My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lords who contributed to the debate. Of course I accept that the BBFC has considerable experience of dealing with classification. I will not rehearse the arguments that noble Lords put forward: it is of course the case. It is well known and well documented. The part of the Bill that we are concerned with concerns the enforcement role, which goes into uncharted waters.
The noble Earl, Lord Erroll, is quite right that the idea of notice and take-down is a very different way of operating and achieving your end goals. It is quite a novel way, and I am sure we all look forward to finding out whether it will work. The idea that to get pornographers to play ball, if you like, we will cut off their advertising or their money is a great initiative, but we do not know whether it will work. More importantly, I do not know whether the BBFC has any experience of trying to oversee a regime that operates on this basis.
As I said in an earlier debate, I have spoken to some of the internet service providers, and all of the organisations we are talking about here have every sympathy with what we are trying to achieve. However, they have a huge number of questions about how this will work in practice. It is very easy to say that we should block access to the sites, but it is much more difficult technically to implement and to oversee.
We could get carried away with the BBFC being in a position to take all of these functions over. I recall that when the BBFC gave evidence in the Commons before debate on the Bill started there it had much more modest ambitions about what it was able to do. It is interesting that it has been persuaded during the past few months that it should expand its horizons, but I have seen no evidence of it having been tested whether it has the staffing, the expertise or the funding
in place, or whether it has the confidence of those whom they will regulate to carry out this role. It is with the back end of all this that we are concerned.
The Minister has implied that the Government’s thinking is the same, but if we look at what was said in the Commons, more latterly in debate here and now in writing, we see that the Government’s position on this has changed as well. I do not know that there has been an adequate explanation. As I said originally, I suspect that they do not have another obvious person lined up, so the people at the BBFC are the only ones volunteering to do it. I am not sure that that is the best basis on which to try out something which I believe could be an exciting way of achieving our aims. I am not convinced that we have yet seen the evidence that the BBFC has the skills to do it.
The Minister may not be surprised that I do not accept what he had to say. There is an issue about subcontracting all this work to a private company that is not properly overseen and regulated in the way that we would want. I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 25J but will seek to test the opinion of the House on Amendment 25P.