My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 5B in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. I am reminded that this is a new stage of the Bill, so I should declare my interests. I have no current financial interests in the tech sector, but until 2019 I worked for one of the large technology companies that will be regulated, doing the kind of censorship job that the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, is concerned about. We clearly did not do it very well or we would not be here today replacing people like me with Ofcom.
Amendment 5B concerns an issue that we raised in Committee: the offence of encouragement of self-harm. That new offence was broadly welcomed, including on these Benches. We believe that there is scope, in some circumstances, to seek criminal prosecution of individuals who, online or otherwise, maliciously seek to encourage other people to harm themselves. The concern we raised in Committee, which we come back to today, is that we want the offence to be used in a way that we would all agree is sensible. We do not want people who are trying to help individuals at risk of self-harm to become concerned about and afraid of it, and to feel that they need to limit activities that would otherwise be positive and helpful.
In Committee we suggested that one way to do this would be to have a filter where the Director of Public Prosecutions looked at potential prosecutions under the new offence. We take a different approach with the amendment, which would in some senses be more effective, which is to explicitly list in the Bill the three categories of activity that would not render an individual liable to prosecution.
The first is people who provide an educational resource. We should be clear that some educational resources that are intended to help people recognise self-harm and turn away from it can contain quite explicit material. Those people are concerned that they might, in publishing that material with good intent, accidentally fall foul of the offence.
The second category is those who provide support—individuals providing peer support networks, such as an online forum where people discuss their experience of self-harm and seek to turn away from it. They should not be inadvertently caught up in the offence.
The third category is people posting information about their own experience of self-harm. Again, that could be people sharing quite graphic material about what they have been doing to themselves. I hope that there would be general agreement that we would not interpret, for example, a distressed teenager sharing material about their own self-harm, with the intent of seeking advice and support from others, as in some way encouraging or assisting others to commit self-harm themselves.
There is a genuine effort here to try to find a way through so that we can provide assurances to others. If the Minister cannot accept the amendment as it is, I hope he will reaffirm that the categories of people that I described are not the target of the offence and
that he will be able to offer some kind of assurance as to how they can feel confident that they would not fall foul of prosecution.
Additionally, some of these groups feel with some conviction that their voices have not been as prominent in the debate as those of other organisations. The work they do is quite sensitive, and they are often quite small organisations. Between Report and the Bill becoming law, I hope that those who will be responsible for doing the detailed work around guidance on prosecutions will meet with those people on the front line—again, specificity is all—and that those who are trying to work out how to make this legislation work will meet with the people doing that work, running those fora and engaging with the young people who seek help around self-harm to look in detail at what they are doing. That would be extraordinarily helpful.
Those are my two asks. Ideally, the Government would accept the amendment that we have tabled, but if not I hope that they can give the assurance that the three groups I listed are not the target and that they will commit to having relevant officials meet with individuals working on the front line, so that we can make sure that we do not end up prosecuting individuals without intending to.