Thank you for contacting me about the Online Safety Bill and specifically your views on age verification for online pornography.

I fully share your concern about evidence suggesting children are increasingly being exposed to pornography online, and that this can have damaging impacts on their development.

Therefore I support a mechanism to protect under-18s from accessing online pornography. It is vital that action is taken to keep our children safe online.

Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act 2017 included powers to require commercial providers of online porn in the UK to implement measures to ensure users are over 18. However, in October 2019, the UK Government confirmed that this would not take effect.

This requirement was intended to protect children from material they should not see but, from the outset, the policy was beset by mistakes and repeated delays. It was poorly thought through, posed serious privacy concerns, and proved almost impossible to implement.

As you know, the draft Online Safety Bill has now been published. The Government has said it expects companies to use age verification technologies to prevent children from accessing harmful online services such as online pornography.

It argues this approach will be more consistent in tackling harmful content across different websites and go further than the Digital Economy Act’s focus on commercial online pornography. It also states the Online Safety Bill will introduce a new duty of care on online companies towards their users, overseen by Ofcom as an independent regulator.

I am, however, concerned that these proposals are insufficient and incomplete and share the NSPCC’s belief that they do very little to ensure children are safe online. I believe there is little to incentivise companies to prevent their platforms from being used for harmful practices.

This long-awaited legislation must tackle legal but harmful content and put in place a robust framework so that everyone can use the internet safely, particularly children. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle dangerous elements of the Internet with real-world consequences. I do not believe that the Government’s response has been sufficiently ambitious and I will be supporting all these measures as the Bill is debated in Parliament.

To make matters worse, despite this legislation being long overdue, the Government has failed to keep their promise to bring forward the online harms bill before Christmas. The government must now urgently act to strengthen its proposals and bring them to Parliament.