13
Examination of witness
Dame Rachel de Souza.
Q1 The Chair: Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Communications and Digital Committee. It is our first meeting back after Parliament’s summer break and it is also the first evidence session of our inquiry into the Online Safety Act. Our aim in launching this inquiry is to examine what impact the Act has had since it was passed in 2023 and how successful its implementation has been to date.
It seems a really timely moment to investigate these issues. It is now a little over a year since the key duties focused on protecting children came into effect in July 2025. More recently, as we know, the Government have proposed introducing new restrictions on children’s access to social media. As we know, there is quite a debate about calling for a ban for under-16s. Just last week in the US, we saw the trial with Meta reach a landmark settlement that will see the company introduce a range of protections for under-18s on Facebook and Instagram.
We will be looking in our inquiry at how the Act has affected a range of different groups and individuals, but children’s experiences will be a key focus. As such, I am delighted to welcome the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, to our session today. Thank you for being here. I do not have any relevant interests but, if members have interests to declare, they will do so as we go through.
Dame Rachel, you and your predecessor Anne Longfield have been working to understand what children’s online experiences are like. You have been trying to do that for several years. Could you start by describing for us the online environment children were growing up in before the Online Safety Act was passed and the main risks that they faced?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I came into role in 2021. I had been a head teacher for 20 years and run a large trust of schools out in East Anglia. I knew there was a problem. Just before I came into this role, one of my head teachers had a young girl who had been bullied online and took her own life, and she said that that was a factor. We knew things were changing. When I came in, Everyone’s Invited exploded, and we knew that children’s experience was not good. My goodness, I did not know how much that was the case. I was really shocked by what I saw.
The first thing I did was call in the porn companies. I grilled the porn companies. They expressed some desire to try to put age verification in place and were sad and sorry. How I wish I had had such a good reception from the tech companies. I pulled the tech companies in regularly to ask them how many underage children were online, what they were doing about age gating and whether they were going to step up before the legislation and protect children. I got mealy-mouthed words, lots of words. In fact, I gave them 10 minutes each and then showed them what children were seeing online.
The two Secretaries of State—DCMS and the Department for Education—asked me to take children’s views and children’s experiences through the Online Safety Act. I went out and did a number of pieces of work with children and started to see their reality. At that time I was also doing The Big Ask, which was the biggest survey in the world of children. I spoke to half a million four to 18 year-olds and got their experiences.
I could talk to you all day, but one of the most shocking bits of experience was the content that children were seeing. I did a piece of work on pornography. I published it in 2023 and re-did it in 2025, which is for another question. The majority of children had seen heinous, awful pornography. The average age was 13 and about 25% were younger than that. I am not being prudish. I am not talking about them being interested in having a look at bodies and things such as that. I am talking about heinous, misogynistic, awful pornography.
I was literally in a former Secretary of State’s office and we were interviewing a group of children about the online world. One little boy started to get very distressed. He was a tiny little tot. I suddenly realised that he had seen porn. I just took him to one side and said to him, “What did you see?” and he told me. I just said, “Those people were acting. It was not real”, and I made sure I spoke to Mum.
I did a piece of work with young people about what they wish their parents had known. Before the Online Safety Act, what they wished that their parents had known was, “Do not give us phones too young”. Most of them got internet-connected phones very young and had unfettered access to everything that is awful. They were shown that and looked at that. They also said, “Do not let us take our phones to bed at night”. This was day and night. We know better now, but then it was pretty awful. Kids were talking to me about self-harm material, suicide material, body shaming and bullying. It was completely unfettered.
Some of the most difficult bits of work and conversations with children that I had were in some work I did on peer-on-peer abuse. The police and psychologists gave me their transcripts. You could clearly see that the perpetrators, who were children, were enacting what they had seen online in life. That was where they were getting the ideas. They were using that language. It was tough.
Before the Online Safety Act I also did a piece of work around the sexual behaviours of boys and girls—I interviewed 18 to 21 year-olds—having changed because of what they had seen online as children. Both girls and boys, young women and young men by then, talked about enacting violence and that being a norm. It really had a massive impact.
