[John Bercow in the Chair] — Internet and Video Games

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 5:04 pm on 13 November 2008.

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Photo of Barbara Follett Barbara Follett Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Culture; Minister for the East of England), Department for Culture, Media & Sport 5:04, 13 November 2008

I am sure that the council will consider that. We must get the message across, and it is through such figures that children understand exactly what we are talking about. The green cross code man certainly played a big part in my children's life.

The key to the problems that hon. Members have so graphically detailed is responsibility. Mr. Hayes alluded to that kind of responsibility. It is responsibility on the part of providers, users and manufacturers, and it must cut right across. Without that responsibility, we can have no trust. The Government seek to provide services and advice that people trust. I was glad to hear that my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend had taken it on herself to go out and give advice. We certainly need that to happen, and it is a good campaign for hon. Members to follow in their constituencies. She has given me a great idea. Going into a school as a trusted figure is exactly the way to do it. The search for trust is what led us to commission Dr. Byron's report and to establish the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, as she recommended.

As my hon. Friend Paul Farrelly and many other hon. Members said, Dr. Byron's work was excellent. She explored the multiplicity of issues that come under the heading of this debate and she also gave a very good guide on how best to strike a balance between Government action, self-regulation and parental monitoring, which is not easy. As anyone who has been a parent knows, it is terribly difficult to release children to experience things on their own and to act responsibly at the same time.

As hon. Members will know, the UK Council for Child Internet Safety was launched in September. Shortly after its launch, the Government moved our involvement in this area up another gear. The reason why we did that—to enlighten Mr. Vaizey, who is the prince of shadow Ministers—was not just to proliferate reviews. The Byron review was focused, but afterwards people asked for a wider focus than just child safety. Consequently, Lord Carter, who was appointed as Minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting a month ago, announced that he would lead the "Digital Britain" report. There will be an interim report in January and a final report in the spring. We have brought forward the publication of the final report to make it quite quick, because, as the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings said, we cannot keep having reviews. We needed to broaden the base of that review.

Lord Carter embodies something that is quite unusual but not so unusual in my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's Government, in that he reports to two Departments; the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. I know that hon. Members were concerned that there should be one lead Minister in this area. If they have not done so already, I urge them to read the book written by my right hon. Friend Sir Gerald Kaufman, entitled "How to be a Minister". In that book, he gives details of a disease from which many Ministers suffer: the very grave and critical disease of "departmentalitis"—in other words, the silo mentality that leads a Minister not to see beyond the boundaries of their own Department. The spread of that disease is, of course, encouraged by a Minister's civil servants, because they also suffer from it; it is a highly infectious disease. We are trying to counter it by having two Ministers dealing with this area, together with a director from the DCMS and another official involved in the "Digital Britain" report. Of course, I also interact very strongly with the "Digital Britain" work.

Returning to the Select Committee report and our progress on it, we agree with the Committee that it is essential to strike the right balance on the risks and benefits of the internet. However, as many of the Committee's recommendations now fall under the remit of the newly formed UK Council for Child Internet Safety, I am not able to give the Committee members the very detailed responses that they want from me; in fact, it would be wrong of me to do so. However, I know that the council will be listening and watching, and I hope that it will be able to give the Committee those responses, because its recommendations merit very deep consideration. I hope that, when the council produces its report, the Committee will find that some of its recommendations have been taken up.

I will work with the council and we will take into account the useful and sensible comments that the Select Committee made in its report. For example, we agree that effective screening measures are needed—many hon. Members made that point today. We also agree that the CEOP is doing excellent work and that that work should be properly resourced. However—I am about to give the Committee an answer that is affected by "departmentalitis"—CEOP falls under the Home Office and that is a Home Office matter, which must be considered within its resource allocation. I thought that I made that point quite well, although my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton would pronounce mine to be an extreme case of "departmentalitis". However, we have noted what the Committee said about CEOP: it does good work, which needs to continue.

The Government will also work with the newly formed council to develop an independently monitored voluntary code of practice on user-generated internet content. As several hon. Members said, that content can be highly disturbing. I will not forget an elderly woman coming in to see me five or six years ago. I am sorry to say that her son-in-law had superimposed her head on a series of pornographic images and then made them easily available to members of her family on a website. It turned out that there was absolutely nothing that could be done to stop that, and she was mortified. Obviously, her relationship with her son-in-law ceased.

We also agree about take-down, take-down times, and levels of search. The information on those things needs to be made much clearer. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend, I think that we also need to make it much clearer that the ISPs have, in some cases, produced booklets with this information. However, those booklets are not as well advertised as other things on their services and the providers should be encouraged to make them far more prominent.