Online Safety Bill (Second sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsTuesday 24th May 2022
(3 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 May 2022 - (24 May 2022)
The Chair
Thank you very much. Ms Foreman, do you want to add anything to that? You do not have to.
Becky Foreman: I do not have anything to add.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Q
Richard Earley: There are quite a few different questions there, and I will try to address them as briefly as I can. On the point about harmful Facebook groups, if a Facebook group is dedicated to breaking any of our rules, we can remove that group, even if no harmful content has been posted in it. I understand that was raised in the context of breadcrumbing, so trying to infer harmful intent from innocuous content. We have teams trying to understand how bad actors circumvent our rules, and to prevent them from doing that. That is a core part of our work, and a core part of what the Bill needs to incentivise us to do. That is why we have rules in place to remove groups that are dedicated to breaking our rules, even if no harmful content is actually posted in them.
On the question you asked about transparency, the Bill does an admirable job of trying to balance different types of transparency. There are some kinds of transparency that we believe are meaningful and valid to give to users. I gave the example a moment ago of explaining why a piece of content was removed and which of our community standards it broke. There is other transparency that we think is best given in a more general sense. We have our transparency report, as I said, where we give the figures for how much content we remove, how much of it we find ourselves—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Earley: I completely agree. Apologies for hogging more time, but I think you have hit on an important point there, which is about sharing information with researchers. Last year, we gave data to support the publishing of more than 400 independent research projects, carried out along the lines you have described here. Just yesterday, we announced an expansion of what is called our Facebook open research tool, which expands academics’ ability to access data about advertising.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Earley: Going back to how the Bill works, when it comes to—
Barbara Keeley
No, I am not just asking about the Bill. Will you do that?
Richard Earley: We have not seen the Ofcom guidance on what those risk assessments should contain yet, so it is not possible to say. I think more transparency should always be the goal. If we can publish more information, we will do so.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katie O'Donovan: To begin with, I would pick up on the importance of transparency. We at Google and YouTube publish many reports on a quarterly or annual basis to help understand the actions we are taking. That ranges from everything on YouTube, where we publish by country the content we have taken down, why we have taken it down, how it was detected and the number of appeals. That is incredibly important information. It is good for researchers and others to have access to that.
We also do things around ads that we have removed and legal requests from different foreign Governments, which again has real validity. I think it is really important that Ofcom will have access to how we work through this—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katie O'Donovan: I do not want to gloss over the Ofcom point; I want to dwell on it for a second. In anticipation of this Bill, we were able to have conversations with Ofcom about how we work, the risks that we see and how our systems detect that. Hopefully, that is very helpful for Ofcom to understand how it will audit and regulate us, but it also informs how we need to think and improve our systems. I do think that is important.
We make a huge amount of training data available at Google. We publish a lot of shared APIs to help people understand what our data is doing. We are very open to publishing and working with academics.
It is difficult to give a broad statement without knowing the detail of what that data is. One thing I would say—it always sound a bit glib when people in my position say this—is that, in some cases, we do need to be limited in explaining exactly how our systems work to detect bad content. On YouTube, you have very clear community guidelines, which we know we have to publish, because people have a right to know what content is allowed and what is not, but we will find people who go right up to the line of that content very deliberately and carefully—they understand that, almost from a legal perspective. When it comes to fraudulent services and our ads, we have also seen people pivot the way that they attempt to defraud us. There needs to be some safe spaces to share that information. Ofcom is helpful for that too.
Kim Leadbeater
That is fine.
Professor Clare McGlynn: I know that there was a discussion this morning about age assurance, which obviously targets children’s access to pornography. I would emphasise that age assurance is not a panacea for the problems with pornography. We are so worried about age assurance only because of the content that is available online. The pornography industry is quite happy with age verification measures. It is a win-win for them: they get public credibility by saying they will adopt it; they can monetise it, because they are going to get more data—especially if they are encouraged to develop age verification measures, which of course they have been; that really is putting the fox in charge of the henhouse—and they know that it will be easily evaded.
One of the most recent surveys of young people in the UK was of 16 and 17-year-olds: 50% of them had used a VPN, which avoids age verification controls, and 25% more knew about that, so 75% of those older children knew how to evade age assurance. This is why the companies are quite happy—they are going to make money. It will stop some people stumbling across it, but it will not stop most older children accessing pornography. We need to focus on the content, and when we do that, we have to go beyond age assurance.
You have just heard Google talking about how it takes safety very seriously. Rape porn and incest porn are one click away on Google. They are freely and easily accessible. There are swathes of that material on Google. Twitter is hiding in plain sight, too. I know that you had a discussion about Twitter this morning. I, like many, thought, “Yes, I know there is porn on Twitter,” but I must confess that until doing some prep over the last few weeks, I did not know the nature of that porn. For example, “Kidnapped in the wood”; “Daddy’s little girl comes home from school; let’s now cheer her up”; “Raped behind the bin”—this is the material that is on Twitter. We know there is a problem with Pornhub, but this is what is on Twitter as well.
As the Minister mentioned this morning, Twitter says you have to be 13, and you have to be 18 to try to access much of this content, but you just put in whatever date of birth is necessary—it is that easy—and you can get all this material. It is freely and easily accessible. Those companies are hiding in plain sight in that sense. The age verification and age assurance provisions, and the safety duties, need to be toughened up.
To an extent, I think this will come down to the regulator. Is the regulator going to accept Google’s SafeSearch as satisfying the safety duties? I am not convinced, because of the easy accessibility of the rape and incest porn I have just talked about. I emphasise that incest porn is not classed as extreme pornography, so it is not a priority offence, but there are swathes of that material on Pornhub as well. In one of the studies that I did, we found that one in eight titles on the mainstream pornography sites described sexually violent material, and the incest material was the highest category in that. There is a lot of that around.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Professor Clare McGlynn: In many ways, it is going to be up to the regulator. Is the regulator going to deem that things such as SafeSearch, or Twitter’s current rules about sensitive information—which rely on the host to identify their material as sensitive—satisfy their obligations to minimise and mitigate the risk? That is, in essence, what it will all come down to.
Are they going to take the terms and conditions of Twitter, for example, at face value? Twitter’s terms and conditions do say that they do not want sexually violent material on there, and they even say that it is because they know it glorifies violence against women and girls, but this material is there and does not appear to get swiftly and easily taken down. Even when you try to block it—I tried to block some cartoon child sexual abuse images, which are easily available on there; you do not have to search for them very hard, it literally comes up when you search for porn—it brings you up five or six other options in case you want to report them as well, so you are viewing them as well. Just on the cartoon child sexual abuse images, before anyone asks, they are very clever, because they are just under the radar of what is actually a prohibited offence.
