My Lords, I will add to my noble friend’s call for us to consider whether Clause 158 should be struck from the Bill as an unnecessary power for the Secretary of State to take. We have discussed powers for the Secretary of State throughout the Bill, with some helpful improvements led by the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell. This one jars in particular because it is about media literacy; some of the other powers related to whether the Secretary of State could intervene on the codes of practice that Ofcom would issue. The core question is whether we trust Ofcom’s discretion in delivering media literacy and whether we need the Secretary of State to have any kind of power to intervene.
I single out media literacy because the clue is in the name: literacy is a generic skill that you acquire about dealing with the online world; it is not about any specific text. Literacy is a broader set of skills, yet Clause 158 has a suggestion that, in response to specific forms of content or a specific crisis happening in the world, the Secretary of State would want to takesb this power to direct the media literacy efforts. To take something specific and immediate to direct something that is generic and long-term jars and seems inappropriate.
I have a series of questions for the Minister to elucidate why this power should exist at all. It would be helpful to have an example of what kind of “public statement notice”—to use the language in the clause—the Government might want to issue that Ofcom would not come up with on its own. Part of the argument we have been presented with is that, somehow, the Government might have additional information, but it seems quite a stretch that they could come up with
that. In an area such as national security, my experience has been that companies often have a better idea of what is going on than anybody in government.
Thousands of people out there in the industry are familiar with APT 28 and APT 29 which, as I am sure all noble Lords know, are better known by their names Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. These are agents of the Russian state that put out misinformation. There is nothing that UK agencies or the Secretary of State might know about them that is not already widely known. I remember talking about the famous troll factory run by Prigozhin, the Internet Research Agency, with people in government in the context of Russian interference—they would say “Who?” and have to go off and find out. In dealing with threats such as that between the people in the companies and Ofcom, you certainly want a media literacy campaign which tells you about these troll agencies and how they operate and gives warnings to the public, but I struggle to see why you need the Secretary of State to intervene as opposed to allowing Ofcom’s experts to work with company experts and come up with a strategy to deal with those kinds of threat.
The other example cited of an area where the Secretary of State might want to intervene is public health and safety. It would be helpful to be specific; had they had it, how would the Government have used this power during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021? Does the Minister have examples of what they were frustrated about and would have done with these powers that Ofcom would not do anyway in working with the companies directly? I do not see that they would have had secret information which would have meant that they had to intervene rather than trusting Ofcom and the companies to do it.
Perhaps there has been an interdepartmental workshop between DHSC, DCMS and others to cook up this provision. I assume that Clause 158 did not come from nowhere. Someone must have thought, “We need these powers in Clause 158 because we were missing them previously”. Are there specific examples of media literacy campaigns that could not be run, where people in government were frustrated and therefore wanted a power to offer it in future? It would be really helpful to hear about them so that we can understand exactly how the Clause 158 powers will be used before we allow this additional power on to the statute book.
In the view of most people in this Chamber, the Bill as a whole quite rightly grants the Government and Ofcom, the independent regulator, a wide range of powers. Here we are looking specifically at where the Government will, in a sense, overrule the independent regulator by giving it orders to do something it had not thought of doing itself. It is incumbent on the Government to flesh that out with some concrete examples so that we can understand why they need this power. At the moment, as noble Lords may be able to tell, these Benches are not convinced that they do.