Draft Online Safety Super-Complaints (Eligibility and Procedural Matters) Regulations 2025

Paul Holmes Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 General Committees

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir John. I thank the Minister for that thorough explanation of the draft regulations. As she outlined, they establish the eligibility criteria and procedural framework for the super-complaints mechanism under the Online Safety Act 2023—a long-awaited and essential step forward in the effort to protect users, particularly children, in the digital space.

Protecting children was one of the top priorities of the last Government, which is why we introduced and passed the Act. Although we welcome the implementation of this mechanism, we must acknowledge that there is still a risk that we will fail our children. As Ian Russell has powerfully and heartbreakingly stated, the Government are “going backwards”. The super-complaints process that we are discussing is not about minor grievances; it is about systemic failures across services, or, in exceptional circumstances, failures within individual services, that put users, especially the most vulnerable, at real risk. These are serious matters, and deserve to be handled with the utmost care, scrutiny and understanding.

Progress is being made. We welcome the clarity on the eligibility criteria, which require that organisations bringing forward complaints must be independent from the services regulated under the Act. That is a sensible and important safeguard. Similarly, the decision to allow a shorter application process for organisations already deemed eligible is a pragmatic move that will avoid unnecessary bureaucracy. None the less, we must also ask hard questions.

Ofcom is already under considerable pressure to deliver its duties under the Online Safety Act, so it is right to ask whether it will be given the support it needs to manage the new mechanism effectively. Expanding the scope of complainants, as the Government appear to be doing, risks compounding the burden without necessarily improving the quality of complaints. That is a key point of divergence from the previous Government’s approach. We believed, and continue to believe, that the super-complaints process should focus on quality, not quantity. We must prioritise high-quality, evidence-based complaints from trusted organisations. Can the Minister assure the Committee that the £72.6 million allocated to online safety in 2025-26 is not just headline money, but is actually proportionate and sufficient to deal with the likely increase in the volume of super-complaints?

The framework around super-complaints matters. It is not just about the process; it is a test of whether we are serious about holding online services to account for systemic harms. Let us not fall into the trap of creating a mechanism that looks good on paper but fails in practice due to a lack of focused resources or political will. We owe it to the families who have suffered like the Russell family have to get this right, and we owe it to the children whom we promised to protect. I look forward to the Minister’s answers to those questions.