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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of bringing forward proposals for family friendly WiFi which use the default filters imposed by mobile network operators, based on BBFC guidelines and regulated by the BBFC.

Protecting children is at the heart of our online harms agenda, and wider government priorities. The government has worked hard to ensure content is filtered in public places where children are likely to be, as well as at home. The major providers of public WiFi are committed to providing family friendly public WiFi wherever children are likely to be. A Friendly WiFi Logo was launched in 2014 to help parents identify the safest places to browse the internet.

The BBFC provides an independent framework for mobile network operators and defines content that is unsuitable for customers under the age of 18 based on their Classification Guidelines for film and video. There are no plans to require other internet providers who provide family friendly filters to use the BBFC’s framework.