My Lords, I am grateful for noble Lords’ comments and questions. Once again, we find an instrument that drifted through the other place
with the mildest breeze of comment and scrutiny coming up against the deeply entrenched expertise that your Lordships’ Committee has shown today. I counted some 16 specific questions that noble Lords asked me to address. I shall do my best to do that, but I suspect that I will need to write, because a considered reflection might be useful and a fair response to the legitimate concerns that have been raised here today.
Let me go through as many of the points as I can, so that we might get at least some comments on the record. As I say, I shall write to noble Lords and expand on them. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, asked whether distributors would understand the definitions well enough in deciding whether to submit a product to the BBFC. The definitions are fairly detailed. Terms such as “mild” are long-standing features of the BBFC’s classification guidelines and are familiar to many video distributors and consumers. To help further understanding, the BBFC is preparing new guidelines specifically for industry, which will include clips from previously classified films to illustrate how definitions might be interpreted.
On the nature of the relationship between the Government and the BBFC, the BBFC is designated by the Secretary of State to classify video works. It is an independent body, but it is required to make an annual report to Parliament. Many noble Lords have welcomed the review after the regulations have operated for three years as being a sensible way forward, so that we might see from day-to-day experience whether fears are borne out in practice. Corrective action can be taken at that point.
Under the regulations, music, sport and education-related themed products will lose their exemption. This was the area that many noble Lords focused on. The latest guidelines issued by the British Board of Film Classification were produced after a major consultation exercise involving over 10,000 people. The listing, categorising and wording reflect what came forward from the consultation process.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Howe, asked about definitions and particularly the word “mild”. I appreciate that we are going into legal definitions, which will be tested in due course, but, again, there is a well established definition of what, for example, “mild sexual activity”, “mild sexual behaviour” or “mild violence” might mean in film classification. It was to be expected that that definition, which is already in place, would continue to be used as a matter of course for implementing these regulations.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for his long-standing work in this area and for his expertise on suicide issues in particular. This is exactly the type of material that we need to bring within the ambit of such regulations. He asked what actions the Government are taking to tackle online material about suicide methods. The Government’s suicide prevention strategy reflects concerns about the misuse of the internet to promote suicide and suicide methods. We are committed to working with the internet industry to provide positive access to people who are contemplating suicide or visiting these sites. The industry
has worked on positive sites in this area, such as through Google and Facebook collaborations, focusing on particularly vulnerable people.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones asked what we were doing about online material. The Video Recordings Act applies only to physical recordings such as DVDs, Blu-ray discs and VHS tapes. The market for hard-copy video is still significant, but we are also committed to ensuring that parents have the information that they need about video content that their children may access online. The Government are working with the industry to ensure that more online videos are age-labelled, using, for example, the BBFC’s voluntary online classification process. Indeed, we hope that that process will also reduce the costs of obtaining these classifications, which was a concern raised by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. Currently 30 online platforms, including iTunes, Netflix and Microsoft, use this.
My noble friend Lord Clement-Jones also asked about the delays. Particularly in the context of videos games, the law requires that all video games unsuitable for younger children must be classified by the relevant designated classification body, the Video Standards Council, which is also known as the Games Rating Authority. The Government brought this law into force in 2012, since when all games unsuitable for younger children must have a 12, 16 or 18 rating. It is an offence for retailers to sell a PEGI-rated game to someone who is not old enough to play it.
My noble friend also asked about internet service provider family-friendly filters. These are well advanced with BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, which together constitute almost 90% of the UK’s broadband market. They are now all providing family-friendly network-level filtering to new customers. The ISPs are committed to rolling out this filtering to all existing customers throughout 2014.