My Lords, I want to say “Hallelujah”. With this Bill, we have reached a landmark moment after the disappointments and obstacles that we have had over the last six years. It has been a marathon but we are now in the final straight with the finishing line in sight, after the extraordinary efforts by noble Lords on all sides of the House. I thank the Secretary of State for her commitment to this ground-breaking Bill, and the Minister and his officials for the effort they have put into it. The Minister is one of my “Play School” babies, who has done his utmost to make a difference in changing the online world. That makes me very happy.
We know that the eyes of the world are watching us because legislators around the world are looking for ways to extend the rule of law into the online world, which has become the Wild West of the 21st century, so it is critical that in our haste to reach the finishing post we do not neglect the question of enforcement. That is why I have put my name to Amendment 268C in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Weir: without ensuring that Ofcom is given effective powers for this task of unprecedented scale, the Bill we are passing may yet become a paper tiger.
The impact assessment for the Bill estimated that 25,000 websites would be in scope. Only last week, in an encouraging report by the National Audit Office on Ofcom’s readiness, we learned that the regulator’s own research has increased that estimate to 100,000, and the figure could be significantly higher. The report went on to point out that the great majority of those websites will be based overseas and will not have been regulated by Ofcom before.
The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, raised his concerns on the final day of Committee, seeking to amend the Bill to make it clear that Ofcom could take a schedule of a thousand sites to court and get them all blocked in one go. I was reassured when the Minister repeated the undertaking given by his counterpart in Committee in the other place that the Civil Procedure Rules already allow such multiparty claims. Will the Minister clarify once again that such enforcement at scale is possible and would not expose Ofcom to judicial review? That would give me peace of mind.
The question that remains for many is whether Ofcom will act promptly enough when children are at risk. I am being cautious because my experience in this area with regulators has led me not to assume that simply because this Parliament passes a law, it will be implemented. We all know the sorry tale of the Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, when Ministers took it upon themselves not to decide when it should come into force, but to ask whether it should at all. When they announced that that should be never, the High Court took a dim view and allowed judicial review to proceed. Interestingly, the repeal of Part 3 and the clauses that replaced it may not have featured in this Bill were it not for that case—I always say that everything always happens for a reason. The amendment is a reminder to Ofcom that Parliament expects it to act, and to do so from the day when the law comes into force, not after a year’s grace period, six months or more of monitoring or a similar period of supervision before it contemplates any form of enforcement.
Many of the sites we are dealing with will not comply because this is the law; they will do so only when the business case makes compliance cheaper than the consequences of non-compliance, so this amendment is a gentle but necessary provision. If for any reason Ofcom does not think that exposing a significant number of children in this country to suicide, health harm, eating disorder or pornographic content—which is a universal plague—merits action, it will need to write a letter to the Secretary of State explaining why.
We have come too far to risk the Bill not being implemented in the most robust way, so I hope my noble friends will join me in supporting this belt-and-braces amendment. I look forward to the Minister’s response.