Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Storey Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

With respect, everyone else has had an opportunity to speak, but no one from my party has, and I want to make some remarks. The House should draw a level of unity from the fact that, although a variety of solutions are provided by these amendments, common threads run between them: a common acceptance of the level of crisis that our young people face, and a common desire, I think, to provide greater levels of protection for our young people.

On the competing and well-argued cases for the amendments, I am more persuaded by Amendment 94A from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, which I believe is cleaner, clearer and bolder. Nevertheless, whichever amendment we settle on, I agree with others that the one thing we cannot afford to do as a House tonight is to prevaricate. I cannot put myself in the mind of the Government. Therefore, I cannot determine whether the proposed consultation is a sincere attempt to engage seriously with this issue or, as was suggested by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, a cynical device to get past the problems internally in the Commons.

There are clear problems with the consultation. First, it does not produce any guaranteed outcome. A lot of us are concerned that, over a prolonged period of time, the muscle of the big tech companies will adjust that to water down whatever comes forward. Secondly, it does not produce swift results. We do not know a timeframe that ultimately will lead to implementation. The longer we delay, the more harm is caused to children. Where possible, we should always be reluctant to ban and restrict but, when we look at the protection of children, we have to make an exception to that. The case for action now is overwhelming.

During the passage of the Online Safety Bill, one of the most moving and significant meetings that I attended was one hosted by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, where she brought in families of children who had died as a result of various online harms. There was a common thread for a lot of those families: they had become victims because of social media. Whether that was issues around self-harm, suicide, sexploitation, bullying or a range of other things, a major danger is out there.

I acknowledge that the gathering mental health tsunami among our young people did not start with social media, but it has been exacerbated by it, and we need to take action against it. Even below that level, we are faced with, as I have seen it put, a “zombification” of our young generation. No one is suggesting in this debate that any solution that we produce will entirely be a panacea or 100% watertight and effective in its nature. But, if we took that approach to its logical conclusion, as indicated by the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, we would simply have no restrictions on young people on any subject or harm. So we need to grasp the nettle.

In conclusion, there is a stark choice before us tonight. We can either embrace the clarion call of the overwhelming majority of parents on this issue and take bold and decisive action to protect our young people, or we can kick the can down the road and neglect our duty to those young people. I hope the House chooses the former tonight.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group. I will speak to my Amendments 108 and 110A, and briefly to Amendment 91 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, and the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I start by thanking the hundreds of thousands of mums, dads, grandparents, single parents, teachers, et cetera, who have kick-started this campaign. While politicians have not been able to get action, they have swung into action.

If noble Lords talk to any MP of any party in this Parliament, they will tell you that they receive hundreds of thousands of emails and letters. I was talking to our digital lead MP, Victoria Collins, and she told me that, in the last three days alone, she has received 1,500 pieces of paper about this. Why? It is because parents do not trust us to do anything. Of course, with the Online Safety Act, they were promised that we would see a new world, but when they look around they see that nothing has changed. Frighteningly, when I asked the Minister a few weeks ago how many companies have been fined or prosecuted for what they have put online, he did not know the answer. That does not fill us with confidence.

Creating a safer future for our children and grandchildren is at a critical crossroads. Our parents, teachers, experts and even young people themselves are calling for action. I hear from real teenagers talking about their experiences online. One teenager said:

“I look at my younger brother and I’m so worried about how much he seems addicted to screens, we have to do something”.


Another said:

“Help, I just can’t stop”.


When doctors discovered that smoking kills, and when research showed that seatbelts saved lives, we acted. Today presents an opportunity to take a similar life-saving action.

It is clear that everyone here is strongly committed to this end goal—to safeguarding children and protecting them from the risks of the online world. Parents and children are both telling us that they feel powerless in the face of platforms designed to maximise engagement at any cost. We see the evidence mounting in our schools, with rising rates of anxiety and depression among young people. Consultations that kick the can down the road are not enough when we face a public health crisis.

So the question before us is not whether or not we must act but how effectively and how quickly we can act. One approach, that of the the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is a blanket ban on social media for under-16s, as well as on many other areas of the internet. I fully support the intent of this approach. Again, we are all here in the name of children’s well-being and the decisive action that is needed. But, as we have heard, we have heard from over 42 charities and experts, including the Molly Rose Foundation, the NSPCC, the Internet Watch Foundation, the Centre for Protecting Women Online, and 5rights, and they all have major concerns about this approach. These are the experts—I am not an expert, noble Lords are not the experts, but they are and they deal with this every day, and yet they have concerns about this approach.

We can look to Australia and see why. When Australia banned social media for young people, it took an approach similar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, creating a specific list of prohibited platforms. What was the result? Within 24 hours of TikTok’s ban, the company launched a new platform under a different name, one not on the banned list. More fundamentally, this list-based approach ignores the broader digital landscape: the harms presented in online gaming, which the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, does nothing about; AI-generated content; and countless other platforms that fall outside these narrow definitions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

We must ensure that children are protected online and send a message to the Government that now is the time for action, not consultation. As Liberal Democrats, we know that children come before politics. We must work together for their safety and future.

I turn briefly to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Nash. I praise and thank the noble Lord for taking this initiative. He deserves a lot of thanks from this House. He has worked tirelessly to get a solution. I was concerned when he said that we had rushed out a counter-amendment. We have not rushed out a counter-amendment at all. Children’s charities came to us and expressed their concerns, and we wanted to ensure that we listened to what they said. We have tried to incorporate that in the amendment. We tried to work with the noble Lord, Lord Nash, to achieve an amendment that we could both support.