It is not necessarily that there is more that the Bill itself could do, although the code of practice would ensure that they have to think about these things more. They have to report on their transparency and their risk assessments: for example, what type of content are they taking down? Who is making the reports, and how many are they upholding? But it is then on the regulator as to what they are going to accept as acceptable, frankly.
Barbara Keeley
Do any other panellists want to add to that?
Janaya Walker: Just to draw together the questions about pornography and the question you asked about children, I wanted to highlight one of the things that came up earlier, which was the importance of media literacy. We share the view that that has been rolled back from earlier versions of the draft Bill.
There has also been a shift, in that the emphasis of the draft Bill was also talking about the impact of harm. That is really important when we are talking about violence against women and girls, and what is happening in the context of schools and relationship and sex education. Where some of these things like non-consensual image sharing take place, the Bill as currently drafted talks about media literacy and safe use of the service, rather than the impact of such material and really trying to point to the collective responsibility that everyone has as good digital citizens—in the language of Glitch—in terms of talking about online violence against women and girls. That is an area in which the Bill could be strengthened from the way it is currently drafted.
Jessica Eagelton: I completely agree with the media literacy point. In general, we see very low awareness of what tech abuse is. We surveyed some survivors and did some research last year—a public survey—and almost half of survivors told no one about the abuse they experienced online at the hands of their partner or former partner, and many of the survivors we interviewed did not understand what it was until they had come to Refuge and we had provided them with support. There is an aspect of that to the broader media literacy point as well: increasing awareness of what is and is not unacceptable behaviour online, and encouraging members of the public to report that and call it out when they see it.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Professor Clare McGlynn: Inevitably, it would have to work from any time that that requirement was put in place, in reality. That measure is being discussed in the Canadian Parliament at the moment—you might know that Pornhub’s parent company, MindGeek, is based in Canada, which is why they are doing a lot of work in that regard. The provision was also put forward by the European Parliament in its debates on the Digital Services Act. Of course, any of these measures are possible; we could put it into the Bill that that will be a requirement.
Another way of doing it, of course, would be for the regulator to say that one of the ways in which Pornhub, for example—or XVideos or xHamster—should ensure that they are fulfilling their safety duties is by ensuring the age and consent of those for whom videos are uploaded. The flipside of that is that we could also introduce an offence for uploading a video and falsely representing that the person in the video had given their consent to that. That would mirror offences in the Fraud Act 2006.
The idea is really about introducing some element of friction so that there is a break before images are uploaded. For example, with intimate image abuse, which we have already talked about, the revenge porn helpline reports that for over half of the cases of such abuse that it deals with, the images go on to porn websites. So those aspects are really important. It is not just about all porn videos; it is also about trying to reduce the distribution of non-consensual videos.
Nick Fletcher (Don Valley) (Con)
Q
I am concerned about VPNs. Will the Bill stop anyone accessing through VPNs? Is there anything we can do about that? I googled “VPNs” to find out what they were, and apparently there is a genuine need for them when using public networks, because it is safer. Costa Coffee suggests that people do so, for example. I do not know how we could work that.
You have obviously educated me, and probably some of my colleagues, about some of the sites that are available. I do not mix in circles where I would be exposed to that, but obviously children and young people do and there is no filter. If I did know about those things, I would probably not speak to my colleagues about it, because that would probably not be a good thing to do, but younger people might think it is quite funny to talk about. Do you think there is an education piece there for schools and parents? Should these platforms be saying to them, “Look, this is out there, even though you might not have heard of it—some MPs have not heard of it.” We ought to be doing something to protect children by telling parents what to look out for. Could there be something in the Bill to force them to do that? Do you think that would be a good idea? There is an awful lot there to answer—sorry.
Professor Clare McGlynn: On VPNs, I guess it is like so much technology: obviously it can be used for good, but it can also be used to evade regulations. My understanding is that individuals will be able to use a VPN to avoid age verification. On that point, I emphasise that in recent years Pornhub, at the same time as it was talking to the Government about developing age verification, was developing its own VPN app. At the same time it was saying, “Of course we will comply with your age verification rules.”
Don’t get me wrong: the age assurance provisions are important, because they will stop people stumbling across material, which is particularly important for the very youngest. In reality, 75% know about VPNs now, but once it becomes more widely known that this is how to evade it, I expect that all younger people will know how to do so. I do not think there is anything else you can do in the Bill, because you are not going to outlaw VPNs, for the reasons you identified—they are actually really important in some ways.
That is why the focus needs to be on content, because that is what we are actually concerned about. When you talk about media literacy and understanding, you are absolutely right, because we need to do more to educate all people, including young people—it does not just stop at age 18—about the nature of the pornography and the impact it can have. I guess that goes to the point about media literacy as well. It does also go to the point about fully and expertly resourcing sex and relationships education in school. Pornhub has its own sex education arm, but it is not the sex education arm that I think many of us would want to be encouraging. We need to be doing more in that regard.
The Chair
We also have Dr Rachel O’Connell, who is the CEO of TrustElevate. Good afternoon.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: Sure—thank you for the question. Business models play a pretty distinct role in the incentives of the companies. When we talk to people about Match Group and online dating, we try to point out a couple of really important things that differentiate what we do in the dating space from what many technology companies are doing in the social media space. One of those things is how we generate our revenue. The overwhelming majority of it is subscription-based, so we are focused not on time on platform or time on device, but on whether you are having a great experience, because if you are, you are going to come back and pay again, or you are going to continue your subscription with us. That is a really big differentiator, in terms of the business model and where incentives lie, because we want to make sure they have a great experience.
Secondly, we know we are helping people meet in real life. Again, if people are to have a great experience on our platforms, they are going to have to feel safe on them, so that becomes a really big focus for us.
Finally, we are more of a one-to-one platform, so people are not generally communicating to large groups, so that protects us from a lot of the other issues you see on some of these larger platforms. Ultimately, what that means is that, for our business to be successful, we really have to focus on safety. We have to make sure users come, have a good, safe experience, and we have to have tools for them to use and put in place to empower themselves so that they can be safe and have a great experience. Otherwise, they will not come back and tell their friends.
The last thing about our platforms is that ultimately, if they are successful, our users leave them because they are engaged in a relationship, get married or just decide they are done with dating all together—that happens on occasion, too. Ultimately, our goal is to make sure that people have that experience, so safety becomes a core part of what we do. Other platforms are more focused on eyeballs, advertising sales and attention—if it bleeds, it leads—but those things are just not part of the equation for us.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: We are very encouraged by the Bill. We think it allows for different codes of conduct or policy, as it relates to the various different types of businesses, based on the business models. That is exciting for us because we think that ultimately those things need to be taken into account. What are the drivers and the incentives in place for those businesses? Let us make sure that we have regulations in place that address those needs, based on the approaches of the businesses.
