Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when regulations requiring providers of regulated user-to-user services to report child sexual abuse and exploitation content to the National Crime Agency will (a) be laid and (b) come into force.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) is responsible for the development and implementation of the Designated Reporting Body (DRB), which will receive reports of CSEA from in-scope user-to-user service providers. The NCA has confirmed that the DRB has been delayed due to technical issues. By revoking the original SIs, the Government is granting the NCA time to resolve technical issues with the reporting portal and allow for the reporting portal to be thoroughly tested ahead of the portal becoming fully operational. This will significantly increase the prospect of an efficient, fully accessible and robust reporting mechanism when legislation comes into force.

We expect the impact of this revocation to be minimal, given service providers can and already do report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US, as US-based services, under US law. NCMEC forwards any reports with a UK nexus to UK law enforcement.

More broadly, until the CSEA reporting provisions within the Online Safety Act (OSA) comes into force, services can continue to act as they do now, including reporting under international law, to existing reporting bodies and law enforcement. Again, suspected CSEA cases with a UK nexus made via alternative channels, including reports made internationally, will continue to be passed to UK law enforcement.

The NCA expects the DRB to go live in Spring 2026. The OSA’s provisions to report CSEA content to the NCA, including the Reporting Regulations, will be laid and will come into force in parallel with the operationalisation of the DRB in Spring 2026.