UK Parliament / Open data

Online Safety Bill

I am grateful to the Minister. That was helpful, particularly the description of the process and the fact that drafts have to be issued early on. However, it still leaves open a couple of questions, one of which was very helpfully raised by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. We have in Schedule 12 this other set of protections that could be applied. There is a genuine question as to why this has been put in this place and not there.

The second question is to dig a little more into the question of what happens when there is a dispute. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, pointed out that if you

have created a backdoor then you have created a backdoor, and it is dangerous. If we end up in a situation where a company believes that what it is being asked to do by Ofcom is fundamentally problematic and would create a security risk, it will not be good enough to open up the backdoor and then have a judicial review. It needs to be able to say no at that stage, yet the Bill says that it could be committing a serious criminal offence by failing to comply with an information notice. We want some more assurances, in some form, about what would happen in a scenario where a company genuinely and sincerely believes that what Ofcom is asking for is inappropriate and/or dangerous and it wants not to have to offer it unless and until its challenge has been looked at, rather than having to offer it and then later judicially review a decision. The damage would already have been done by opening up an inappropriate backdoor.

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
831 cc2097-8 
Session
2022-23
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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