The Chair
Nima, would you like go next?
Nima Elmi: Thank you very much for inviting me along to this discussion. Building on what Jared said, currently the Bill is not very clear in terms of references to categorisations of services. It clusters together a number of very disparate platforms that have different platform designs, business models and corporate aims. Similarly to Match Group, our platform is focused much more on one-to-one communications and subscription-based business models. There is an important need for the Bill to acknowledge these different types of platforms and how they engage with users, and to ensure appropriate guidance from Ofcom on how they should be categorised, rather than clustering together a rather significant amount of companies that have very different business aims in in this space.
The Chair
Dr O’Connell, would you like to answer?
Dr Rachel O'Connell: Absolutely. I think those are really good points that you guys have raised. I would urge a little bit of caution around that though, because I think about Yellow Tinder, which was the Tinder for teens, which has been rebranded as Yubo. It transgresses: it is a social media platform; it enables livestreaming of teens to connect with each other; it is ultimately for dating. So there is a huge amount of risk. It is not a subscription-based service.
I get the industry drive to say, “Let’s differentiate and let’s have clarity”, but in a Bill, essentially the principles are supposed to be there. Then it is for the regulator, in my view, to say, at a granular level, that when you conduct a risk impact assessment, you understand whether the company has a subscription-based business model, so the risk is lower, and also if there is age checking to make sure those users are 18-plus. However, you must also consider that there are teen dating sites, which would definitely fall under the scope of this Bill and the provisions that it is trying to make to protect kids and to reduce the risk of harm.
While I think there is a need for clarity, I would urge caution. For the Bill to have some longevity, being that specific about the categorisations will have some potential unintended consequences, particularly as it relates to children and young people.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: There is a mention of age assurance in the Bill. There is an opportunity to clarify that a little further, and also to bring age verification services under the remit of the Bill, as they are serving and making sure that they are mitigating risk. There was a very clear outline by Elizabeth Denham when we were negotiating the Digital Economy Act in relation to age verification and adult content sites; she was very specific when she came to Committee and said it should be a third party conducting the checks. If you want to preserve privacy and security, it should be a third-party provider that runs the checks, rather than companies saying, “You know what? We’ll track everybody for the purposes of age verification.”
There needs to be a clear delineation, which currently in clause 50 is not very clear. I would recommend that that be looked at again and that some digital identity experts be brought into that discussion, so that there is a full appreciation. Currently, there is a lot of latitude for companies to develop their own services in-house for age verification, without, I think, a proper risk assessment of what that might mean for end users in terms of eroding their privacy.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: That means you have to track and analyse people’s activities and you are garnering a huge amount of data. If you are then handling people under the age of 13, under the Data Protection Act, you must obtain parental consent prior to processing data. By definition, you have to gather the data from parents. I have been working in this space for 25 years. I remember, in 2008, when the Attorneys General brought all the companies together to consider age verification as part of the internet safety technical task force, the arguments of industry—I was in industry at the time—were that it would be overly burdensome and a privacy risk. Looking back through history, industry has said that it does not want to do that. Now, there is an incentive to potentially do that, because you do not have to pay for a third party to do it, but what are the consequences for the erosion of privacy and so on?
I urge people to think carefully about that, in particular when it comes to children. It would require tracking children’s activities over time. We do not want our kids growing up in a surveillance society where they are being monitored like that from the get-go. The advantage of a third-party provider is that they can have a zero data model. They can run the checks without holding the data, so you are not creating a data lake. The parent or child provides information that can be hashed on the device and checked against data sources that are hashed, which means there is no knowledge. It is a zero data model.
The information resides on the user’s device, which is pretty cool. The checks are done, but there is no exposure and no potential for man-in-the-middle checks. The company then gets a token that says “This person is over 18”, or “This person is below 12. We have verified parental responsibility and that verified parent has given consent.” You are dealing with tokens that do not contain any personal information, which is a far better approach than companies developing things in-house.
Barbara Keeley
Q
The Chair
Q
Nima Elmi: Yes, I am. I have nothing to add.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Jared Sine: Sure. I would add a couple of thoughts. We run our own age verification scans, which we do through the traditional age gate but also through a number of other scans that we run.
Again, online dating platforms are a little different. We warn our users upfront that, as they are going to be meeting people in real life, there is a fine balance between safety and privacy, and we tend to lean a little more towards safety. We announce to our users that we are going to run message scans to make sure there is no inappropriate behaviour. In fact, one of the tools we have rolled out is called “Are you sure? Does this bother you?”, through which our AI looks at the message a user is planning to send and, if it is an inappropriate message, a flag will pop up that says, “Are you sure you want to send this?” Then, if they go ahead and send it, the person receiving it at the other end will get a pop-up that says, “This may not be something you want to see. Go ahead and click here if you want to.” If they open it, they then get another pop-up that asks “Does this bother you?” and, if it does, you can report the user immediately.
We think that is an important step to keep our platform safe. We make sure our users know that it is happening, so it is not under the table. However, we think there has to be a balance between safety and privacy, especially when we have users who are meeting in person. We have actually demonstrated on our platforms that this reduces harassment and behaviour that would otherwise be untoward or that you would not want on the platform.
We think that we have to be careful not to tie the hands of industry to be able to come up with technological solutions and advances that can work side by side with third-party tools and solutions. We have third-party ID verification tools that we use. If we identify or believe a user is under the age of 18, we push them through an ID verification process.
The other thing to remember, particularly as it relates to online dating, is that companies such as ours and Bumble have done the right thing by saying “18-plus only on our platforms”. There is no law that says that an online dating platform has to be 18-plus, but we think it is right thing to do. I am a father of five kids; I would not want kids on my platform. We are very vigilant in taking steps to make sure we are using the latest and greatest tools available to try to make sure that our platforms are safe.
Mrs Miller
Q
Dr Rachel O'Connell: I am the author of the technical standard PAS 1296, an age checking code of practice, which is becoming a global standard at the moment. We worked a lot with privacy and security and identity experts. It should have taken nine months, but it took a bit longer. There was a lot of thought that went into it. Those systems were developed to, as I just described, ensure a zero data, zero knowledge kind of model. What they do is enable those verifications to take place and reduce the requirement. There is a distinction between monitoring your systems, as was said earlier, for age verification purposes and abuse management. They are very different. You have to have abuse management systems. It is like saying that if you have a nightclub, you have to have bouncers. Of course you have to check things out. You need bouncers at the door. You cannot let people go into the venue, then afterwards say that you are spotting bad behaviour. You have to check at the door that they are the appropriate age to get into the venue.
