Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee 

Oral evidence: The work of Ofcom, HC 528

Tuesday 20 October 2026

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 October 2026.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Dame Caroline Dinenage (Chair); Mr Bayo Alaba; Nigel Huddleston; Dr Rupa Huq; Liz Jarvis; and Jeff Smith.

Guest: Dame Chi Onwurah, Chair, Science and Technology Committee.

Questions 1 to 109

Witnesses

I: Sir Ian Cheshire, Chair, Ofcom; and Dame Melanie Dawes DCB, Chief Executive, Ofcom.

Written evidence from witnesses:

– [Add names of witnesses and hyperlink to submissions]

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Sir Ian Cheshire and Dame Melanie Dawes.

Q1                Chair: Welcome to this meeting of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Today, we are holding a session on the work of Ofcom. We are delighted to welcome, for the first time since his appointment as chair earlier this year, Sir Ian Cheshire. Alongside Sir Ian is Dame Melanie Dawes, who is familiar to us as the chief executive of Ofcom.

We are also joined by a star guest this morning, in the form of Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science and Technology Committee. She is our star hostage for the day and will obviously be known to both of you through that role. Before we begin, I remind Members to declare any interests at the point they ask their questions.

I start with you, Sir Ian. This is the first time you have been in front of our Committee since your appointment as chair. What assessment have you made so far of the scale of the challenges facing Ofcom and how it is rising to meet them?

Sir Ian Cheshire: It is very nice to be here again, having been here before with a Channel 4 hat on. Thank you for giving us your time. I have probably been struck by three main things since coming in, some elements of which I suppose are fairly obvious from the outside, but a couple maybe are not.

First, Ofcom is a multiregulator. It has different remits in different areas and, obviously, needs to think about different staff in different areas. In the last three years, it has become totally transformed by the addition of the online safety challenge. With what is coming now with social media, this is a complete inflection point. The old Ofcom, created as somewhere to put competition in telecoms and broadcasting standards, has expanded into this very different animal. From the outside in, that looks like a very broad set of responsibilities. In the shape of online safety, it is genuinely evolutionary because no one has tried to do this before or regulate it in this way. Trying to get to how we make it work is a whole new set of challenges.

Having been at BT, where we were regulated by Ofcom, I saw a very clear, practised form of regulation that was well established, but also the framework opened up to give us fibre. It was all good regulation work there. At Channel 4, we had broadcast regulations which worked very well. Again, there was lots of practice.

Online safety changes the game. There are 450 people now in the organisation who were not there previously, with a year and a half of writing codes—I think Melanie has written something like nine major pieces of codes. That is not very exciting from the outside in because it sounds as though you are not doing anything, but until you have the code you cannot measure the response against it, and then you cannot get to enforcement.

I feel as though I have walked in at a point where Ofcom has gone through its transformation and is about to get into the next phase, which is much more about achieving impact and compliance. It is not just fines or keeping score, but genuinely changing behaviours. I think we have some good early examples of that with things like X, which has changed. Even Meta, despite suing us three times, is engaging with us. I think what needs to happen now is that we learn our way into how to have maximum impact over the next three years. The team are very up for it, and we will be discussing a review of how we are organised to make sure we have maximum effect.

Secondly, this is a highly respected regulator, both in the industry and overseas particularly. I find it interesting that the online safety players are sufficiently concerned about us that our lovely head of legal, Martin, is in court this week—one of two against 50 lawyers from Meta, TikTok and X. They are taking us seriously. This is emerging, but it has not yet got to the point where we are in a full cycle. We are in flight on this.

Finally, when I was sat here before Chi, I was asked, “What are your early perceptions from what you have heard pre-appointment?” I heard a lot about perceptions that Ofcom was slow or legalistic or did not move fast enough, maybe did not have the right people, or was too big. I genuinely do not think it is too big. You need to understand the whole digital economy to be effective in this. We are still much smaller than the FCA. I think we are about the right size but we will need more resources, which we are asking for, to do a better job on online safety, particularly with the social media ban. That will take more resources.

We need to recognise that if there is a perception that we have not moved fast enough or been risky enough—however it is expressed—we need to communicate that. We need to communicate, for example, that we have been very busy. We did a great job on porn but we have also been busy writing codes in other areas, so there are not flashy engagements or enforcements.

Also, we have to set a tone. We will not just give up if we find that we hit the limits of the Act, as we have done before. We have talked about the suicide forum and things like that. Instead, we are saying, “Right, if we can’t do that, what more can we do?” Potentially, that includes asking the Government for more powers to be more effective. I think, as you learn to use these things, you find that out.

