What a difference a year makes. Or rather, what a difference a year in government makes to a Labour Party that promised so much on online safety when in opposition but has yet – conspicuously – failed to deliver.
The tortuous passage of the Online Safety Bill under the Conservatives was, in part, because the then government’s own backbenchers were its main opposition. HM’s Official Opposition was urging them to go further and faster, such that – by the time a watered-down version of the Bill limped towards the Lords in late 2022 – Labour’s shadow DCMS spokesperson Lucy Powell, was heaping praise on the efforts of an earlier Conservative secretary of state, Nadine Dorries, to “[see] off a raft of vested interests to enable the Bill to progress”.
Powell’s assessment was that – as a result of the government’s eventual capitulation to its right wing – they had “let the big tech companies off the hook and left us all more at risk. Online hate, disinformation, sensationalism, abuse, terrorism, racism, self-harm, eating disorders, incels, misogyny, antisemitism and many other things are now completely out of scope of the Bill”. A Labour government, Powell said, would bring in further legislation to address the “major loophole that massively falls short of the Bill’s original intention”.
A year on, there is no sign of this legislation. Many of the Labour MPs who held the previous government so doggedly to account are now in positions of power, including Jess Phillips at the Home Office, Alex Davies-Jones at the Ministry of Justice and Powell herself, now leader of the Commons. Yet the hole at the heart of the online safety regime remains.
There are many reasons why this might be the case, not least the scale of the economic challenge the incoming government was confronted with last July and the fact that the focus on delivering growth has dominated all policy priorities since then. But to not take action on online safety as part of the same policy programme doesn’t add up.
The government’s own modelling shows that a reduction in exposure to online harms by just 1.3% would – even under the most conservative estimates – deliver an annualised economic benefit of £345m to the UK. As the Molly Rose Foundation recently argued, “a strengthened Online Safety Act that was capable of achieving a 15% reduction in online harms could be expected to deliver £4bn in annualised economic return”.
It’s not just the return on investment that makes stronger regulation an economic no-brainer, but the “polluter pays” principle too: bringing down the soaring costs to public services – the police, the criminal justice system, schools, the NHS – of dealing with the offline impacts to individuals and society of online harms, across all the areas that Powell listed above.
The political case for strengthened regulatory action has certainly become more complicated in the past year. The influence of the tech giants on the Trump administration and the “will they, won’t they?” games around whether the OSA will be on or off the table in US-UK trade talks is clearly creating unwelcome noise and pressure for the government, emboldening their lobbyists in Westminster and silencing the voices of victims and their advocates calling for them – at the very least – to hold firm.
But at the heart of this storm is a department that is utterly conflicted in delivering upon this part of its portfolio. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is the sponsor and cheerleader for - as well as a major client of, and investor in – the sector that it is also supposed to regulate. Normal business on “innovation” requires daily ministerial and official interaction with UK representatives of tech giants whose US masters are utterly opposed to their excesses being reined in by foreign regulators and who have the most powerful man in the world in their corner.
Add to this the well-documented closeness of the secretary of state, Peter Kyle, to the tech industry and the prospects for regulatory boldness recede even further – notwithstanding the appointment of their new permanent secretary, which is welcome news for the small but committed civil service team working on this brief. Meanwhile, DSIT’s lead minister for online safety is its most junior, splitting her time with the Department for Business and Trade and sitting in the Lords.
In the face of the external challenges buffeting the government, there is one measure that is well within their control which might deliver a welcome reset for this agenda and restore civil society’s faith in their commitment to deliver on their pre-election promises: putting the civil service and Cabinet leadership on online safety in another department, one whose other priorities depend on it, rather than being in opposition to it.
Maeve Walsh is director of the Online Safety Act Network. She is an experienced policymaker and government relations expert who has worked in the UK government and not-for-profit sector and was previously an Associate with Carnegie UK