It is so interesting when I talk to people in their mid-20s and older 20s. They say, “The adults did not know. They did not have a clue”. That is the message. You asked me about what we saw before. That is why, with many people in this room, I was an absolutely passionate advocate for wanting children to be able to express themselves and have digital experience and all the joys of the online world, but needing desperately to protect them. That is why we needed the Online Safety Act and why it was worth the fight. It was a long fight to get it in.
The Chair: A number of members of the committee were involved in that fight.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Yes, indeed.
Q2 The Chair: In your view, has the Act made a positive or negative difference to children’s experiences online since it came into force?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I hugely welcomed it. It is ground-breaking legislation. I am positive about it. I am really pleased we have it. When I talk to my counterparts across the world—I have been in Australia, New Zealand and most European countries talking to children’s commissioners—they are quite jealous of our legislation, so we can be positive.
Let us start with the positives. We all agree now—we all have a bit of a common definition—about what would be harmful for children. That is a positive. There is a general consensus that age verification is a good thing. That is a positive. When very serious things have happened, at the very edge of harms, the tough edge of harms, we have seen the Act being used to take action, whether that is some of the issues around Grok or the pornography companies. There are positives.
What about the negatives? The biggest negative you are going to get from me—I am the Children’s Commissioner—is that children think it has made absolutely no difference. When I talk to children, they do not even know about it. “What Act? It has not made any difference to me.”
I have just talked to 625,000 children in my latest survey. We are going for a million. When I am out there, they are dealing with horrors around AI. I had to do a piece of work on nudifying apps before we could get the Government to ban them. I would have wanted the Act to be out there in front of these things. We wanted a flexible Act that would really be safeguarding our children.
You talked about the Meta judgment. In America, the legal system is protecting children. We have Ofcom. We have this Act. That is why it needs to work. The Act itself, the way it has been interpreted, is too focused on content. It has not been flexible enough. It has not kept up with the times. There are things that we need to do with it, even though, in its creation, we knew it would need to grow and adapt. That needs to happen.
Q3 Lord Knight of Weymouth: Thank you for coming, Rachel. As you have just suggested, many online safety issues arise from the design of the systems that put the content in front of children. When the legislation was going through here, many of us were arguing that we needed a piece of legislation that tried to regulate systems rather than just focusing on content. We did not manage to win that argument. What evidence is there, if any, that the Act has led to any meaningful improvements to systems and features rather than just suppressing harmful content?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We do not know. I say that on purpose because I am really cross about it. What is the mechanism? The tech companies, supposedly, have written risk assessments for Ofcom. There is not an outcomes measure. They are completely not transparent. As the most senior safeguarding person in this country for children, I have asked Ofcom to see those risk assessments, and it has said no. I have threatened to use my data powers. I have statutory powers to get them, and it has said that it will attempt to stop me getting them.
One thing that I did want to ask this committee was for your assistance in this matter because I am planning to use my powers. If we cannot even see the risk assessments that may well have put these mechanisms into place—they may not have; we do not know—how on earth can we judge the efficacy of the Act? I will leave that one with you, but I am pretty furious about that.
Q4 Lord Knight of Weymouth: I am sure we will have noted that plea for help, if nothing else, getting the legislative power to have access to those risk assessments. Can a regime of risk assessments, safe harbours and those sorts of things ever work effectively or do we need to legislate further to do better?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We need a couple of things. We need Ofcom to use its teeth. It has a lot of power. It needs to use its teeth. We need Ministers to encourage it and give it the air cover to do that.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: We will come back to those in a minute. I am more interested in the structure of the regulatory regime.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Are you interested in any bit in particular?
Lord Knight of Weymouth: I suppose I am, to an extent, distracted by the Meta settlement in the United States. The US courts look like they have achieved a settlement that goes further than our legislation does.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Indeed, yes.
