My Lords, in the very best parliamentary traditions, my noble friend has been persistent, dogged, assiduous and determined. I have been privileged to support her on earlier occasions when she raised this issue. I will speak briefly in support of her excellent amendment today.
All of us, especially those with teenage children, know how important the arguments are that she has advanced to the Committee today. Her three basic arguments are incontrovertible. First, it cannot be right to say on the one hand that default-on is an important protection for children and yet to settle for an arrangement where over 10% of households are serviced by ISPs that are not party to the agreement and where some are completely opposed to that form of protection. Those ISPs that object simply will not introduce a protection unless they are obliged to do so by law.
That recalls an argument I had in the 1990s, when a Member of another place had promoted legislation to protect children from video violence. During a meeting with the then Home Secretary and his civil servants, I was pretty shocked to hear one of them say, “Really, this legislation will affect only a small number of people”, as though those people did not really matter. My noble friend made the point that 10% of children will not be covered by the current arrangements. Can the Minister say, when she comes to reply, how many families that means and how many children the Government estimate that 10% represents? If there was only one uncovered household left in this country with children in it, surely it would be our duty to protect those children.
Secondly, it cannot be right that we settle for a form of age verification that is not age verification at all. Anyone seeking to opt in to access adult content and to disable adult content filters must obviously be age verified before doing so, as mandated by this amendment.
Finally, if we care about children and protecting them, we must afford them protection through the law, backed by sanctions. As my noble friend said, it is absurd to have protections offline but not online; there has to be some logical consistency in the way we view these issues. If this issue is important—and it clearly is—we must bite the bullet and place the obligations on ISPs and mobile phone operators to provide default adult content filters that can be lifted subject to prior expeditious age verification on a statutory footing. We do not allow a child to buy an 18-rated DVD offline, so why do we afford them less protection online?
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I suspect that when the noble Baroness comes to reply, she will suggest that the Government are doing enough already because they are planning to introduce regulations that will simply require websites live-streaming R18-type content online to do so behind robust age verification. I very much welcome that, but I suggest that it is no substitute for Amendment 104 because they largely deal with different things. First, unless the Government have widened their proposals, the
requirement relates only to R18 video on demand content and not all adult content, which could be 18-rated video on demand or indeed the vast majority of adult content that is not video on demand but photographs and articles. Secondly, it relates only to R18 video on demand content that is live-streamed from the United Kingdom. Of course, the vast majority of the content accessed in this country is from outside the United Kingdom and will be outside the scope of their proposed regulations.
I very much look forward to the regulations being laid, but they are no reason not to back Amendment 104. The amendment is vital because we do not live in a world where all online adult content, or even most online adult content, comes in the form of video on demand live-streamed from sites based in the United Kingdom. The basic issue is: do the 10% really matter? Does protection matter? If it does, the Government will surely accept this amendment.