My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Storey and with his permission, I move Amendment 57. It seeks to ensure that, where age ratings are used by video on demand channels—and I of course acknowledge that some adopt a different approach to audience protection—the ratings are the same as the ones used by the British Board of Film Classification or meet equivalent standards of rigour, transparency and objectivity. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, who has worked tirelessly on this issue and whose amendments, while having the same effect as Amendment 57, provide much more detail on the procedures to be followed. We on these Benches support them, and the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton.
I welcome the Bill’s proposal to improve audience protection on streaming services through Ofcom reviews, but my concern is that the Bill does not specify on what basis Ofcom should consider measures to be adequate—echoing the point I made earlier on the need for Parliament to have a greater say in guiding Ofcom on the way it carries out its functions. This is a particular problem when it comes to age ratings, as not all age ratings are equally effective for child protection. The present lack of consistency risks undermining public confidence in age ratings in general and I know there is an unusual level of cross-party support on this particular issue.
In the ideal world—as I see it—all streaming content would carry a BBFC age rating. We expect this of cinema and DVD releases, so why not streaming? Netflix, Amazon, Apple and many others have demonstrated that this is achievable. However, in the interests of achieving consensus, at the very least there should be minimum standards to ensure greater consistency where services choose to use age ratings. This is essentially what all the amendments in this group seek to achieve. BBFC ratings are rightly trusted and valued by UK families. The BBFC is designated
by the Government, accountable to Parliament and legally bound to take UK public opinion into account, which it does through extensive research. The BBFC is also fully transparent. It publishes its guidelines and provides detailed content advice to help families make informed choices. This is essential to the effectiveness of its ratings.
Streamers working with the BBFC automatically benefit from its transparency and consistency and from the massive public trust it enjoys. Netflix viewers understand what a 12 or a 15 means on Netflix because it means exactly the same thing as in cinemas or on DVD. I have looked at some of the services that do not use BBFC ratings, including Disney+, Paramount+ and Sky’s Now service. I did not find any information on their age rating criteria, nor any evidence of research underpinning their standards. The ratings these services apply are often misaligned with UK expectations. Even where films and series have a legally enforceable BBFC rating, they often choose to apply—bizarrely—a different rating. How can parents know which rating to trust when the BBFC says one thing and Disney says something different?
To give an example: “Beauty and the Beast”, the 2017 live action remake, was a PG in the cinemas and on DVD. It remains a PG online on those streamers that are working with the BBFC, including Amazon Prime and Apple TV, but on Disney+, for some reason, it has been reclassified as a 12+. Another example is “Bohemian Rhapsody”, the Freddie Mercury biopic. This has a BBFC rating of 12. Many families will have enjoyed it together at the cinema. It remains a 12 on Amazon, Apple and the other services that work with the BBFC, but on Disney+ it is 16+. This means that, if a parent wants to let their 12 year-old watch a film that is entirely appropriate for them, they need to set the child’s Disney+ profile to access 16+ content—but that would include many titles with a BBFC rating of 15 or 18.
At the same time, Disney classified a very sinister 2019 adaptation of “A Christmas Carol” involving graphic horror scenes and sexual exploitation as a 9+. While Disney subsequently took this title down, it was a serious compliance failure when it was released with this rating in the first place. But Disney+ is not the only offender. On Paramount+, titles rated BBFC 12 are routinely bumped up to 15+, putting them alongside much stronger material. Do family favourites such as “Mean Girls”, “Top Gun: Maverick” and various titles in the Transformers series really belong alongside violent thrillers and gory horror movies?
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As the Bill is clearly not going to mandate BBFC age ratings—that is ideally what I would like, but I accept the Government have a different view—the very least it can do is set minimum standards to help Ofcom assess whether any age rating system is likely to be effective for child protection. This does not create double regulation, as I believe some streamers have been suggesting, and, in any case, Ofcom already references BBFC ratings in the Broadcasting Code. This amendment and the others in this group propose common-sense standards that are not a high bar to expect companies to meet. Principles such as transparency,
clarity and alignment with UK cultural expectations are the bare minimum for effective age ratings and should be set out on the face of the Bill.