Lord Knight of Weymouth: I am interested in your reflection on that. If it were possible to get that set of measures to apply to the UK and to apply to other social media companies, as well as the Meta ones, would that be an improvement on what we have through legislation?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I gave you a description pre-Online Safety Act of what children were seeing. I have been out repeating the porn work and I have literally got 625,000 responses from children. I have talked to children right across the country. We will be publishing in February. They are concerned about different things—things that the Meta settlement covers. They are concerned about functionality. They are concerned about being online for too long, not being able to cut down, strangers coming into their games and talking to them, what AI means for them and how it is affecting their lives. We saw that with nudifying apps.
We had hoped that the scope of the Act would be able to change and evolve to the new world that our children are living in. Believe me, it is new and different. As Children’s Commissioner over five years, I cannot tell you how different 2021 is from now. The concerns from children around the country are very different.
Yes, we should be looking at functionality in gaming, time online and curfews. We should be looking at all of these things. Why? It is interesting. Up here in Westminster, we have been having this debate about banning or not banning social media. It is a Westminster debate, and it is everyone doing their best. We will come to a decision. When I ask children, “Do you want a social media ban?”, their answer to me is always no. I changed the conversation. This is right across the country, from Preston to Birmingham to Bournemouth. I have been everywhere this year asking this question. When I say to them, “Do you have any worries?” they talk about the terrible things that they have seen online. They talk about issues with gaming. They talk about addiction, needing to cut down. They talk about algorithms. I say, “Do you want the adults to protect you?” and they say yes. When I say, “Should the adults say that any company that does not keep you safe should not be allowed to have access to you?”, their answer is yes.
We need to be very careful about our language. There is an opportunity to engage with young people. Banning or not banning is just so simplistic. In terms of the Online Safety Act and banning social media, most children will think it is funny and irrelevant. The right conversation really does elicit a cri de coeur and a response of, “Please help”.
Q5 Lord Knight of Weymouth: My final question, before opening up to others, follows that up. Should we prioritise the systems that the tech companies use, the algorithms, the use of addictive by design and the lack of design for age over banning? Is banning just a political win that is easy? Is there a more sophisticated and effective thing that children will buy into?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I have been challenged in one of these rooms before on whether I would ban. My answer always is, “If it is a simple binary and there is nothing else, at the moment with the levels of danger—”.That is what people in this place are doing. They are trying to be responsible and protect children. Having looked closely and talked to my Australian counterparts, it is not a magic wand.
We absolutely need to prioritise systems. We need to look at children up until the age of 18 as well. I was in youth prison last week sitting with boys, and they were telling me about the radicalisation into violence that they experienced online at 17. They need protecting. We need to protect children, full stop.
Q6 The Chair: Just to go back slightly, you have done extensive work on consulting with children. You have all that input. Are there particular groups of children for whom significant gaps in protection still remain? With the Online Safety Act, are there groups that are outside of its scope?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I would say 17 and 18 year-olds. We have only talked about 16s and under. Just because you get tall does not mean you are not still a very young person. I would say the under-18s. Some of the most awful things I see are things such as com sites, where children who might have mental health problems or be very vulnerable are persuaded into self-harming in front of other children online. They are often sucked in through TikTok. They are our most vulnerable.
Another group that I highlighted recently in my report on the Prevent duty is children who have been pulled into non-ideological extreme violence and obsession with violence. It is a small but important group. That is the group that is worrying our anti-terrorism police and others the most. It is where vulnerability intersects with childhood. That is where we need to look.
I still worry about girls. I know we are strong in our language up here about protecting women and girls, but there is not a place I go where I do not have a queue of girls talking about dieting material, comparing themselves online and algorithms. That is not going away. The boys will quietly tell you after. We looked at the selling of beauty and health products recently. I did a piece of research on this. Something like 45% of black children that we spoke to have been targeted with skin-whitening products.
