My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendments 2A, 2B and 5A, which are in my name but perhaps more importantly in the names of my noble friends Lady Buscombe and Lord Leicester. I want to make it quite clear that this is not a contentious debate, in the sense that I had a very useful meeting with my noble friend the Minister on Monday 3 July, in which we set out to each other our respective concerns about the content of the Bill and how it does not protect the people that my noble friends and I seek to protect. My noble friend the Minister explained the practical difficulties faced in trying to introduce these provisions into this Bill. I think we probably agreed to differ. I hope I do not misinterpret what he told me the other day, but, essentially, I think the Government’s view is that an amendment along the lines that we propose might sit more suitably within the digital markets Bill. I am not entirely sure about that, but I am not going to have a fight about it this afternoon.
I will make some short points. Having listened to the debate on the Government’s Amendment 1, I suggest that our proposal that “financial” should be included in the types of damage referred to in Clause 162(1)(c)—that a person commits an offence if
“at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological”,
we would then add in “financial”,
“or physical harm to a likely audience”—
fits in very well with Amendment 1 and the point raised by my noble friend Lady Harding on proposed new subsection (2), which says:
“To achieve that purpose, this Act (among other things) … imposes duties which, in broad terms, require providers of services … to … mitigate and manage the risks of harm … from … illegal content and activity”.
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At our meeting the other day and in Committee, we talked about making it a criminal act to post damaging material about, for example, a business, such as one that sells meat, which becomes the victim of a vegan pile-on. It could be a local bed and breakfast, an Airbnb, a restaurant or pub that is owned by people who, for example, enjoy sports that others disapprove of—to take an easy and obvious example, hunting. In so far as hunting is still a permitted and legal activity, there are none the less people who vehemently disapprove of it, and they take their disapproval to the extent that they pile on abusive, damaging and false accusations on the internet, to the financial damage, quite apart from the mental upset, of those who run those businesses. We are talking not about large corporations but about individuals who own pubs, restaurants, small shops or whatever it might be, whose livelihoods and psychological well-being could well be affected by this.
We think it would be a good idea not only if this sort of activity were criminalised but if the providers and operators of the websites and so on took on the moral responsibility for what those who use their sites are doing. That duty, which I would say goes beyond morality—it is a social, moral and legal duty—translates across to the Government. It is the duty of the Government to protect small business people running perfectly legitimate businesses from this sort of mob activity—in the jargon, pile-ons. I therefore urge the Government, although I accept their concerns about the difficulty of using this particular Bill, to think imaginatively and positively about how they can protect the victims and potential victims of the activity I refer to.
Nothing that we propose would affect the legitimate rights to freedom of expression or privacy set out in Amendment 1. The law as it stands—I refer to the Defamation Act 2013, Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and the common law—allows for restriction of people’s “right” to tell damaging lies. We do not need to get too prissy about protecting the rights of liars who wish to go around damaging other people’s businesses.
That, in essence, is the long and the short of it. I look forward to the Government coming forward in short order with some positive proposals about what they want to do, and how they propose to do it, to protect this group of people who have had their lives
and their businesses damaged and who will continue to be at risk until Parliament does something about it. I beg to move.