Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Bethell Excerpts(4 days, 2 hours ago)
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Lord Addington (LD)
This is fairly straightforward. There is a bit of passion being stirred up and a nice pace, so let us not delay too long. The reason I am suggesting that we include smartphones as assistance to those with special educational needs is because smartphones fit in your pocket and are a great way of carrying technology with you.
Chris McCausland, who noble Lords have probably seen on “Strictly Come Dancing”, did a lovely little programme showing all the assistance you can get if you are blind that can be loaded on to your phone. I, as a dyslexic, have good voice-operated systems that I can carry with me everywhere and use because they are on my phone. It gives you personal independence. It means that you can operate these systems, and we have only just started to scratch the surface. If there is another personal device that does it, I am all ears. I do not know whether there is another one.
You can block social media so the phone itself can be used for other purposes. It is a plastic and metal box that carries technology; it is not the devil’s passport. If we use it correctly, we can change it so that it actually supports and gives independence to a person who otherwise has it restricted from them. I ask all noble Lords in this Chamber: do we want to give independence to those who have disabilities?
This amendment would not solve everything, but it would address certain things. It would make sure that pupils could interact with lessons more easily. If they are restricted to a computer in front of them, that may well be better, but, for instance, they will not be able to take notes quite as easily—as in my case—or communicate quite as easily. The Carers Trust has been in touch to say that it does not like the proposal and would like an exemption for some of the people it is dealing with. This is moving very fast—there might be other groups.
I appreciate what the noble Baroness is trying to do but let us not be too rigid and throw the baby out with the bathwater. Technology is a way of helping to give independence, allowing people to access education. Please accept the fact that an absolute ban has downsides—downsides we can avoid. I beg to move.
Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, for a very moving speech there, but I will address his point directly.
This amendment does not object to a child having a basic phone for safety. My plucky 11 year-old son travels to and from school every day with a big rucksack and a violin on the Circle line and the Jubilee line, come rain or snow. It worries the hell out of me every time he leaves the house, and I am not happy until he is back home. That is why he has a Nokia dumb phone in his pocket, so he can call me if he needs to. I confess that he sometimes plays “Pong” on a black and white LED screen when he is bored, but that does not damage his frontal cortex or bring him into touch with predators. He does not have a smartphone with all its nasty algorithms. Until they invent such a box as the noble Lord, Lord Addington, quite reasonably described, that is what a smartphone contains.
I do not, for instance, allow my son to go to the local pub, the Westbourne, where he might be beaten up. For the same reason, I do not let him on Instagram, with all its bullying. I do not allow him to go to the Ministry of Sound—wonderful organisation though that is—because he will be confronting sexual predators. For the same reason, I do not let him on Snapchat. I do not give him methamphetamine—whizz—or Es, because they are addictive and would mess with his brain, as do TikTok and YouTube reels. I do not, for instance, allow him on X, where he might see internet filth. For the same reason, he is not allowed to go to Soho to watch peep shows.
Toxic digital platforms are designed for adults and are engineered for addiction, fraudsters and predators—and, I am afraid, they are screwing with too many of our children’s brains. A simple device that makes calls and sends texts poses none of these challenges. That is what children should have. That is why schools should be in a regulatory position to ban smartphones during school hours.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I have spoken on this issue so many times in this House that I am not going to repeat myself—really—except to say that I have never taught in a school that allows mobile phones either in school or on the way to school. I have taught in some of the highest-performing schools—non-selective state schools that are some of the highest performing for pupil progress in the country—and I do not think the two are unconnected.
We do not need mobile phones in schools. They distract and they disturb. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that I am sure we can take a smartphone, take out all the stuff the student needs and give it to them for the day. We do it with laptops for the pupils all the time. We do not need them on the way to school. It is a huge irony that we pack our children off to school with many hundreds of pounds-worth of equipment in their pocket and then worry about their safety. As part of a strategy to build a safe environment for our children online, the first step is very simple: ban phones from schools entirely.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Bethell Excerpts(2 weeks, 3 days ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, it is such a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. She is absolutely right. We have a choice today on whether we will send an amendment to the Commons to put pressure on the Government to act or whether we are going to flunk this opportunity. I support her conclusion that this is a moment when the House of Lords does need to act.
I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Penn for her Amendment 91, which is thoughtful, patiently put and important. I hope very much indeed that the Government pay attention to her notes on timetable and that, if necessary, she presses this point so that she gets what she needs.
I want to address Amendment 94A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Nash, and pay tribute to the noble Baronesses, Lady Cass, Lady Berger and Lady Benjamin, all of whom have made an enormous impact on this. Guardrails for our children are where we have landed. I say this with some regret, but it is important that we recognise this point.
The noble Baroness, Lady Cass, mentioned a meeting with the royal colleges. As a former Health Minister who has had many dealings with the herd of cats that are the royal colleges, I say that if they unify and say that there is a public health emergency, we should pay attention to that moment. We should not be brushed off by attempts to knock this into the long grass via public consultations. We should listen to our clinicians. Dr Rebecca Foljambe and the clinicians against smart- phones have done conclusive research on the harms done by screen time, by predators, by fraudsters, by the filth on the internet and by the sheer quantity of screen time that our children are subjected to. It is an utterly persuasive argument. Further research is not needed.