Kirsty Blackman
Q
Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: It is very difficult. While I am strongly about protecting children from encountering perpetrators, I also recognise that children need to have freedoms and the ability to use the internet in the ways that they like. I think if that was implemented and it was 100% certain that no adult could pose as a 13-year-old and therefore interact with actual 13-year-olds, that would help, but I think it is tricky.
Susie Hargreaves: One of the things we need to be clear about, particularly where we see children groomed —we are seeing younger and younger children—is that we will not ever sort this just with technology; the education piece is huge. We are now seeing children as young as three in self-generated content, and we are seeing children in bedrooms and domestic settings being tricked, coerced and encouraged into engaging in very serious sexual activities, often using pornographic language. Actually, a whole education piece needs to happen. We can put filters and different technology in place, but remember that the IWF acts after the event—by the time we see this, the crime has been committed, the image has been shared and the child has already been abused. We need to bump up the education side, because parents, carers, teachers and children themselves have to be able to understand the dangers of being online and be supported to build their resilience online. They are definitely not to be blamed for things that happen online. From Rhiannon’s own story, how quickly it can happen, and how vulnerable children are at the moment—I don’t know.
Rhiannon-Faye McDonald: For those of you who don’t know, it happened very quickly to me, within the space of 24 hours, from the start of the conversation to the perpetrator coming to my bedroom and sexually assaulting me. I have heard other instances where it has happened much more quickly than that. It can escalate extremely quickly.
Just to add to Susie’s point about education, I strongly believe that education plays a huge part in this. However, we must be very careful in how we educate children, so that the focus is not on how to keep themselves safe, because puts the responsibility on them, which in turn increases the feelings of responsibility when things do go wrong. That increased feeling of responsibility makes it less likely that they will disclose that something has happened to them, because they feel that they will be blamed. It will decrease the chance that children will tell us that something has happened.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: We already work with the internet industry. They currently take our services and we work closely with them on things such as engineering support. They also pay for our hotline, which is how we find child sexual abuse. However, the difference it would make is that we hope then to be able to undertake work where we are directly working with them to understand the level of their reports and data within their organisations.
At the moment, we do not receive that information from them. It is very much that we work on behalf of the public and they take our services. However, if we were suddenly able to work directly with them—have information about the scale of the issue within their own organisations and work more directly on that— then that would help to feed into our work. It is a very iterative process; we are constantly developing the technology to deal with the current threats.
It would also help us by giving us more intelligence and by allowing us to share that information, on an aggregated basis, more widely. It would certainly also help us to understand that they are definitely tackling the problem. We do believe that they are tackling the problem, because it is not in their business interests not to, but it just gives a level of accountability and transparency that does not exist at the moment.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: At the moment, there is nothing on the face of the Bill on co-designation. We do think that child sexual abuse is different from other types of harm, and when you think about the huge number of harms, and the scale and complexity of the Bill, Ofcom has so much to work with.
We have been working with Ofcom for the past year to look at exactly what exactly our role would be. However, because we are the country’s experts on dealing with child sexual abuse material, because we have the relationships with the companies, and because we are an internationally renowned organisation, we are able to have that trusted relationship and then undertake a number of functions for Ofcom. We could help to undertake specific investigations, help update the code, or provide that interface between Ofcom and the companies where we undertake that work on their behalf.
We very much feel that we should be doing that. It is not about being self-serving, but about recognising the track record of the organisation and the fact that the relationships and technology are in place. We are already experts in this area, so we are able to work directly with those companies because we already work with them and they trust us. Basically, we have a memorandum of understanding with the CPS and the National Police Chiefs’ Council that protects our staff from prosecution but the companies all work with us on a voluntary basis. They already work with us, they trust our data, and we have that unique relationship with them.
We are able to provide that service to take the pressure off Ofcom because we are the experts in the field. We would like that clarified because we want this to be right for children from day one—you cannot get it wrong when dealing with child sexual abuse. We must not undo or undermine the work that has happened over the last 25 years.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Susie Hargreaves: There is uncertainty, because we do not know exactly what our relationship with Ofcom is going to be. We are having discussions and getting on very well, but we do not know anything about what the relationship will be or what the criteria and timetable for the relationship are. We have been working on this for nearly five years. We have analysts who work every single day looking at child sexual abuse; we have 70 members of staff, and about half of them look at child sexual abuse every day. They are dealing with some of the worse material imaginable, they are already in a highly stressful situation and they have clear welfare needs; uncertainty does not help. What we are looking for is certainty and clarity that child sexual abuse is so important that it is included on the face of the Bill, and that should include co-designation.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Ellen Judson: At the moment, no. The rights that are discussed in the Bill at the minute are quite limited: primarily, it is about freedom of expression and privacy, and the way that protections around privacy have been drafted is less strong than for those around freedom of expression. Picking up on the question about setting precedents, if we have a Bill that is likely to lead to more content moderation and things like age verification and user identity verification, and if we do not have strong protections for privacy and anonymity online, we are absolutely setting a bad precedent. We would want to see much more integration with existing human rights legislation in the Bill.
Kyle Taylor: All I would add is that if you look at the exception for content of democratic importance, and the idea of “active political issue”, right now, conversion therapy for trans people—that has been described by UN experts as torture—is an active political issue. Currently, the human rights of trans people are effectively set aside because we are actively debating their lives. That is another example of how minority and marginalised people can be negatively impacted by this Bill if it is not more human rights-centred.
Chris Philp
Q
Ellen Judson: I accept that that is what the Bill currently says. Our point was thinking about how it will be implemented in practice. If platforms are expected to prove to a regulator that they are taking certain steps to protect content of democratic importance—in the explanatory notes, that is content related to Government policy and political parties—and they are expected to prove that they are taking a special consideration of journalistic content, the most straightforward way for them to do that will be in relation to journalists and politicians. Given that it is such a broad category and definition, that seems to be the most likely effect of the regime.
Kyle Taylor: It is potentially—
Online Safety Bill (First sitting)
Baroness Keeley ExcerptsTuesday 24th May 2022
(3 years, 8 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Online Safety Act 2023 View all Online Safety Act 2023 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 24 May 2022 - (24 May 2022)
Mrs Miller
Q
Kevin Bakhurst: One area that is very important and which is in the Bill and one of our responsibilities is to make sure there is a sufficiently robust and reactive complaints process from the platforms—one that people feel they can complain to and be heard—and an appeals process. We feel that that is in the Bill. We already receive complaints at Ofcom from people who have issues about platforms and who have gone to the platforms but do not feel their complaints have been properly dealt with or recognised. That is within the video-sharing platform regime. Those individual complaints, although we are not going to be very specific in looking at individual pieces of material per se, are very useful to alert us where there are issues around particular types of offence or harm that the platforms are not seen to be dealing with properly. It will be a really important part of the regime to make sure that platforms provide a complaints process that is easy to navigate and that people can use quite quickly and accessibly.
