My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, and the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for adding their names to Amendment 270A, and to the NSPCC for its assistance in tabling this amendment and helping me to think about it.
The Online Safety Bill has the ambition, as we have heard many times, of making the UK the safest place for a child to be online. Yet, as drafted, it could pass into legislation without a system to ensure that children’s voices themselves can be heard. This is a huge gap. Children are experts in their own lives, with a first-hand understanding of the risks that they face online. It is by speaking to, and hearing from, children directly that we can best understand the harms they face online—what needs to change and how the regulation is working in practice.
User advocates are commonplace in most regulated environments and are proven to be effective. Leading children’s charities such as 5Rights, Barnardo’s and YoungMinds, as well as organisations set up by bereaved parents campaigning for child safety online, such as the Molly Rose Foundation and the Breck Foundation, have joined the NSPCC in calling for the introduction of this advocacy body for children, as set out in the amendment.
I do not wish to detain anyone. The Minister’s response when this was raised in Committee was, in essence, that this should go to the Children’s Commissioner for England. I am grateful to her for tracking me down in a Pret A Manger in Russell Square on Monday and having a chat. She reasonably pointed out that much of the amendment reads a bit like her job description, but she also could see that it is desirable to have an organisation such as the NSPCC set up a UK-wide helpline. There are children’s commissioners for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who are supportive of a national advocacy body for children. She was suggesting —if the Minister agrees that this seems like a good solution—that they could commission a national helpline that works across the United Kingdom, and then advises a group that she could convene, including the children’s commissioners from the other nations of the United Kingdom. If that seems a good solution to the Minister, I do not need to press the amendment, we are all happy and we can get on with the next group. I beg to move.