In fact, a consultation is the tobacco industry playbook, applied to smartphones for adolescents. Delay, consult, lobby, weaken—we know this playbook very well. We do not need a “get out of jail” clause for the tech companies; we need implementation. This is our opportunity for doing it.
Like many others in this Chamber, I worked really hard on the Online Safety Act to make it a success. It is a landmark piece of legislation. I am extremely proud of bits of it. But it assumed that we could work with the platforms to moderate their algorithms, to remove the filth, to prevent the predators, and to limit the screen time. It assumed that we were working in some kind of collaborative partnership with Facebook, Google, TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, Twitter and all the other social media companies to protect children and work towards some kind of better world.
That was a catastrophic misjudgment about the nature of these companies and of their leadership. The outcomes for our children, which have gone significantly backwards in the last two years, are testimony to that point. That damage done to our children is accelerating, with the tsunami of AI that is heading their way. The platforms have not reformed. They have not taken the bait. Instead, they have taken the mick. They are introducing artificial intelligence and totally inappropriate chatbots to our children.
The risk assessments that are an absolutely essential building block of the Ofcom regime and the Online Safety Act are an absolute insult to the intelligence of the regulators and of parents. How on earth did a risk assessment ever assess Grok’s new AI tools as being safe for children? It is a complete joke. The noble Lords, Lord Knight and Lord Clement-Jones, say that these platforms can be moderated, that they can be brought to heel, and that they will abide with the regulator’s will. But we have got to remember that they will not change, because around 25% of their clicks—the page views—come from the children they are targeting, and they are far too reliant on mis-selling those children’s eyeballs as adult eyeballs to advertisers. You cannot regulate far-off tech titans who are reliant on that income. You can only create perimeters in which they can hunt their profits, and that is exactly what the amendment seeks to do.
I recognise that there are sensible, respected voices who take a completely different view. Noble Lords have rightly paid tribute to the Molly Rose Foundation. I know that Ian Russell, and the NSPCC and other charities, have argued that instead of guardrails we should strengthen the Online Safety Act. They say that we should mandate well-being by design requirements, and Ian Russell has said that we should require platforms to prioritise child well-being in algorithmic design, and that age verification creates
“a false sense of security”.
I just do not think that is right. This argument rests on a false premise that we can somehow design our way out of the problem while keeping children on platforms whose entire business model depends on their exploitation. That cannot happen. You cannot algorithmically mitigate something that is not a design problem but a business model problem. The algorithm is not broken; it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: maximise engagement, keep eyes on the screen, and amplify provocative content, because provocative content keeps people clicking, including our children. This is not a market failure; this is a market working as designed by the companies that have monetised our children’s childhood as a commodity.
There are other noble Peers, such as the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, who are flying a kite on the possibility of some kind of film-style certification system. I also share that dream. What a wonderful world it would be to live in. I lived in that world for many years. Previous to being here, I was the strategy director of Capital Radio, in much-loved local radio, which, in the 1990s, was a warm and loving place to work and operate in. For every single local radio station, the Government had a licence which dictated exactly who they could broadcast to and what content they had on their radio station. If you breached that licence, they pulled it and gave it to someone else. It meant that local radio was extremely compliant with the licence details. Our broadcasting was a warm and lovely thing that was safe for children.
It is completely unrealistic that we are going to appoint something like a modern Radio Authority that will issue licences for every single website in the world and in some way oversee what our children access on those websites. How many bureaucrats would be needed to look at all those licences? How many armies of enforcement agents would be needed to issue the fines? How could we possibly read all that content?
Poverty: Metrics
Lord Bethell Excerpts(7 years ago)
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Lord Bethell (Con)
My Lords, the debate has been incredibly rich. I do not know how to chip in with some fresh material. Let me try with some key points. First, the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, should be thanked for leading the debate, but she has a huge team behind her: both the commissioners and the secretariat have spent two and a half years putting the report together. A gentleman called Matt Oakley deserves special praise for his sterling work over that period.
I am proud to declare an interest as an adviser to the Legatum Institute—I was involved, tangentially, in the launch—but I am also very sad because the report taught me that, over the past 25 years, the proportion of the country living in some form of poverty has remained almost static, at around 22%. That is a deep failure in government policy. It rocks one’s hope that anything can change, but I have hope: I think that the 14 million people living in poverty and the 7 million living in persistent poverty referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, can be lifted out of that state if we have better mechanisms to support them.
I believe that the Government are not necessarily a cumbersome, inert agent in all this; when prodded, they can have better policy. As the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, put it so well, these statistics can be the intellectual engine to improve policy. Disability is an example of that, as was mentioned by a number of speakers, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Tyler and Lady Lister. The disabled are overlooked; the SMC figures are clear about that. I suspect that we will look back at these years with a sense of national shame over not calculating properly the cost to families and individuals of being disabled, in terms of lost possibilities, the capital costs of equipment and the cost of support. These things have not been measured properly. When they are, we will be deeply ashamed.
Thirdly, I want to convey a sense of the great opportunity here for the Minister if she can bring these statistics into the centre of government policy-making. Stakeholders are on the side of change. I encourage the Minister to look at the fantastic YouGov report on what voters think of the statistics. The press coverage on launch was incredibly powerful. The winds of change are blowing in the Minister’s direction; I encourage her to set up her sails and make these changes as soon as possible.