Richard Wronka: An additional point I would make, building on that, is that this is a really complex ecosystem. We understand that and have spent a lot of the last two or three years trying to get to grips with that complex ecosystem and building relationships with other participants in the ecosystem. It brings in law enforcement, other regulators, and organisations that support victims of crime or online abuse. We will need to find effective ways to work with those organisations. Ultimately, we are a regulator, so there is a limit to what we can do. It is important that those other organisations are able to operate effectively, but that is perhaps slightly outside our role.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Q
Richard Wronka: I think our starting point here is that we think transparency is a really important principle within the regime—a fundamental principle. There are specific provisions in the Bill that speak to that, but more generally we are looking for this regime to usher in a new era of transparency across the tech sector, so that users and other participants in this process can be clearer about what platforms are doing at the moment, how effective that is and what more might be done in the future. That is something that will be a guiding principle for us as we pick up regulation.
Specifically, the Bill provides for transparency reports. Not all services in scope will need to provide transparency reports, but category 1 and 2 services will be required to produce annual transparency reports. We think that is really important. At the moment, risk assessments are not intended to be published—that is not provided for in the Bill—but the transparency reports will show the effectiveness of the systems and processes that those platforms have put in place.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Wronka: I think what is important for us as a regulator is that we are able to access those risk assessments; and for the biggest services, the category 1 services, we would be expecting to do that routinely through a supervisory approach. We might even do that proactively, or where services have come to us for dialogue around those—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Richard Wronka: Some services may wish to publish the risk assessments. There is nothing in the Bill or in our regulated approach that would prevent that. At the moment, I do not see a requirement in the Bill to do that. Some services may have concerns about the level of confidential information in there. The important point for us is that we have access to those risk assessments.
Kevin Bakhurst: Picking up on the risk assessments, it is a tricky question because we would expect those assessments to be very comprehensive and to deal with issues such as how algorithms function, and so on. There is a balance between transparency, which, as Richard says, we will drive across the regime—to address information that can harm, or people who are trying to behave badly online or to game the system—and what the regulator needs in practical terms. I am sure the platforms will be able to talk to you more about that.
Barbara Keeley
Q
There is also a question of timing. The reports suggested that the new hub and jobs will come into play in 2025. I am sure that everyone here wants to see the Bill taking effect sooner. Ofcom will need to do a lot of reviews and reporting in the first year after the Bill receives Royal Assent. How will that be possible if people are not in post until 2025?
Kevin Bakhurst: They are both big questions. I will take the first part and maybe Richard can take the second one about the timing. On the resourcing, it is important to say publicly that we feel strongly that, very unusually, we have had funding from Government to prepare for this regime. I know how unusual that is; I was at a meeting with the European regulators last week, and we are almost unique in that we have had funding and in the level of funding that we have had.
The funding has meant that we are already well advanced in our preparations. We have a team of around 150 people working on online safety across the organisation. A number are in Manchester, but some are in London or in our other offices around the UK. It is important to say that that funding has helped us to get off to a really strong start in recruiting people across the piece—not just policy people. Importantly, we have set up a new digital function within Ofcom and recruited a new chief technology officer, who came from Amazon Alexa, to head up that function.
The funding has allowed us to really push hard into this space, which is not easy, and to recruit some of the skills we feel we need to deliver this regime as effectively and rapidly as possible. I know that resourcing is not a matter within the Bill; it is a separate Treasury matter. Going forward though, we feel that, in the plans, we have sufficient resourcing to deliver what we are being asked to deliver. The team will probably double in size by the time we actually go live with the regime. It is a significant number of people.
Some significant new duties have been added in, such as fraudulent advertising, which we need to think carefully about. That is an important priority for us. It requires a different skillset. It was not in the original funding plan. If there are significant changes to the Bill, it is important that we remain alive to having the right people and the right number of people in place while trying to deliver with maximum efficiency. Do you want to talk about timing, Richard?
Richard Wronka: All I would add to that, Kevin, is that we are looking to front-load our recruitment so that we are ready to deliver on the Bill’s requirements as quickly as possible once it receives Royal Assent and our powers commence. That is the driving motivation for us. In many cases, that means recruiting people right now, in addition to the people we have already recruited to help with this.
Clearly there is a bit of a gating process for the Bill, so we will need a settled legislative framework and settled priority areas before we can get on with the consultation process. We will look to run that consultation process as swiftly as possible once we have those powers in place. We know that some stakeholders are very keen to see the Bill in place and others are less enthusiastic, so we need to run a robust process that will stand the test of time.
The Bill itself points us towards a phased process. We think that illegal content, thanks to the introduction of priority illegal content in the Bill, with those priority areas, is the area on which we can make the quickest progress as soon as the Bill achieved Royal Assent.
The Chair
Thank you. I intend to bring in the Minister at about 10 o’clock. Kirsty Blackman, Kim Leadbeater and Dean Russell have indicated that they wish to ask questions, so let us try to keep to time.
The Chair
And on the screen—[Interruption.] Uh-oh, it has frozen. We will have to come back to that. We will take evidence from the witnesses in the room until we have sorted out the problem with the screen.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Andy Burrows: Thank you for the question. We think that more could be built into the Bill to ensure that children’s needs and voices can be fed into the regime.
One of the things that the NSPCC would particularly like to see is provision for statutory user advocacy arrangements, drawing on the examples that we see in multiple other regulated sectors, where we have a model by which the levy on the firms that will cover the costs of the direct regulation also provides for funded user advocacy arrangements that can serve as a source of expertise, setting out children’s needs and experiences.
A comparison here would be the role that Citizens Advice plays in the energy and postal markets as the user voice and champion. We think that would be really important in bolstering the regulatory settlement. That can also help to provide an early warning function—particularly in a sector that is characterised by very rapid technological and market change—to identify new and emerging harms, and bolster and support the regulator in that activity. That, for us, feels like a crucial part of this jigsaw.
Given the very welcome systemic approach of the regime, that early warning function is particularly important, because there is the potential that if harms cannot be identified quickly, we will see a lag where whole regulatory cycles are missed. User advocacy can help to plug that gap, meaning that harms are identified at an earlier stage, and then the positive design of the process, with the risk profiles and company risk assessments, means that those harms can be built into that particular cycle.
