Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Caroline Voaden Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2026 Commons Chamber

The final harm is the chronic use of devices and the way that individual device use has filtered into all our children’s everyday lives.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

Would the hon. Lady agree that the film-style age rating system that the Liberal Democrats have come up with speaks to exactly what she is saying? An app that allows children access to strangers or is built with an addictive algorithm, for example, would have a different age rating than something that is absolutely safe and gated, like a game, which could be rated safe for younger children.

[Lola McEvoy]

I am interested in the idea of licensing functionalities and new developments before they come into children’s lives, which is not happening at the moment—at the moment it is happening after they have been used for a long time. We are age-analysing and risk-assessing them retrospectively, which seems very backwards to me.

I agree that we should have a licensing scheme for content that is designed for children, like CoComelon and some of the other content that we know is addictive for very young children. Such a scheme would obviously have to be fleshed out, with a proper consultation on publishing rights and with information on who is going to do the licensing. I feel very strongly that self-published is inappropriate for under-16s. I do not think that content that is not regulated, that has not gone through any supervision and that has no legislative or regulatory framework surrounding it should be allowed to be fed to our children in any way.

I will sum up by saying that one of the young people in my latest online safety forum said to me via an anonymous note—I told them all that they could send me an anonymous note if there was anything they did not want to say in front of their peers— “Don’t ban it, but if you do, make sure it works.” I thought that was brilliant. Young people are much savvier than we give them credit for.

I want to make it very clear that at the moment, Ofcom is yet to use its strongest powers. The Online Safety Act does not include AI. I am determined that whatever this Government decide to do, they must do it with the idea of effective implementation of the legislation. We owe it to the next generation and the generation currently using the digital world to get it right and to future-proof their right to a childhood. Because so many of them have been badly let down, we must make evergreen—