Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps she is taking to ensure that the Online Safety Bill will result in a measurable improvement in the protection of children from online pornography.

The strongest protections in the draft Online Safety Bill are for children. Services in scope of the legislation which are likely to be accessed by children will need to take steps to prevent children from accessing content which poses the highest risk of harm, including online pornography. The draft Bill covers many of the most-visited pornography sites, social media platforms, video-sharing sites, forums and via search engines - thereby capturing many of the sites through which children access pornography.

The Government recognises the concerns that have been raised, including from the Joint Committee scrutinising the draft Online Safety Bill, about protecting children from online pornography on services which do not currently fall within the scope of the Bill.

Ofcom will set out in its codes of practice the steps companies need to take to comply with their duties under the Bill. Ofcom will have a range of information and transparency powers which it will use to understand whether companies are meeting their safety duties. These will help build an understanding of the impact that the framework is having on users, including children.

The Bill includes the requirement that the Secretary of State for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport must undertake a review on the effectiveness of the regulatory framework, two to five years after it comes into force, producing a report which will then be laid in Parliament. This review must consider how effective the regulatory framework is at providing higher levels of protection for children than for adults.