Dame Rachel de Souza: I was very pleased when the Government asked me, when I came into the role, to look at what more could be done to keep children safe online and to make sure that their voices went right through the passage of the Bill. I am committed to doing that. Obviously, as Children’s Commissioner, my role is to elevate children’s voices. I was really pleased to convene a large number of charities, internet safety organisations and violence against women and girls experts in a joint briefing to MPs to try to get children’s voices over.
I worry that the Bill does not do enough to respond to individual cases of abuse and that it needs to do more to understand issues and concerns directly from children. Children should not have to exhaust the platforms’ ineffective complaints routes, which can take days, weeks or even months. I have just conducted a survey of 2,000 children and asked them about their experiences in the past month. Of those 2,000 children, 50% had seen harmful content and 40% had tried to get content about themselves removed and had not succeeded. For me, there is something really important about listening to children and talking their complaints into account. I know you have a busy day, but that is the key point that I want to get across.
The Chair
Lynn Perry is back on the screen—welcome. Would you like to introduce yourself for the record and then answer the question? [Interruption.] Oh, she has gone again. Apparently the problem is at Lynn’s end, so we will just have to live with it; there is nothing we can do on this side.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Andy Burrows: The systemic regime is important. That will help to ensure that the regime can be future-proofed; clearly, it is important that we are not introducing a set of proposals and then casting them in aspic. But there are ways that the Bill could be more strongly future-proofed, and that links to ensuring that the regime can effectively map on to the dynamics of the child sexual abuse problem in particular.
Let me give a couple of examples of where we think the Bill could be bolstered. One is around placing a duty on companies to consider the cross-platform nature of harm when performing their risk assessment functions, and having a broad, overarching duty to ask companies to work together to tackle the child sexual abuse threat. That is very important in terms of the current dynamics of the problem. We see, for example, very well-established grooming pathways, where abusers will look to exploit the design features of open social networks, such as on Instagram or Snapchat, before moving children and abuse on to perhaps live-streaming sites or encrypted messaging sites.
The cross-platform nature of the threat is only going to intensify in the years ahead as we start to look towards the metaverse, for example. It is clear that the metaverse will be built on the basis of being cross-platform and interdependent in nature. We can also see the potential for unintended consequences from other regulatory regimes. For example, the Digital Markets Act recently passed by the EU has provisions for interoperability. That effectively means that if I wanted to send you a message on platform A, you could receive it on platform B. There is a potential unintended consequence there that needs to be mitigated; we need to ensure that there is a responsibility to address the harm potential that could come from more interoperable services.
This is a significant area where the Bill really can be bolstered to address the current dynamics of the problem and ensure that legislation is as effective as it possibly can be. Looking to the medium to long term, it is crucial to ensure that we have arrangements that are commensurate to the changing nature of technology and the threats that will emerge from that.
Dame Rachel de Souza: A simple answer from me: of course we cannot future-proof it completely, because of the changing nature of online harms and technology. I talked to a large number of 16 to 21-year-olds about what they wished their parents had known about technology and what they had needed to keep them safe, and they listed a range of things. No. 1 was age assurance—they absolutely wanted good age assurance.
However, the list of harms and things they were coming across—cyber-flashing and all this—is very much set in time. It is really important that we deal with those things, but they are going to evolve and change. That is why we have to build in really good cross-platform work, which we have been talking about. We need these tech companies to work together to be able to stay live to the issues. We also need to make sure that we build in proper advocacy and listen to children and deal with the issues that come up, and that the Bill is flexible enough to be able to grow in that way. Any list is going to get timed out. We need to recognise that these harms are there and that they will change.
The Chair
I will bring in Kim Leadbeater and then Maria Miller and Kirsty Blackman, but I will definitely bring in the Minister at 10.45 am.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Dame Rachel de Souza: Baroness Kidron has done some fantastic work on this, and I really support her work. I want to tell you why. I am a former headteacher—I worked for 30 years in schools as a teacher and headteacher. Only in the last five or six years did I start seeing suicides of children and teenagers; I did not see them before. In the year just before I came to be Children’s Commissioner, there was a case of a year 11 girl from a vulnerable family who had a relationship with a boy, and it went all over the social media sites. She looked up self-harm material, went out to the woods and killed herself. She left a note that basically said, “So there. Look what you’ve done.”
It was just horrendous, having to pick up the family and the community of children around her, and seeing the long-term effects of it on her siblings. We did not see things like that before. I am fully supportive of Baroness Kidron and 5Rights campaigning on this issue. It is shocking to read about the enormous waiting and wrangling that parents must go through just to get their children’s information. It is absolutely shocking. I think that is enough from me.
Andy Burrows: I absolutely agree. One of the things we see at the NSPCC is the impact on parents and families in these situations. I think of Ian Russell, whose daughter Molly took her own life, and the extraordinarily protracted process it has taken to get companies to hand over her information. I think of the anguish and heartbreak that comes with this process. The Bill is a fantastic mechanism to be able to redress the balance in terms of children and families, and we would strongly support the amendments around giving parents access to that data, to ensure that this is not the protracted process that it currently all too often is.
Barbara Keeley
Just quickly, do coroners have sufficient powers? Should they have more powers to access digital data after the death of a child?
Andy Burrows: We can see what a protracted process it has been. There have been improvements to the process. It is currently a very lengthy process because of the mutual legal assistance treaty arrangements—MLAT, as they are known—by which injunctions have to be sought to get data from US companies. It has taken determination from some coroners to pursue cases, very often going up against challenges. It is an area where we think the arrangements could certainly be streamlined and simplified. The balance here should shift toward giving parents and families access to the data, so that the process can be gone through quickly and everything can be done to ease the heartbreak for families having to go through those incredibly traumatic situations.
Alex Davies-Jones
Q
Dame Rachel de Souza: There is no silver bullet. This is now a huge societal issue and I think that some of the things that I would want to say would be about ensuring that we have in our educational arsenal, if you like, a curriculum that has a really strong digital media literacy element. To that end, the Secretary of State for Education has just asked me to review how online harms and digital literacy are taught in schools—reviewing not the curriculum, but how good the teaching is and what children think about how the subject has been taught, and obviously what parents think, too.
I would absolutely like to see the tech companies putting some significant funding into supporting education of this kind; it is exactly the kind of thing that they should be working together to provide. So we need to look at this issue from many aspects, not least education.
Obviously, in a dream world I would like really good and strong digital media literacy in the Bill, but actually it is all our responsibility. I know from my conversations with Nadhim Zahawi that he is very keen that this subject is taught through the national curriculum, and very strongly.