The team has done a fantastic job of pushing and shoving, but needs to signal—particularly on online safety—from the early engagement all the way through to compliance and fines that this is a continuum of enforcement. The thing we are interested in is the outcomes for citizens. Ultimately, it is not a scorecard of how many days we have had in court; it is about whether more people have been better looked after.

We are just at the beginning of that and we are going to challenge ourselves very thoroughly. We have been doing that, but particularly from a board point of view I will challenge the team, saying, “What more can we do? What can we signal?” But we are not going to take stupid risk profiles on key legal cases or something like that, because a lot of what Ofcom does is highly legal, highly disputed and quite hard to figure out. What did Grok actually do with nudification? Until we got into the investigation, we did not know; it just appeared.

We are very motivated. It is brilliant for me, having been on the other side of the regulator, to now be inside it. I have been impressed by the quality of people. I feel that I can contribute to that. Perhaps there needs to be a reset in the perception, which is a lot to do with communication, but ultimately about our performance. I take that very seriously.

Q2                Chair:  I sat in on Chi’s Science, Innovation and Tech Committee on your appointment hearing. One thing stressed there was the importance of the chair understanding that Ofcom’s primary duty is to the British public.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Correct.

Q3                Chair: What more do you think needs to be done to demonstrate that at this moment?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I have two thoughts. As I say, we are literally just finishing a review of the online safety structures, measures and resources. I probably need a first round with the Secretary of State to make sure that that vaguely lines up, but I would love to come back here and talk about that in a bit more micro detail.

The two observations are that, first, we have to lay out quite explicitly what we are doing to move the dial. There is great work on, for example, the small but very nasty sites, including the sharing of child sexual images and porn. Then, the big question for me is: how does the average young child consume social media, and how can you change that? Probably, being realistic, that is a change over time and includes cultural change with parents if this is to happen.

When you have more than 80% of 11 to 16-year-olds using social media, frankly, despite the 13-year-old age policy, we are not going to press a button and declare it shut, and suddenly it is. We will have to be set up to make a continuous programme of change. We have to demonstrate, “Here is the whole set of initiatives we are doing.” There will not be one thing. Effective age assurance is vital but it ain’t going to solve everything. We have to say, “There will be waves of change here. We are going to move the dial.”

Crucially, the second thing for me, as well as sharing a plan, is that we have to share some metrics. Using the brilliant research capability that Ofcom has, and dialling into that, let us see what is actually happening out there in the country. What is the reality? One challenge with this whole sector, as I have found, is that there is a tonne of anecdotal experience, including some really awful, genuinely atrocious experience that was really upsetting. You have to say, “Yes, we probably can’t get 100% perfection, but we have to move the dial.” Sharing the metrics is what I would like to come back on and perhaps have a debate with many of you about.

Q4                Dr Rupa Huq: What you have on your plate has become so vast. You alluded to this yourself, from originally postal services and broadcasting to online harms and all these things. Do you think is has got too big and unmanageable?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I won’t comment, but you should probably ask Melanie as she lived through the last seven years and saw that remit expand. We understand, as we build up our work plan, that it is remit by remit. Something like Royal Mail is a new addition. Deep-sea cables will be another. There is data centre security. The question for me, if you did not put it in that digital economy bucket, is where else you would put it. Would you create another one? I do not see resource in one level being bled off to deal with something else. We have added to do online safety, rather than taking it away. Shared comprehension is really important. If you do not understand what is going on, for example, in the digital platform world and how it is building data centres, you cannot really talk about the security side of it. We generally find the cross-cutting piece works. Also, we obviously get economies of scale on things like finance and HR.

Q5                Dr Rupa Huq: One thing we are contacted about all the time, and where people accuse you of taking your eye of the ball, is that in the original Communications Act 2003 you laid down the law on impartiality—quite literally. You have statutory duties with the broadcast code. However, a lot of people say that GB News seems such an anomaly, and to some extent TalkTV as well.

There is the whole controversy about politician presenters. There is a sense that they are all from one side. You have a party leader regularly doing a programme. Then you have X number of MPs from that same party, and the whole roster is very right wing. If you see someone from the other side, they are set up to be pilloried. I think a lot of people think that Ofcom is not doing its job; it just seems blatant. Originally, you were a sort of arm’s length regulator but now this argument of freedom of speech comes up. It has turned into a culture wars and warrior thing. What is going on?

Sir Ian Cheshire:  I do not agree with that characterisation.