Children are being targeted with health products. It starts with health products. For girls, it is, “Change your eyes”, “Get Botox”, and “Get fillers”. What 15 year-old needs that? With boys, it is often health products through to steroids. It is completely not allowed; it is illegal to be selling anything to under-16s. If you speak to an under-16, they will tell you that they are targeted all the time with products. I have done a piece of work. I am sorry. It is not very pleasant. What I am really saying to you is that there are vulnerable groups, but it is everyone.
Q7 Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: You already mentioned that Ofcom has teeth and that the Government need to encourage Ofcom to use its teeth more. How effective has Ofcom’s implementation and enforcement of the Online Safety Act been in driving services to make the changes that they need to make to protect children? Do the services fear Ofcom or not?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We have some examples where Ofcom has been very effective after the fact. It is finally getting involved with nudifying apps—the Grok issue—and it is working on age verification with pornography companies. I am really pleased that it has asked me to provide a group of young people to help it as an advisory board. There is an openness there.
I have a couple of concerns. One is that, if Ofcom is going to be the vehicle to protect our children through the implementation of the Act, we need them to be getting ahead of the harms. I do not think it has. When I talk to children around the country, what is worrying them are things around AI. It was the nudifying apps. There are new harms, and we need Ofcom to be getting ahead of those. I do not think it is.
We all had hopes, but when government changed in the States, it felt like there was almost a pulling back here. I can only say it felt like that; I do not know. What I need for children is for Ofcom to be incredibly robust and not pull back. I do not just want to criticise it because, frankly, it is Ministers who drive and give the air cover for Ofcom to be strong. We need our Ministers to be really strong in asking Ofcom to protect children. How effective do I think it has been? It has not been effective enough.
Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: It is interesting that you speak about the States, because we are watching with great interest the TAKE IT DOWN Act and how the US will use the Federal Trade Commission to implement fines should there be breaches. Will that strengthen Ofcom’s hand or encourage it to go further and faster, if we start seeing those fines being issued, if you are saying that we are being influenced by the US?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I hope so. I led a roundtable at UCLA just last year and I was talking to people who are involved, as we are. I do feel sometimes that where they go, we follow. There is the opportunity. Ofcom should be fining. It should be more robust. When I read the children’s code, I was so disappointed. It felt like it was a technical document written for the companies, not a document written to every child in this country about how Ofcom was going to try to keep them safe. That is what it should have been.
Yes, I want it to use all its powers. I would like to see some big fines and I would like to see it be ahead of the cases and ahead of things as well, because it knows. It will need the air cover of Ministers. We know we have had turbulence. I am on my seventh Prime Minister and multiple Ministers. We need some really focused ministerial energy on keeping children safe.
Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: Has Ofcom been cautious because it does not believe it has cover from Ministers?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I do not know. How would I know? I do not know. We have had lots of change politically and Ofcom just has not used its teeth.
Q8 The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Do you have any comment about the potential role of the ICO? I was interested to hear that it is contacting Meta about the outcome of the case. Does it have a significant role to play here?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Do you mean the Information Commissioner?
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Yes. Might it have teeth that Ofcom is not using?
Dame Rachel de Souza: It is good when the Information Commissioner does things; it is good when the Children’s Commissioner does things. We need Ofcom, which is the regulator whose job it is, to make sure this is implemented.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: I am not wanting to let Ofcom off the hook. I am just wondering whether there is a multi-faceted approach to this.
Dame Rachel de Souza: I would like to see the new Prime Minister really commit to keeping children safe and making sure that the ministerial team does that. Whether it sits here or there, we need someone in charge to give proper air cover to Ofcom and to demand that Ofcom does their job and gets ahead of it. If we are going to use Ofcom as our means of implementation and keeping children safe, it has to do better.
Q9 Viscount Colville of Culross: You have given us such interesting answers. Thank you very much indeed, Dame Rachel. I just want to look at some specifics. I have read your response to the codes that have been published and you have just said that the code seems to concentrate more on the companies and not on the children. You have said that Ofcom seems to be more worried about the cost to business of enforcing the Act and it gives that disproportionate weight.
