Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department plans to take to (a) monitor and (b) enforce the removal of illegal content on platforms with end-to-end encryption.

The Online Safety Act 2023 places legal obligations on tech companies to prevent and rapidly remove illegal content.

The Act’s illegal content safety duties mean that in-scope services will have to prevent users from encountering illegal content, such as child sexual exploitation and abuse. These provisions will come into force in due course.

The Online Safety Act is “technology agnostic” and focuses on the outcomes and behaviours it's trying to regulate, rather than targeting specific technologies, platforms and services. The Online Safety Act requires digital services to put in place proportionate systems and processes to make their platforms safe, whatever the design of the platform, informed by their own risk assessment of their service and its functionalities.

The UK Government supports strong encryption provided that it can be implemented safely and in a way that does not undermine legitimate law enforcement. But there does not necessarily need to be a choice between protecting children and privacy and it is right to require companies to keep children safe.