Digital Safety: Children

Lord Grade of Yarmouth Excerpts

Tuesday 9th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

My noble friend is right to highlight the high expectations we have for this to be rolled out. We have made it very clear that, if those high expectations for the rollout at scale of this nudity-detection technology for children’s devices does not happen, we will legislate. The Minister for Online Safety yesterday confirmed to the other place that he is working closely with the Home Office to draw up this legislation in parallel, so that we can act should that be necessary.

[Lord Grade of Yarmouth (Con)]

I declare my interest as a recently retired chairman of Ofcom. It is very easy to criticise the Online Safety Act and to criticise the regulator, and it is even easier to criticise the Government, but does the Minister agree with me that the force of the Online Safety Act and the work that Ofcom and indeed the Government have done in persuading tech companies to change their behaviour is not all negative? Indeed, this week, X voluntarily agreed to tighten up its procedures in respect of illegal hate and terror content, which Ofcom has scrutinised and agreed. So there are some successes. We are making some progress in a very difficult area.

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right: there has been progress in implementing the Online Safety Act since the illegal content code and the children’s code came out. As I mentioned, there have been 100 investigations into companies. There is also the very important aspect of the communication with the wider public, and indeed with tech companies, on what action is expected and at what speed.