women are 27 times more likely than men to receive abuse online. There is a lot of research to back that up. I echo her congratulations to her constituent Seyi and the campaign organisation she founded, Glitch. That was a very courageous move to overcome the awfulness of what she had to cope with online and actually do something about it. If we are going to do something about abuse, we have to confront it, so I congratulate Seyi.
Some of the proposals that Glitch has developed on digital citizenship and digital literacy are very important. There is a section in our White Paper devoted to improving digital literacy, and not just among young people but among the general population—for us all—and particularly with regard to children as they are growing up. That is very important. The hon. Member for West Ham suggested that the proposed measures could be funded from the digital services tax. I am sure that we can ask the Chancellor those questions, but the White Paper proposes that the regulator should be funded via a levy on companies, which would be a similar source of income.