Online harms bill “yet another broken promise” from Johnson, says Labour

Labour has described the failure of Boris Johnson to bring forward the online harms bill before Christmas as “yet another broken promise” from the Prime Minister, who had pledged to accelerate the passage of the legislation.

Lucy Powell, Labour’s new Shadow Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, welcomed a report on the legislation from the joint select committee on the online safety bill today, saying it would “help improve how the internet is governed”.

But she added: “Social media companies have for too long gotten away with facilitating harmful content online. Current regulation is from the analogue age and lags far, far behind the digital age in which most of us all now live.

“The Prime Minister’s failure to bring forward the online harms bill by Christmas is yet another broken promise. The government must now urgently act to strengthen its proposals and bring them to parliament to prevent more and more people becoming victims online.”

Johnson promised during a session of Prime Minister’s Questions in October, in response to concerns raised by Keir Starmer and others over the killing of David Amess MP, that the online harms bill would receive its ‘second reading’ before Christmas.

Labour has now criticised the Prime Minister for again delaying, after ten years of what it described as a “digital free for all”. The party said the failure means that children will not be protected from harmful content, and older people from online scams, over the festive period.

The parliamentary committee today recommended that the government hold online services to account for the design and operation of their systems with regulations governed by a democratic legislature and an independent regulator.

Its report said the bill should be easy to understand for providers and the public, have clear objectives that lead into precise duties for providers, with robust powers for the regulator to act when platforms fail to meet requirements.

It also called for an update to criminal law relating to online communications, in line with the Law Commission’s recommendations. They are to create:

• “a new ‘harm-based’ communications offence to replace the offences within section 127 (1) of the Communications Act 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988;
• “a new offence of encouraging or assisting serious self-harm;
• “a new offence of ‘cyberflashing’; and
• “new offences of sending knowingly false communications, threatening communications, and making hoax calls to the emergency services, to replace section 127 (2) of the Communications Act 2003.”

The comments from the Labour frontbench follow several delays with the online harms bill. The legislation was first announced in 2019 following the death of Molly Russell but only completed the white paper stage in December.

Harms are divided into three categories under the proposed bill: illegal activities; content that would be harmful to children but not adults; and legal content harmful when accessed by adults. Disinformation, including anti-vaccination information, would also be classified as harmful under the legislation.

Current proposals would see senior managers of platforms face criminal sanctions for noncompliance with information requests from Ofcom, and companies could be fined up to £18m or 10% of a company’s global annual turnover, whichever is greater. But concerns remain that the proposed law is not strong enough.

Dr Joe Mulhall, head of research at HOPE Not Hate, has said that criminal sanctions should be up to seven years in prison (the current proposal is two) in line with sanctions for managers of financial institutions which break regulations.

The bill also proposes that “significant” numbers of children must use a platform before it is subject to the child safety duty. NSPCC analysis has found that the bill failed in ten out of its 27 indicators on the protection of children.

Labour proposed late last year the introduction of penalties to prevent the spread of anti-vax disinformation and called on ministers to work on a cross-party basis on the promised bill to “get that legislation on the statute book”.

In December 2020 Jo Stevens, the then Shadow Secretary of State, described the legislation as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to tackle the dangerous elements of the internet” and said it must not be wasted by the Conservatives.

She accused ministers of having “kicked further down the road” plans to bring forward the proposed as Oliver Dowden told MPs last year that the bill would not be introduced until the next parliamentary session, which started in May.

Labour called again for tougher rules to be brought forward under the online harms bill over the summer amid the racist abuse experienced by England football players, particularly Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka.

The two million most vulnerable children in Britain are seven times more likely to come to harm online than their peers, according to a study by Internet Matters, published by the online safety body early this year.