You have called for children’s voices to be part of the process in the enforcement of the Act. How would that work? You have gone around and listened to thousands of children. How would you like Ofcom to move the balance in favour of children and create this process?
Dame Rachel de Souza: There are so many ways, but a simple straightforward thing that I have offered the last three Ministers and Ofcom is to write to every child in the country to explain the children’s code. I write to children. I speak to everyone. Just do it. I have said, “I will do it for you”. We will write to them, tell them that the children’s code is meant to keep them safe and then go back every year and ask, “Do you feel safer?” It is a simple, straightforward thing that Ofcom could ask my office to do or could do themselves. I could help them. We do not need to overthink it. Getting an advisory board was a good start.
We do not need to do everything that children tell us they want. We need to listen to them, but we are the adults and we need to try to make good decisions. It is that listening piece about their genuine experiences. The children’s code was a massive lost opportunity. At the time, I said to the Minister, “The children’s code should be for children. Write to them and explain it to them. I can get you a letter that will go into every single child’s pigeonhole in this country”. That is a simple straightforward one.
Q10 Viscount Colville of Culross: We have talked already about the American judgment against Meta and addictiveness. In your response to the code, you said that Ofcom must reconsider its decision not to include persuasive design features in order to try to limit the amount of time that children spend online. From that comment, you obviously do think that Ofcom does have the power to be able to affect addictiveness. How should that be enforced?
Dame Rachel de Souza: When the Online Safety Bill was being drafted, redrafted or redrafted—it went through many iterations—I tried to get some of these things in. The response I got was, “No, this will be a Bill that can adapt, grow and change to what is needed”. I took that in good faith and hence my response. Children’s experience is here and now. Children’s negative experience is online. It is not just the content. It is the features. It is the addictive features. It is the length of time that they are spending on there. It is the algorithms. It is those things. Ofcom should absolutely have those powers.
Viscount Colville of Culross: Ofcom has come before us and said that the Act does not give it the power to look at addictiveness. Do you agree with it on that?
Dame Rachel de Souza: It might have some particular legal argument. I do not know. I have not looked at it. At the inception of the Bill, we were told that we could go back for amendments and make changes. That is what I want to see, if Ofcom does not have that now. It is all to play for, frankly. We were promised an Act that could evolve, develop and change to children’s needs. That is the important point.
Q11 Viscount Colville of Culross: When it comes to categories, there has been a lot of concern that Ofcom has concentrated on the size of the companies and not on the risk that they pose. We know perfectly well that smaller companies can be just as risky as larger companies. Is that a problem in the Act or is it a problem in Ofcom’s enforcement of the Act?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I would say it is Ofcom’s enforcement of the Act. I am sure it would have an argument against that, but the scope of the Act ought to cover that. If we are going to keep children safe, we cannot say, “You have to be a multi-billion-pound tech company to be covered by this”. Ofcom’s argument was about the burden on the company, was it not, but what burden to keep children safe?
Q12 Lord Tarassenko: I am going to declare a conflict of interest, not a financial one but one that is relevant especially to my second question, which is that I am working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation to introduce a level 3 qualification in schools to teach children about data science and AI. We start our first pilot of an EPQ in about a fortnight’s time.
I want to discuss with you the pace of change of AI versus the pace of change in legislation. You have been quite vocal about this yourself. The House of Lords has tried in the Crime and Policing Act to introduce new offences. Likewise, in the then Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Baroness Kidron had an amendment on AI chatbots, which is an issue that you highlighted in June. Unfortunately, it was defeated.
Is it possible to have an evolution of the legislation or maybe the children’s code? You must have thought about it because you spoke up about AI chatbots. How can we ensure that children are aware of the dangers of AI chatbots in terms of becoming over-dependent on them as companions and so on? They are not being protected at the moment. Can you see a way of doing that?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I would like to see, if necessary, amendments to the Online Safety Act to enable it to stretch to cover harms related to this. As I said, I am out asking every child at the moment. They are doing a survey for me called The Big Future. We are asking them about AI. We have already got 625,000 responses and we will have more. Before we went out, we did a bit of polling of all the children who would be of an age to vote in the next election, so 14 to 19 year-olds. We asked them what their biggest concerns were. I have to say that AI came down very low.
