My Lords, I rise to support in particular the inclusion of Amendment 65 on the requirement for payment services providers to cease providing a service to those who flout the age verification rules, and I am pleased to say that it looks like we are building slightly more of a consensus on that than we did on the previous group of amendments. It seems to us that this is the most powerful measure that can be taken against rogue pornographic sites. If we can cut off their source of income, the likelihood of a positive response is almost inevitable.
The very nature of commercial pornography is based on the vast sums of money that can be made from it. Indeed, when we debated Part 3 at Second Reading, several noble Lords made the point that legitimate pornography sites would welcome the age verification process as they do not make any money
from children casually visiting their sites; they want the more serious players to be involved because obviously they are the ones who are going to pay the money, so there is a kind of internal logic to what is being proposed. For these sites, the overriding concern is to harvest the profits, and any threat to that is likely to bring about an immediate response.
However, I also accept the point that we have to get the enforcement right, and I listened carefully to the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, about the experience with regard to the Gambling Bill, some of which I did not know. If there is a problem, let us talk it through and work it out because somewhere in the mix is the answer to our problems.
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My noble friend Lord Maxton said that this could not be enforced. I do not think that anyone considers that what is being proposed in the Bill is going to be 100% deliverable or enforceable. We are on a journey and, if we can attack 50% or 75%, we are making progress in this area. It is inevitable that we will have to revisit the whole issue in the future, so we are taking steps towards what I hope will be a fully robust system. Incidentally, I agree with my noble friend about identity cards, although obviously that is another issue. I have tabled amendments on how it is possible to provide age verification on an anonymised basis and I hope that he will look at them. There are new websites that manage the process of checking identity without putting people’s details into the public domain. Technology is moving on in ways I do not claim to understand, but I am glad they are there.
Amendment 65 also refers to the requirement for ancillary service providers to block access to non-complying persons. We have debated this a little this afternoon. While we have some sympathy with that objective, we are keen to ensure that any measure to block sites via ancillary service providers, such as Twitter and Google, are proportionate and deliverable. The Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, reaffirmed that. We are not talking about taking down the whole of Twitter, so I do think we need to get the proportionality of this right. We will explore this issue more in some of the amendments that we have tabled for debate later on, and we need somehow to have further discussion and debate about social media sites, their responsibilities and what we can do about it.
I was very interested to hear the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and of the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, on the issue of what was not commercial but user-generated material, including issues such as revenge porn, which the noble Lord reminded us about. That is an issue that we really need to address and I feel that children are particularly susceptible to getting involved in that innocent exchange of information, which can prove all too damaging and be misused against them by those who are keen to exploit their innocence. We need to build in more protections for children from being exploited in this way. I do not know whether the Minister has any more thoughts on that, but I hope we can explore in more detail the question of what is different between commercial and non-commercial material and how can we make sure that those children are protected?
Finally, I have added my name to Amendment 237, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, and we agree with the one-year implementation date. As we have already outlined, we feel there is a great deal of more work to be done in this Bill, both in primary and secondary legislation, but we agree that a one-year deadline would produce, on the one hand, space for this additional work to be done and, at the same time, provide reassurance of our ultimate determination to introduce what we hope would be a robust and detailed age verification system which would stand the test of time.