Online Safety Bill returns to Commons

The Government’s Online Safety Bill has returned to the House of Commons, after a delay due to a lack of parliamentary time.

MPs voted to drop the controversial ‘harmful communications’ offence and to return the Bill to Committee in order to delete the unpopular ‘legal but harmful’ clause.

Last month, Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan pledged to remove the clause from the Bill, and make further amendments to protect free speech, following a meeting with The Christian Institute and other stakeholders.

‘Robust’

Introducing the debate for the Government, the Minister for Tech and the Digital Economy Paul Scully MP explained: “it is vital that people can continue to express themselves freely and engage in pluralistic debate online”.

He continued: “That is why the Bill will be amended to strengthen its provisions relating to children and to ensure that the Bill’s protections for adults strike the right balance with its protections for free speech.”

The Minister also said that tech companies “must treat their users fairly and ensure that the internet remains a place for free expression and robust debate”.

Former Cabinet Minister David Davis, who had previously warned the Bill “could be the biggest accidental curtailment of free speech in modern history”, thanked the Government for deciding “to remove the legal but harmful clause”.

‘Malevolent’

Miriam Cates MP warned of the unsupervised and ‘often malevolent’ influence of people on “our children in their bedrooms” via the internet.

She said: “There are many harms in the internet, but pornography is an epidemic. It makes up a third of the material on the internet, and its impact on children cannot be overstated.”

Cates added that, “given the link between children viewing pornography and child sexual abuse”, she hoped that the House of Lords “will consider how regulations around pornographic content can be strengthened”.

CI concerns

The Christian Institute has been raising concerns over the Bill since 2020.

Deputy Director for Public Affairs Simon Calvert recently welcomed the Government’s climbdown on ‘legal but harmful’ content and its decision to remove an offence for ‘harmful communications’.

But he called on the Government to do more to protect children from pornography.