My Lords, this has been a good debate, perhaps unfairly curtailed in terms of the range of voices we have heard, but I am sure the points we wanted to have on the table are there and we can use them in summarising the debate we have had so far.
I welcome the Government’s amendments in this group. They have gone a long way to resolving a number of the difficulties that were left after the Digital Economy Act. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has said, we now have Part 3 and Part 5 hooked together in a consistent and effective way and definitions of “age verification” and “age estimation”. The noble Lord, Lord Grade, is sadly not in his place today—I normally judge the quality of the debate by the angle at which he resides in that top corner there. He is not here to judge it, but I am sure he would be upright and very excited by what we have been hearing so far. His point about the need for companies to be clearly responsible for what they serve up through their services is really important in what we are saying here today.
However, despite the welcome links across to the ICO age-appropriate design code, with the concerns we have been expressing on privacy there are still a number of questions which I think the Minister will want to deal with, either today or in writing. Several noble Lords have raised the question of what “proportionate” means in this area. I have mentioned it in other speeches in other groups. We all want the overall system to be proportionate in the way in which it allocates the powers, duties and responsibilities on the companies providing us with the services they do. But there is an exception for the question of whether children should have access to material which they should not get because of legal constraints, and I hope that “proportionate” is not being used in any sense to evade that.
I say that particularly because the concern has been raised in other debates—and I would be grateful if the Minister could make sure when he comes to respond that this issue is addressed—that smaller companies with less robust track records in terms of their income and expenditures might be able to plead that some of the responsibilities outlined in this section of the Bill do not apply to them because otherwise it would bear on their ability to continue. That would be a complete travesty of where we are trying to get to here, which is an absolute bar on children having access to material that is illegal or in the lists now in the Bill in terms of priority content.
The second worry that people have raised is: will the system that is set up here actually work in practice, particularly if it does not apply to all companies? That relates perhaps to the other half of the coin that I have just mentioned.
The third point, raised by a number of Peers, is: where does all this sit in relation to the review of pornography which was announced recently? A number of questions have been asked about issues which the Minister may be unable to respond to, but I suspect he may also want to write to us on the wider issue of timing and the terms of reference once they are settled.
I think we need to know this as we reach the end of the progress on this Bill, because you cannot expect a system being set up with the powers that are being
given to Ofcom to work happily and well if Ofcom knows it is being reviewed at the same time. I hope that some consideration will be given to how we get the system up and running, even if the timescale is now tighter than it was, if at the same time a review rightly positioned to try to look at the wider range of pornography is going to impact on its work.
I want to end on the question raised by a large number of noble Lords: how does all this work sit with privacy? Where information and data are being shared on the basis of assuring access to services, there will be a worry if privacy is not ensured. The amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, are very salient to this. I look forward to the Minister’s response to them.