The kids see the double-sided nature of it. When I am talking to them around the country, they are all using it. They are all using it to mark their homework. They can see its efficiency. They think it is going to change their lives. It is exciting. They want to know about it. At the same time, they are saying to me, “I applied for 100 jobs and all I got was an AI message back from each of them”. They are seeing it as limiting their experience. They talk to me about their friends who think the AI is their friend and talk to it and all the rest.
There is a role here for a modernised Online Safety Act and some amendments that would really help. There is also a big education piece here. That is for families as well. It is incumbent on all of us to educate our children and help them through the difficulties as well as seeing the positives.
Q13 Lord Tarassenko: You mentioned part of the solution that I wanted to follow up on in my second question, which is about education. What should be the top three priorities for AI literacy in schools? Would you allow school children to use ChatGPT in school? If not, what kind of AI tools should they be allowed to use?
Dame Rachel de Souza: In February, I will tell you what a million children in this country think about the answer to that question—we are asking them that—which would probably be a more interesting answer than mine.
The fact is that they are using them. They are using AI in school already. Many of them are using AI in their classrooms. Many of them can see great potential in using AI. There is no question that teaching and learning both at school and at university level is going to change. Examinations are going to change. Kids are absolutely aware of the transformation that is afoot and they are ahead of us on it. Like I say, most of them see that as incredibly positive, but there are problems too. I think I would like to come back to you with what the children of this country think in response to that.
Lord Tarassenko: Which AI tool are you going to use to analyse the million responses?
Dame Rachel de Souza: Ask the team. I have a very good research team.
Q14 Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate: I had the dubious honour of being involved in preparing the GDPR when I was in Brussels. We knew at the time that legislation and regulation in the field of data—I am following on from Lord Tarassenko’s question—can never keep up with technological development. There is a big flaw in the legislative system both in Europe and here in this country. I find it very frustrating.
We are looking here at all the different elements that feed in to give you the powers to take action appropriately to protect children. You have everything, really. You have various pieces of legislation. You have the regulator, which seems to be totally inadequate to deal with this matter or indeed to pursue regulation. What I would ask you is this. I have been suggesting this in other fields, particularly in AI. Would it be more helpful if we could really concentrate on codifying all these pieces and bits—in other words, bringing them all together—so that there is, if you like, a menu available that can be used for the circumstances as they develop? You have touched on that. Lord Tarassenko touched on it in his question too.
We are moving at such a pace. It is not just children trying to get around something. It is the platforms trying to get around it. Therefore, as legislators, we cannot be adequate. We do not have a third form of legislation. We have primary; we have secondary. We need to have some kind of third element of faster-moving legislation. You said you could stretch the Act or you could add some amendments and so on. By the time that is done through our processes, it is out of date. Would you prefer to have this codification that we can move faster on to sort out the problems that you envisage?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We always have to take the time to think of the unintended consequences of any such proposal. We absolutely can demand more of our regulator. Any bringing together of an offer is a good idea, but it would need some really careful thinking through. That is not to try to pour cold water on your idea, but we need to think. We are clear about our legislative process and our regulatory processes. If we start free-forming, I worry about unintended consequences. Come up with a great idea, but what we can do today is demand more of those who are meant to be giving more.
The Chair: I have a couple of members who want to raise points, but, Baroness Owen, you wanted to raise your declaration, did you not?
Baroness Owen of Alderley Edge: In my enthusiasm to ask my question, I forgot to declare my interest. I am now going to do that. I receive pro bono legal advice from Mishcon de Reya on image-based sexual abuse and I sit on the advisory board of Araya Ventures, a venture capital company that may invest in AI technology.
