My Lords, the noble Baroness is absolutely right again, in the sense that technology is the problem and therefore technology needs to offer the solution. Simply put, the numbers and the scale—of course, she has had those briefings and I have had them, too—are both distressing and mind-blowing in terms of their reach. As the technology is not limited to, and does not respect, geographies or jurisdictions, the matter is a global one. Therefore, we need to work very closely with the industry to ensure that this can be done.
I want to cover some of the issues that are being addressed at present which noble Lords may not be aware of. We recognise the concerns that the noble Lord has raised about the use of the internet to store and circulate indecent images of children. We fully accept that more needs to be done to address this issue, but I hope to be able to persuade the noble Lord that legislation is not required at this point, although we continue to keep that option under review.
We believe that the internet industry operating in the UK has taken significant steps, on a self-regulatory basis, to tackle the availability of indecent images online. The internet industry in the UK has worked closely for many years with the Internet Watch Foundation and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection command of the National Crime Agency to tackle illegal images. We recognise the support that responsible internet service providers have given to the Internet Watch Foundation, both financially and through taking action on the Internet Watch Foundation’s list of web pages identified as containing illegal images by either taking down such sites, if they are hosted in the UK, or blocking access to them if they are overseas.
The public and businesses can report images to the Internet Watch Foundation, which assesses them and determines whether they are illegal. Indeed, the Internet Watch Foundation took more than 51,000 reports
from all sources last year. If the site containing the image is hosted in the UK, the details will be passed to law enforcement agencies, and the ISP will be asked to take down the web page using the “notice and take down” process. In 2013, the Internet Watch Foundation found that 47% of UK child abuse web pages were removed within 60 minutes. Thanks to the work of the Internet Watch Foundation, and the internet industry, less than 1% of the global total of indecent images of children is hosted in the UK.
However, we are not complacent, and we recognise the need to adapt to changing uses of technology by paedophiles. As the Prime Minister made clear in his speech to the NSPCC in July last year, we need to do more to eradicate these images from the internet and, in particular, ensure that the internet industry plays its full part in doing so. We have been working closely with the industry, and with its support we believe that significant steps have been taken towards removing these images. We have asked internet search engine providers such as Google—which was referred to by the noble Baroness and also by the noble Lord—and Microsoft to make changes to their search mechanisms, and these measures have been effective in preventing access to child abuse images.
We are also creating a new child abuse image database, using much of the same technology that the noble Lord, Lord Harris, referred to in setting out and introducing his amendment. This will enable the police to identify known images more quickly on suspects’ computers and will improve their ability to identify and safeguard victims from the images. A key part of this is not just about lining up prosecutions by identifying these images or getting the images taken down; it is about realising that the children behind them are vulnerable victims and need to be protected and get the help and support that they need.
Not only do we want the industry to remove such images, we want it to use its technical skills and capability to help develop the technical solutions to prevent the dissemination of these images online. The Home Office and the US Department of Justice have created a taskforce that provides a platform for industry to develop technical solutions to online child sexual exploitation. This work is ongoing under the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Shields.
The UK will host a summit in December on online child exploitation. We have invited representatives of key partner governments and organisations, including the internet industry, to participate in the summit, which will focus on protecting the victims of online child abuse and examine how we can work internationally to prevent children being exploited online.
The Government are very clear that those who provide services online, particularly those where images can be stored—a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, made—have a responsibility to take action to prevent those services being used for the purposes of storing and sharing indecent images of children. In that regard, as she rightly said, we should have zero tolerance. We believe that internet service providers operating in the UK have a good record in this respect, both through their support for the Internet Watch Foundation and through the actions that they are taking to support the Prime Minister’s call for action.
Against this background of good co-operation and progress at present, we believe that the current system of self-regulation has been effective, and we are not persuaded at this time that more would be achieved by placing a legal requirement on these companies. In that regard I hope that, having heard the progress that has been made and our undertaking to keep this under review, the noble Lord will feel sufficiently reassured to consider withdrawing his amendment.