Digital Economy Bill — House of Lords, 2017-02-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Merlin Hay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I will make some brief points. First, on this set of amendments I am afraid I disagree with the noble Baroness: we must get on with this. It will not be perfect on day one but the sooner we get moving the better. We have talked about this for a very long time. That is why I am not really pro these amendments On Amendment 55, I agree entirely with my noble friend Lady Howe. She is absolutely right to spot this lacuna: the BBFC will look at this stuff and age verification, but who will enforce it? That is a problem and I was going to raise it later anyway. She was absolutely spot on there. My noble friend Lady Kidron was also absolutely spot on about these sites. Twitter could be classified as commercial because it takes money from pornography sites to promote them. I can get evidence of that. It would be difficult for it to say that it does not promote them Very quickly on what the Minister said, I was going to raise under the group starting with Amendment 57 the issue of including prohibited material with the age verification stuff. We should separate protecting children from protecting adults or it will confuse things. The big danger is that if we start using this to protect adults from stuff that they should not see—in other words, some of the adult prohibited material, of which there is quite a lot out there—we run the risk of challenges in court. Everything that the BBFC does not classify because it falls into certain categories is automatically prohibited material. It is not allowed to classify certain acts. I should probably not tell noble Lords about those now as they are pretty unpleasant but they are fairly prevalent in the hardcore pornography out there. If the pornography sites are blocked from supplying adults with what they want, they will just move offshore and get round this. If they do that, there will be no point in doing age verification and we will not protect our children. That will create the first major loophole in the entire thing I have this from the pornographers themselves. They know what they are doing. However, they are very happy—and would like—to protect children. If we leave them alone and argue through the Obscene Publications Act and other such things as to what they must stop adults seeing, they will help block children. They are very keen on that. Children just waste their time as they do not have money to spend. At the end of the day, the pornographers want to extract money from people I am advised that the real problem is that prohibited material includes content that would be refused a BBFC R18 certificate. The Crown Prosecution Service charging practice is apparently out of sync with recent obscenity case law in the courts. Most non-UK producers and distributors work on common global compliance standards based on Visa and Mastercard’s brand-protection guidelines. Maybe we should start to align with that. We should deal with that separately under the Obscene Publications Act. It will be very easy for the BBFC, the regulator or the enforcer to tell what does not have age verification on the front. That is yes/no—it is very simple. The trouble is that if we get into prohibited material, it will end up before the courts. We will have to go through court procedures and it will take much longer to block the sites. I would remove that from here. I shall leave my other comments to a later stage.