My Lords, I am pleased to move Amendment 104, which requires internet service providers and mobile phone operators to provide default adult content filtering that can be removed if the service user opts in to adult content, demonstrating, as they must, that they are aged 18 years or over.
This is a matter that I have raised before, not least through my Online Safety Bill. As ever, I begin by recognising that progress has been made and that the Prime Minister’s intervention in relation to the big four ISPs has helped to move us forward. However, given the importance of the issue, I must say that, having been initially encouraged, I find myself increasingly disappointed by the Government’s approach. The truth is that children continue to suffer, but there does not seem to be the political will to move beyond the deal that the Government negotiated on filtering with the big four ISPs: a status quo that is simply unacceptable, for reasons that I shall set out.
4 pm
However, before doing that, I will remind the Committee why this matter is so important, by referring to a story that was in the press over the summer. This is the tragic case of a 10 year-old girl who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a 14 year-old boy acting out pornographic content that he had seen online. Judge Robin Onions said that the boy “used, abused then abandoned” his victim after repeatedly watching internet porn that,
“treats women as objects and not as people”,
on his home computer. Crucially, it was reported that the mother of the boy in question was unaware that he had visited such sites from his bedroom in their Shropshire home. The Labour Party spokesman on these matters in another place, Helen Goodman MP, hit the nail on the head as far as I am concerned when she said,
“the Government’s failure to introduce a legal requirement for internet filters … is letting down young people”.
The first reason why the voluntary nature of the current arrangement does not constitute a credible long-term solution is that the default-on agreement between the big four ISPs does not cover the whole market. By the Government’s own admission, it leaves just over 10% of the home broadband market, representing hundreds of thousands of children, completely uncovered. The truth is that this point alone is sufficient to justify a statutory approach that applies to 100% of the market, as proposed by my Amendment 104. If the Government believe, as I certainly do, that default-on provides a better level of protection for children online
and that persuading the big four ISPs to implement it was an important step forward in advancing child protection, then it must be important for all children in the United Kingdom.
Mindful of this, I would ask the Minister the following questions. First, what are the Government doing to ensure that all the remaining ISPs also commit to introducing default-on? Secondly, I know of at least one significant ISP beyond the big four that boasts of the fact that it has not and will not introduce default filtering—indeed, it seems to use its position in this regard as something of a marketing ploy. It seems clear to me that the only way that the Government will be able to extend their much celebrated voluntary code to 100% of the market is through legislation such as that set out in my Amendment 104. Surely the Minister will agree with that?
The whole point about default-on is that people should be provided with access to an internet service that is free from adult content such as pornography, but with the option for them to opt in to access adult content by lifting the default filtering, subject to their demonstrating that they are 18 or over through a robust and credible age verification process. However, that is not what is happening. Under the arrangements used by the big four, there is no age verification prior to the filters being disabled. The only thing that happens is that after the filters have been disabled, an e-mail is sent to the account holder, informing him or her that the filters have been disabled.
I would argue that that arrangement is completely inadequate. If the tech-savvy children of an account holder disable the filters, and the account holder is sent the e-mail informing them that the filters have been disabled the same day and he or she manages to read it and take action, the children in question would still have had some hours of access to an unfiltered internet, during which they could be exposed to a significant amount of material from which they should be protected.
More importantly, the truth is that many people take some days to read e-mails sent by their ISPs and some never do. According to polling conducted by ComRes for the charity Care, a total of 34% of British adults—16.3 million people—say that they would not read an e-mail from their ISP immediately; 11% said that they would probably leave the e-mail unread for up to a week; and 9% would be likely to leave it for more than a week. A staggering 14% said they were unlikely to read an e-mail from their ISP. That figure rises to 18% when we look at the parents of children between five and 10 years-old.
The truth is that the failure of ISPs to deliver proper age verification of those seeking to disable the default filters prior to lifting the filters is leaving a significant number of children exposed to adult content for a number of days, weeks, or in some cases permanently. This constitutes a significant flaw in the current self-regulatory arrangements. At a time when the technology is available to age-verify, prior to disabling the filters, this approach is simply unacceptable. My Amendment 104 explicitly requires age verification before filters could be disabled. If we
are serious about age verification, how can anything less than age verification before permitting the disabling of filters be acceptable?
I turn to equal protection offline and online. In a previous debate on this matter, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, set out the very important principle that if child protection is sufficiently important to merit statutory protection offline, the same must be true online. One of the most basic principles underpinning any civilised society is that those who are vulnerable—a category that certainly includes children—should be subject to particularly developed protection through the law. As a consequence of this, the United Kingdom very properly approaches the subject of child protection on a statutory foundation in the offline world. This can be seen, for example, with respect to accessing sex shops and buying adult material, or purchasing 18-rated DVDs. While the law makes clear that if something is illegal offline it is illegal online, I am convinced that the protections that we put in place to prevent children accessing legal but adult content should be as robust in legal terms online as they are offline.
Mindful of this fact and the strength of the Prime Minister’s declaration of commitment regarding child safety, his reluctance to introduce legislation is difficult to comprehend. His important Daily Mail article on online safety just before Christmas 2012 was entitled, “Nothing matters more than keeping our children safe”. Meanwhile, the final two sentences of his seminal July 2013 NSPCC speech stated:
“And all the actions we’re taking today come back to that basic idea: protecting the most vulnerable in our society, protecting innocence, protecting childhood itself. That is what is at stake, and I will do whatever it takes to keep our children safe”.
We seem to have laws—which, unlike voluntary arrangements, crucially benefit from the full sanction of the law—about everything under the sun, but not about the thing regarding which the Prime Minister has very rightly said, “Nothing matters more”.
How can it be right to carry on with a system that leaves over 10% of the market outside the agreement negotiated with the big four ISPs and with some ISPs openly saying that they refuse to submit to this voluntary agreement? How can it be right to compromise on proper age verification of the person seeking to disable default filtering before removing the filtering? How can it be right to say that nothing is more important than keeping our children safe online but to then make excuses for not introducing a legal obligation on ISPs to provide default filtering with the option of disabling that filtering subject to age verification, while providing all manner of legal provisions as regards other matters that must by definition be of less importance if nothing is more important—I stress that again—than keeping our children safe?
While I recognise that self-regulation is a step forward, it cannot be anything other than a very short-term arrangement. If we are serious about pioneering child safety online, and if we really believe that nothing matters more than keeping our children safe, we cannot accept the current arrangements, where part of the market is not covered and where there is no age
verification prior to disabling default filters. These shortcomings, and some others, are all addressed by my Amendment 104. I beg to move.