Online Safety Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 1st February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, like other contributors to the debate, I support the Bill, but that does not mean that I think that it is perfect; we must be aware of letting the best be the enemy of the good. I declare my interests as a trustee of Full Fact and the Public Interest News Foundation.

I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Hastings, referred to the Broadcasting Act 1996, because, during its passage as a Bill, I was fulfilling the role that the Minister is performing today. I remember that, before coming to address your Lordships, I looked at the draft speech that had been prepared and which described the Bill at length. It was incredibly boring, and I said, “No, I am not going to do that; I want to describe to the House what the world that the Bill will bring into effect will look like”. I told your Lordships that I was taking them into a world of science fiction. In fact, I may have misled your Lordships on that occasion, because I underestimated the impact of the technology that was evolving. Also, I do not think that anybody realised quite to the extent that we do now that you cannot disinvent technology: things have happened which are here for ever from here on out.

While technology has changed, sadly one thing has not changed: human wickedness. Rather, human wickedness has been innovative. The Government tell us that they are great believers in innovation, but I do not think that they believe in innovation in this context. History suggests, and the contemporary world corroborates, that countering wickedness and vice is never easy, particularly when it is complicated by issues of jurisdiction, geography and technology.

My view is that this simply cannot be done by primary law or, indeed, secondary legislation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, touched on, we need all kinds of soft law and codes of conduct to complement that. She was right that we have to move on from the kind of legislative approach we have now, which I call “stop and start”. We have a period of intense debate in Parliament about a piece of legislation and then, as has been heard this evening, it is all forgotten for five years—and then you find that the piece of legislation you passed does not really meet the problems of the day. We must find a way of passing what I like to describe as “living legislation”, so that it is possible, in an ongoing way, to allow those things to evolve in response to the problems that the world is presenting. It is not simply a matter of a cosy relationship between the Government, the regulator, media companies, pressure groups, charities and so on; Parliament must be involved in doing what is, after all, its real job: law-making. I think that the public, too, need to know what is going on.

If I am right in saying so, and I think I am, this kind of static approach to law-making cannot really be what is needed in circumstances of the kinds we are talking about now. Parliament, this House and the other place together, should somehow take the metaphorical bull by the horns and evolve ongoing procedures to complement the technological evolution of the internet, which changes every day—indeed, things will have changed during the duration of the very debate we are having. I dare say that the same is true elsewhere, including in other sectors about which I know very little. If we, as parliamentarians, do not grasp this particular nettle, the consequence will be that the citizens of this country will materially lose control over quite a lot of what surrounds their daily lives.