At the end of the day, as I said on my previous amendment, it is children who are important. We are not interested in playing yah-boo politics or trying to score points. We will support Lord Nash’s amendment because we understand, as the right reverend Prelate rightly noted, that something has to come back to this House on which we, as a House, can then work together.

I turn briefly to Amendment 110A.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Storey (LD)]

This amendment is in my name. We are on to Front-Bench speakers and I have spoken for only 10 minutes.

In Amendment 110A, we propose raising the age for processing personal data in the case of social networking services from 13 to 16. This amendment covers platforms where users create profiles, interact and share content. It would exclude educational platforms used in schools and universities for educational purposes, as well as health services such as NHS Digital platforms and crisis helplines that process data and provide care and support.

Raising the age is vital to the well-being of children in this country, who must navigate an increasingly digitalised world. Social networking services often use personal data for the purposes of delivering personalised content, such as targeted advertising and curated recommendations. Such things have been condemned by Ofsted, as they can have a substantial negative impact on children. Algorithm-driven content can keep children scrolling for hours, disrupting sleep patterns, physical activity and face-to-face social development. Targeted advertising can exploit children’s vulnerabilities, promoting an unrealistic body image and exposing them to age-inappropriate products, as highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass. Recommendation algorithms can create echo chambers that amplify harmful content. Children can be exposed to content such as extreme dieting advice and self-harm material at a developmental stage when they are particularly impressionable and cannot critically evaluate what they are being shown. This amendment is therefore key to children’s well-being.

The years between 13 and 16 represent a critical window of opportunity where children can be susceptible to the design features that social media platforms employ to maximise engagement. By allowing platforms to harvest and exploit the personal data of 13 year-olds, we are essentially permitting commercial entities to conduct behavioural manipulation on children at their most vulnerable. The mental health crisis among young people, with rising rates of anxiety, depression and eating disorders, cannot be divorced from the datafication of childhood and the attention economy that profits from it. My amendment is simple: the age for processing personal data in the case of social networking services should be raised, so as to provide children with three additional years of protection from commercial data exploitation during a critical period of their development.

Finally—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I was going to speak to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, but certain Members are heckling me. I will just say how important this amendment is and that I hope the House will support it.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, a good speech is a short speech.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, I have spent most of this debate rewriting my speech. I have tried hard to listen to what noble Lords have said. We have three options before us tonight: the Government option of a consultation; the Liberal Democrat option; and the option from my noble friend, Lord Nash, as it relates to social media.

Briefly, before I talk about the three options, I would like to say to my noble friend Lady Penn that, rather than being a warm-up act, she gave us a master class in how to present an amendment. She made a well-argued, practical case for her amendment, underlining the importance of shifting norms for very young children at the earliest possible stage and calling urgently for firm action, and timing on that action, from the Government. Like others, we look forward to the Minister’s reply.

To return to the group of amendments that deal with social media use, we have before us, as we have heard, an opportunity to end the harm that our children and grandchildren are experiencing as a result of the hours that they spend on there. I was going to talk about the merits of my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment, but I think others have done that extremely ably.

I will therefore turn to the key differences between my noble friend’s amendment and that tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. Between the fiercely critical comments by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about Ofcom struggling and critically undermining implementation and wider failures, and the comparison made by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, of Ofcom being to the tech companies as “Dixon of Dock Green” is to “Crocodile Dundee”, I think those noble Lords have done my job for me. The key element in the Liberal Democrat amendment is that we would give powers to Ofcom and the Children’s Commissioner to decide which apps are safe or not safe. Whether it is my noble friend Lady Harding, who may be in a slightly different place in this debate than I am, or many other noble Lords around the House, they have noted that Ofcom is struggling with the powers that it was given in the Online Safety Act. The noble Baroness, Lady Berger, put it extremely well. Do your Lordships want to give to a struggling organisation one of the most complicated jobs before us? I would suggest that we do not. It should of course advise the Children’s Commissioner and the Government, but it should not be responsible.

The second reason it should not be responsible is one of democracy. We have too many recent examples, of which your Lordships will be aware, where we have delegated incredibly important powers to unelected and relatively unaccountable officials, however competent they might be, and we should not do that again. Our democracy depends on our colleagues at the other end being given the chance to decide, and Parliament deciding, what is or is not appropriate for our children, taking advice from every expert that they can draw on, many of whom we have heard from this evening.

Thirdly—I was finding it hard to wait to the end to get to this point—the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, should be not mentioned anywhere near this endless reference to a “blunt, blanket ban”. I was so grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Berger, as I was about to read out proposed new subsection (5) of Amendment 94A from my noble friend and the noble Baroness. This would not be a blanket ban, and it is, if I may say so, irresponsible of noble Lords who kept asserting that and referring to it as such, even once my noble friend had clarified that it was not the case. Crucially, proposed new subsection (2)(b) would also give our Government time to learn both from some of the scientific work that is going on and from the Australian approach. Amendment 94B would add neither in terms of flexibility or future-proofing but would dilute democratic accountability, which we do at our peril.

Turning to the Government, I would say that now is the time for leadership on this issue. The proposed consultation and approach set out in yesterday’s Statement, with a government amendment at Third Reading, does not feel like leadership. We have heard tonight that we do not need another national conversation. The nation has spoken very clearly about its level of concern, and parents and children will not thank us for further delay. The Government argue that views are divided, and we have heard tonight that the children’s charities are split and bereaved parents are split. If we wait for consensus on this issue, the one thing I am confident of is that not a single one of us will still be in your Lordships’ House. As Martin Luther King wisely said,

“a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus”.

The Government need to get moulding, and fast, because we owe it to our children to act now to protect their childhood.