Online Safety Bill

I appreciate the tone of the Minister’s comments very much, but they are not entirely reassuring me. There is a debate going on out there: there are people saying, “We’ve got these fabulous technologies that we would like Ofcom to order companies to install” and there are companies saying, “That would be disastrous and break encryption if we had to install them”. That is a dualistic situation where there is a contest going on. My amendment seeks to make sure the conflict can be properly resolved. I do not think Ofcom on its own can ever do that, because Ofcom will always be defending what it is doing and saying “This is fine”. So, there has to be some other mechanism whereby people can say it is not fine and contest that. As I say, in this debate we are ignoring the fact that they are already out there: people saying “We think you should deploy this” and companies saying “It would be disastrous if we did”. We cannot resolve that by just saying “Trust Ofcom”.