Online Safety Bill

Debate between John Hayes and Damian Collins

Consideration of Lords amendments
Tuesday 12th September 2023 Commons Chamber

[Damian Collins]

The draft Bill was published in April 2021, so it is fantastic that we are now discussing its final stages after it has gone through its processes in the House of Lords. It went through pre-legislative scrutiny, then it was introduced here, committed to the Bill Committee, recommitted, came back to the House, went to the Lords and came back again. I do not think any Bill has had as much scrutiny and debate over such a long period of time as this one has had. Hon. Members have disagreed on it from time to time, but the spirit and motivation at every stage have never been political; it has been about trying to make the Bill the best it can possibly be. We have ended up with a process that has seen it get better through all its stages.

Picking up on the comments of the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and others, the question of ongoing scrutiny of the regime is an important one. In the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee—the Joint Committee that I chaired—there was a recommendation that there should be a post-legislative scrutiny Committee or a new Joint Committee, perhaps for a limited period. The pre-legislative scrutiny Committee benefited enormously from being a Committee of both Houses. Baroness Kidron has rightly been mentioned by Members today and she is watching us today from the Gallery. She is keeping her scrutiny of the passage of the Bill going from her position of advantage in the Gallery.

We have discussed a number of new technologies during the Bill’s passage that were not discussed at all on Second Reading because they were not live, including the metaverse and large language models. We are reassured that the Bill is futureproof, but we will not know until we come across such things. Ongoing scrutiny of the regime, the codes of practice and Ofcom’s risk registers is more than any one Select Committee can do. The Government have previously spoken favourably of the idea of post-legislative scrutiny, and it would be good if the Minister could say whether that is still under consideration.

[Sir John Hayes]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point, echoing the comments of Members on both sides of the House. He is absolutely right that, as well as the scale and character of internet harms, their dynamism is a feature that Governments must take seriously. The problem, it seems to me, is that the pace of technological change, in this area and in others, does not fit easily with the thoroughness of the democratic legislative process; we tend to want to do things at length, because we want to scrutinise them properly, and that takes time. How does my hon. Friend square that in his own mind, and what would he recommend to the Government?

[Damian Collins]

The length of the process we have gone through on this Bill is a good thing, because we have ended up with probably the most comprehensive legislation in the world. We have a regulator with more power, and more power to sanction, than anywhere else. It is important to get that right.

A lot of the regulation is principle-based. It is about the regulation of user-to-user services, whereby people share things with each other through an intermediary service. Technology will develop, but those principles will underpin a lot of it. There will be specific cases where we need to think about whether the regulatory oversight works in a metaverse environment in which we are dealing with harms created by speech that has no footprint. How do we monitor and scrutinise that?

One of the hardest challenges could be making sure that companies continue to use appropriate technology to identify and mitigate harms on their platforms. The problem we have had with the regime to date is that we have relied on self-reporting from the technology companies on what is or is not possible. Indeed, the debate about end-to-end encryption is another example. The companies are saying that, if they share too much data, there is a danger that it will break encryption, but they will not say what data they gather or how they use it. For example, they will not say how they identify illegal use of their platform. Can they see the messages that people have sent after they have sent them? They will not publicly acknowledge it, and they will not say what data they gather and what triggers they could use to intervene, but the regulator will now have the right to see them. That principle of accountability and the power of the regulator to scrutinise are the two things that make me confident that this will work, but we may need to make amendments because of new things that we have not yet thought about.