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: At present, we have a range of risk assessment processes. We have a risk committee of the board. We do risk assessments when we make a change about—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: At present, we do not have a specific individual designated to do the children’s risk assessment. The key question is how much does Ofcom’s guidance on risk assessments—once we see it—intersect with our current processes versus changes we would need to make to our risk assessment processes?
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: I would have to go away and review the Bill. I do not know whether a specific level is set out in the Bill, but we would want to engage with the regulation and requirements set for companies such as Twitter. However it would be expected that is what we would—
Barbara Keeley
Q
Katy Minshall: Already all the biggest decisions that we make as a company are signed off at the most senior level. We report to our chief executive, Parag Agrawal, and then to the board. As I say, there is a risk committee of the board, so I expect that we would continue to make those decisions at the highest level.
Ben Bradley: It is broadly the same from a TikTok perspective. Safety is a priority for every member of the team, regardless of whether they are in a specific trust and safety function. In terms of risk assessments, we will see from the detail of the Bill at what level they need to be signed off, but our CEO has been clear in interviews that trust and safety is a priority for him and everyone at TikTok, so it would be something to which we are all committed.
Oral Answers to Questions
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(3 years, 10 months ago)
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Julia Lopez
That is not the message that I have heard, but I will be meeting UK Music representatives on Monday; if they share the concerns that the hon. Lady has just expressed, I will be happy to discuss those with them. The Secretary of State and I continue to do a lot of work with ministerial counterparts in other countries and across the Government on this issue. We are alive to the sector’s concerns.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
In an astonishing admission, Lord Frost, the Government’s former Brexit negotiator, recently said of musicians touring to the EU:
“There is a whole set of problems here that is making life difficult on both sides”.
Big problems include the road haulage limits, which mean that UK-based vehicles cannot make more than two laden stops in the EU, which adds a £30,000 cost to each tour. Cabotage limits can add up to £16,000 a day. Those are substantial burdens, and most tours of UK orchestras are to Europe: such tours represent 12% of their earned income. Lord Frost now believes that the Government should change and move to a more pragmatic position to ease touring. Does the Minister agree?
Julia Lopez
I thank the hon. Lady for her interest in this issue. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is not responsible for the overall negotiating position, but as I say we have been in close discussions with other Departments. We have made progress on some of the specific issues raised with us, such as splitter vans, and we have also provided a lot of support to the wider events sector. We have made sure that carnets will not be required and we have been doing a whole bunch of other stuff.
As I said, I am meeting UK Music representatives on Monday to discuss the remaining outstanding issues, but we have also had a number of conversations with EU member states. In the vast majority of those, people no longer require permits or visas to carry out this kind of work.
Events Research Programme
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Nigel Huddleston
I thank my hon. Friend for his comments and I agree with him completely. As I said, a huge amount of work and effort has been done by event organisers, as well as by those involved in the events research programme, including the chairs, Nick Hytner and David Ross, for whom we have extreme appreciation. Such events are very valuable and are lifting our spirits in the way described by my hon. Friend.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
The pilot scheme means that, although some events are going ahead at full capacity, other events cannot continue at all. Contradictions in Government guidance mean that amateur choirs cannot even rehearse indoors with protective measures in place, despite other non-professional activities, such as amateur orchestras, brass bands, theatre and grassroots team sports being allowed indoors. Can the Minister explain why choirs have been singled out from other similar risk activities? Will the Government update guidance to allow non-professional choirs to resume their valuable activities, or do they have to apply to be pilot events to be allowed to rehearse and perform?
Nigel Huddleston
The hon. Lady is correct in highlighting the difference between professional and non-professional choirs. In accordance with performing arts guidance, non-professional groups of up to six people can now sing indoors. They can also perform or rehearse in groups of up to 30 outdoors, or in multiple groups of 30 outdoors, provided that the groups are kept separate. Those limits do not apply to commercial activities. We all know from our mail bags that this is an area of importance to our constituents, and we want to get choirs up and running again in all formats as soon as possible.
Oral Answers to Questions
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Matt Warman
I do not want to preannounce anything that is in Project Gigabit, but I can certainly say to my hon. Friend that the project he mentions is on the radar of DCMS officials, and I look forward to continuing those conversations so that we can deliver the improvements that I know are so valuable to his constituents.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
The Minister for Digital and Culture (Caroline Dinenage)
The Government recognise the importance of international touring for our creative and cultural sectors. The DCMS-led working group on creative and cultural touring, which involves sector representatives and other key Government Departments, is working through the issues to ensure that the sector gets both the clarity and the support that it needs.
Barbara Keeley [V]
Musicians are eager to get back to work when restrictions allow, but for those who would normally tour Europe that will require a mountain of paperwork to be negotiated both for themselves and their instruments. This is increasingly urgent as we approach the lifting of lockdown restrictions, with little time left to negotiate bilateral agreements. Can the Minister confirm that Ministers are talking to their EU counterparts about securing visa waivers to allow our musicians to tour Europe freely when restrictions are lifted?
Caroline Dinenage
The hon. Lady is right: the end of freedom of movement has inevitably had some consequences for touring artists. We want our cultural and creative professionals to be able to work easily across Europe, in the same way that EU creatives are able to work flexibly in the UK, and we are working very closely with the sector to consider all the available options. I have said right from the start that our door will always be open if the EU is willing to reconsider its position, but we are also working with colleagues across Government and members of our working group on our engagement with different member states. I met FCDO colleagues only yesterday once again to discuss this, and we want to ensure that touring can resume as easy as possible for UK artists.
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
This Budget may come to be remembered for what it did not mention rather than for what it did contain. The health and care world was reported to be stunned that the NHS was mentioned only once and social care not at all in the Chancellor’s speech, and this despite the fact that we are still in the grip of a deep crisis in health and social care due to this Government’s failure to get covid-19 under control. The UK has experienced higher rates of infections, hospitalisations and deaths from the virus than other countries. The care sector was rocked by more than 30,000 deaths, and a fragile sector has now become even more fragile. Turnover in care staff is at 40% and there are still 100,000 care staff vacancies. The president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services has warned that the care system risks “catastrophic failure” without urgent changes. During the pandemic, the number of people with unmet need is likely to have risen to 1.9 million. The £1 billion extra to councils for social care and the reliance on councils raising the social care precept by 3% are both inadequate sticking plasters. We need a recovery plan that gets social care functioning properly by putting it on a par with the NHS.
After a year of incredibly hard work spent fighting this virus, there was no mention of a recovery plan for the NHS, and we learned just a few days ago of the proposal for only a 1% pay rise for NHS staff who have sacrificed so much during this pandemic. My constituents are angry and upset at this derisory pay proposal, because last year Conservative MPs promised, budgeted for and voted into law a 2.1% pay rise for NHS staff.