Q15 Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: I was just going to ask a small supplementary about Ofcom. The scale of the task is large and grows ever larger. A regulator that previously was dealing with the media industry and a small number of companies is now having to deal with multiples of that. Those multiples will grow and the areas that we want them to regulate will grow. It is an organisational question, really. Is Ofcom the right body? Does there need to be another body? Does it need to be more than one body? It is a hard question to answer, but do you feel Ofcom is underpowered? Is it about will or is it about will and power and resource?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I think about my office. It is a tiny office. We have 30 members of staff. The NAO says that we have the biggest impact of any small office. It is amazing what a small group of people can do if they are genuinely committed. It sounds simple, but, in my experience—I have 20 years as an educator connected to Westminster and six years in this role—with the right ministerial air cover and the right passion and desire to get the job done, it can be done. It is good to have children’s experts and things like that—I would always support Ofcom with that, if it needed more—but it is amazing what you can get done.
Baroness Caine of Kentish Town: Thank you. That is very helpful.
Q16 Lord Holmes of Richmond: Thank you for your answers so far, Dame Rachel. You have described your frustration and you have said you are cross. That is all well said and understood. In terms of the Act itself, are you more frustrated and cross with the Act as enacted or with what has happened since in terms of how it has been used and how the provisions within it have been relied upon?
Dame Rachel de Souza: We are really fortunate to have the Online Safety Act. Although it is not perfect and although we went through many years of getting it to where it was—I am just talking about the children’s bit now—it is strong. I want amendments. I want it to be able to change and to do the thing that it said on the tin, but my frustration is how it is now being used or not used to hold tech companies and others to account.
Lord Holmes of Richmond: That is incredibly helpful and an incredibly insightful point for what we are trying to get at here, because it goes to the heart of what legislation can do. You have said that there is a lot in what has been enacted, but how it has been used is where your frustration lies.
Q17 The Lord Bishop of Winchester: First of all, I am sorry I missed you when you came to Southampton and Winchester. You had a good time.
Dame Rachel de Souza: It was a lovely visit. Thank you. I was going to thank you for that. It was excellent.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Not at all.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Your young people were brilliant.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Thank you. That is good. Thank you so much for, well, doing your job and, in particular, taking such a child-centred and child-focused approach to all this. I have a simple question. In your view, what would need to change in children’s experiences for you to judge the UK’s online safety regime to be a success? I will give you my supplementary now. It is the “Desert Island Discs” question: which of the eight would you have? If you could make one recommendation to the Government, Ofcom or Parliament to help achieve that outcome, what would it be?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I am going to go back to my conversation with Lord Knight. It is the risky features and the addictive nature of the systems. If we dealt with that, we could make children a lot safer—if I only get one.
The Lord Bishop of Winchester: Yes, you only get one. Let me come back to the substantive question, then. What would need to change in children’s experiences more broadly?
Dame Rachel de Souza: I will tell you some of my biggest worries. I can think of all their little faces. When I am talking to five, six and seven year-olds, I say, “What did you do last weekend?” They say, “I gamed”. I say, “Was that all weekend?” They say, “Yes, all weekend”. I ask, “What do you enjoy doing?” They say, “Gaming or whatever”. They do hours and hours and hours and hours of it. They are not going to the park; they are not going to see friends. There is a completely different experience qualitatively to sitting down with a group of pals and playing a competitive game and then going out and doing something else to spending hours and hours in this doom-thing of social media and tech.
For me, what needs to change the most, apart from obviously safety first, is we need to be giving children equally compelling experiences off this blessed stuff, so that, when they do use it, it can be wonderful and instructive, but it is not their whole life.
The Chair: That is excellent. Thank you. That is a really good point for us to end on today, so thank you. Thank you for opening our inquiry in the way that you have done today, with such rich experience that you have from working with children across the country. It is very worth while, the job that you and your office do, with, as you said, such a small team and so successfully. Thank you.
Dame Rachel de Souza: Thank you. It is great to be here.
