My Lords, as somebody who is only five feet and two inches, I have felt that size does not matter for pretty much all my life and have long wanted to say that in a speech. This group of amendments is really about how size does not matter; risk does. I will briefly build on the speech just given by the noble Lord, Lord Allan, very eloquently as usual, to describe why risk matters more than size.
First, there are laws for which size does matter—small companies do not need to comply with certain systems and processes—but not those concerned with safety. I have in my mind’s eye the small village fête, where we expect a risk assessment if we are to let children ride on rides. That was not the case 100 years ago, but is today because we recognise those dangers. One of the reasons why we stumbled into thinking that size should matter in this Bill is that we are not being honest about the scale of the risk for our children. If the risk is large enough, we should not be worrying about size; we should be worrying about that risk. That is the first reason why we have to focus on risk and not size.
The second reason is subsequent to what I have just said—the principles of the physical world should apply to the online world. That is one of the core tenets of this Bill. That means that if you recognise the real and present risks of the digital world you have to say that it does not matter whether a small number of people are affected. If it is a small business, it still has an obligation not to put people in harm’s way.
Thirdly, small becomes big very quickly—unfortunately, that has not been true for me, but it is true in the digital world as Threads has just shown us. Fourthly, we also know that in the digital world re-engineering something once it has got very big is really difficult. There is also a practical reason why you want engineers to think about the risks before they launch services rather than after the event.
We keep being told, rightly, that this is a Bill about systems and processes. It is a Bill where we want not just the outcomes that the noble Lord, Lord Allan, has referred to in terms of services in the UK genuinely being safer; we are trying to effect a culture change. I would argue one of the most important culture changes is that any bright, young tech entrepreneur has to start by thinking about the risks and therefore the safety procedures they need to put in place as they build their tech business from the ground up and not once they have reached some artificial size threshold.