Many people around the country were excluded from support in this Budget. The 2.4 million people who have been excluded from financial support are not helped by Budget measures that apply to only some of the self-employed. The Chancellor failed again to put in the financial support needed to help people to self-isolate, meaning that they still have to choose between their job and their health. Our schools are left with nothing for additional spending related to covid. Our local councils are being forced into a 5% council tax increase after a decade of cuts that have seen £211 million cut from budgets in my local area of Salford.
To add insult to injury, the Chancellor and the Communities Secretary have come up with a priority list for the levelling-up fund that puts their constituencies into priority 1 for investment but leaves Salford and other more deprived areas lower down the queue. This was not the Budget the country needed, with its triple blow of tax rises, a pay freeze and a cut to universal credit later. Worst of all, while Government Ministers are happy to waste billions on test and trace that fails to deliver and to give contracts to their cronies, they are failing the key worker heroes of the NHS and social care.
Covid-19: Cultural and Entertainment Sectors
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(4 years, 11 months ago)
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Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
In the past year, we have seen many hundreds of thousands of people out of work, with many of them no longer having jobs to return to. We have seen 123,000 people tragically die due to covid-19. While today we are debating the economic impacts of the virus, we cannot forget that lockdowns and social distancing were the correct thing to do to prevent this tragic death toll from being even higher. Over the coming months, we need to continue to protect lives, but it is not a zero-sum game where we need to abandon public health precautions in order to reopen the economy. We need an approach that protects livelihoods while also saving lives.
The need for support to protect livelihoods is particularly acute in the cultural and entertainment industries, which have had to close their doors for much of the past year. Even the most optimistic plans for reopening mean that they will not be back at full capacity until towards the end of this year or later. In the absence of support, many organisations have turned to the internet to keep working. Livestream performances, ranging from classical music to opera and plays, have been an invaluable lifeline not only to performers but to people staying at home during lockdown.
Bizarrely, orchestras putting on livestream performances are not eligible for the tax relief they would receive if they had attendees in person. The Government’s guidance on orchestra tax relief says that it can only be claimed if there are some attendees in person, but that is clearly impossible at a time when audiences cannot attend. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will address that in the Budget, to ensure that orchestras get the financial support they need when they livestream without an audience present in person? While I am talking about live music, we cannot let the hon. Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) get away with claiming the best brass band in the world, when we have the award-winning Eccles Borough Band and the Cadishead Public Band.
In the Budget tomorrow, we need support for the people who work in the cultural industries. I have heard from many of my constituents who work in MediaCity in Salford and have found themselves excluded from the Government’s financial support so far. The nature of their work means that many of them are on a mix of self-employed work and short-term pay-as-you-earn contracts, and they do not get support through the self-employment income support scheme. Unless they were under contract at the end of March last year, they did not get furlough support. A year into this crisis, they still have not had any support, and it is worse for people at the start of their careers, when they have not had time to build up any reserves.
Can the Minister tell us whether the Budget tomorrow will finally contain support for those people who have been excluded so far, so that they can get through the remaining months of this pandemic without facing further financial hardship? The Minister may say that he cannot reveal measures ahead of the Budget, but that rule seems to have been comprehensively abandoned.
UK Musicians: EU Visa Arrangements
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Caroline Dinenage
I thank my hon. Friend for that question. The negotiating team did negotiate an opportunity to come back and review this in the years ahead, so the light at the end of the tunnel is not entirely switched off. But there is quite a lot we can do between European nation states to try to make things a lot easier and straightforward. She is right to highlight that this impacts EU artists as much as it does those from the UK. We want to make their lives as easy and as straightforward as possible.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
As well as issues with visas or work permits, UK musicians working in EU countries risk being double-charged their social security contributions if they work in a country that has opted out of the social security co-ordination under the detached worker rules. Can the Minister set out what the Government are doing to avoid that and ensure that UK musicians do not face that financial penalty while they are working in the EU?
Caroline Dinenage
I am really pleased that the hon. Lady has given me the opportunity to answer that question. The protocol on social security co-ordination secured in the agreement ensures that UK nationals and EU citizens have a range of social security cover when working and living in the EU and the UK. It also supports business and trade by ensuring that cross-border workers and their employers are only liable to pay social security contributions in one state at a time. That is, obviously, very beneficial in particular to smaller cultural organisations that may not have the required cash flow to finance any duplicate payments. Member states have until 31 January to sign up to the detached worker provision. The UK continues to engage with our European counterparts via our global and international stakeholder network to encourage countries to sign up to that provision ahead of the deadline.
Professional and Amateur Sport: Government Support
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Nigel Huddleston
I know my hon. Friend is a huge fan of sports and we have talked about this issue. He is absolutely right that many clubs went to enormous efforts to put social distancing, hygiene and other measures in place in anticipation of opening. Those efforts will not be wasted. We want to start again as soon as possible. We did not want to stop clubs from opening; we had to in the face of the increase in infections. We want to get back to business as soon as possible.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
The AJ Bell stadium in my constituency is home to both Sale Sharks rugby union club and Salford Red Devils rugby league club. Sale Sharks is the only premiership rugby club in the north-west. It has a women’s team. It employs over 100 people, with hundreds more local jobs reliant on its matchdays. Covid-19 poses an existential threat to clubs like Sale Sharks, to their women’s team and to premiership rugby. Will the Minister therefore seek a targeted funding package to support them as a matter of urgency, and continue with the extra support to rugby league clubs like Salford Reds?
Nigel Huddleston
The recognition of the important role that clubs play in their local community, way beyond just the sport, is precisely why we are looking at these measures and the broader economic multiplier impact. Again, I am afraid that I cannot give the hon. Lady details today, but her comments are understood and received.
Arts, Culture and Heritage: Support Package
Baroness Keeley Excerpts(5 years, 7 months ago)
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Caroline Dinenage
I love an agricultural show. Sadly, they fall under the remit of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport we are doing everything we can to support rural cultural establishments.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab) [V]
I want to raise the survival of orchestras. The support package for organisations is welcome, but as we keep hearing it will not help thousands of freelancers—the musicians who are not eligible for Government support schemes. Other vital measures are reforms to orchestra tax relief and gift aid. To help orchestras survive and rebuild, will the Government look again at support for freelance musicians, and at the vital reforms to orchestra tax relief and gift aid?
Caroline Dinenage
I have met with orchestras almost weekly over the past few weeks as we try to navigate our way through some of the particular challenges that they are experiencing. We will certainly look at some of the hon. Lady’s suggestions.