Dame Melanie Dawes: No, I do not either. It was not until very recently that we had many concerns about due impartiality. We had very few complaints. What we have seen over the past few years is new broadcasters coming on to the scene, innovating and satisfying quite a lot of public appetite for opinion-based current affairs programmes. It is a challenge. We have opened up 24 investigations into GB News over the last few years, and 19 into Talk. Most of those are more recent.

I think Talk has been pushing the boundaries a little bit more in the last few months. We looked at a number of those programmes. We are also clear that Ofcom is a post-broadcast regulator. We do not set detailed rules in advance about who should present which shows or how broadcasters should do it. We leave editors, producers and journalists lots of freedom to be able to do the job—to be honest, in the UK we have an extraordinarily strong news and current affairs ecosystem—and to bring that to the public in new and different ways.

The test, when we look at a programme after it has been broadcast, is: does it meet the due impartiality rules? There, I think some people would like us to move to something with absolutely equal amounts of time. The rules are that you do not have to do that. It is about a due and appropriate balance. With the exception of the rule that politicians cannot present the news, which is a very long-standing one, and our election rules as well, we do not set up-front rules.

Finally, at Ofcom we get asked this question of whether serving politicians should be allowed to present current affairs. We asked the public about it a few years ago. It was a relatively small survey, but people were not entirely clear about this. Honestly, I think it is for politicians to decide what politicians may or may not do. I know the Secretary of State raised this matter recently. Our role is not to look at programmes in advance. As I say, we have always been very sparing in the number of rules we set up front, because of freedom of expression—which is very important.

Sir Ian Cheshire: The question of whether we regulate a programme or channel has been tested in law now. The answer is that, under current legislation, we regulate a programme. On a question of multiple issues and people, providing they put in enough due impartiality—maybe it is two talking heads and one maybe gets a bit more time than the other—I think it currently works. That is unless Parliament feels it is time to change the rules, which obviously it can.

Q6                Dr Rupa Huq: It literally feels like that, though, to anyone watching it. If it was on YouTube I think it would be fine, but just as a public service broadcaster there is a massive lack of balance there. Other channels do it as well. At the weekend, Sky had a Labour Baroness presenting a show, but it would say it will then have a Conservative Baroness the week after. Within the channel, and LBC as well, which has politician presenters, they would claim balance, whereas there is no balance within those other channels. If there is a trade unionist, they are set up as a punchbag.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Just to say: GB News is not a public service broadcaster. It is a licensed broadcaster.

Q7                Dr Rupa Huq: Is it subject to your codes?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is subject to our due impartiality rules but it is not a public service broadcaster with those additional obligations. Look, I think this is about how you interpret due impartiality.

You initially asked the question whether Ofcom is too big and I would like to say something about that. Ofcom regulates communications services and communications infrastructure. I think the synergies between those things have only grown in the six years I have been at Ofcom. If you think about Google and Amazon, they are cloud providers, infrastructure providers and provide services. They are right at the centre of the advertising value chain. You need to be able to see across that.

I need to have a strong relationship with the senior people at Google, for example, for Ofcom to be able to carry out its job. What you get by having all of that in one place is a lot of synergy. It is way more efficient than if you have a few, smaller regulators, each needing their own general counsel, head of economics and so on, not to mention their own chief executive. For me, it makes a huge amount of sense and we are finding that those synergies only grow every day.

To reassure you, and bring this back to broadcasting, there is no sense at Ofcom that we deprioritise that work just because our remit has grown for online safety. We have the same number of people doing it as we have always had. It is just a debate about whether the rules are fit for purpose for the modern world and the way broadcasting has changed.

Q8                Dr Rupa Huq: Are there different standards for, say, BBC presenters? Gary Lineker got pilloried for his tweets. We know that the directors general from the BBC that we have had in the chair are scrupulous and that people leave their politics at the door when they present. That does not seem to apply for GB News. Even the subject matter is often Reform Party talking points: things like rape gangs, gangs, small boats and Muslims. That is the subject matter as well. Is there a different standard for the BBC?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I think the BBC requires that its staff are extremely careful about how their personal opinions are expressed. That was the debate about Gary Lineker online. It was not an Ofcom regulatory issue and was very much the BBC board’s decision, principles and processes for what it requires of its staff. If the board were here, I think it would say that it is extremely careful about those things because of its role as the BBC, our national broadcaster, and the most trusted news brand globally, with a big reputation to defend.

As far as the broadcasting code is concerned, Ofcom’s job is to apply that across different formats and broadcasters. It is true that a very wide range of different programming is available but our job is to judge due impartiality and sometimes due accuracy on the basis of the programme we see. We allow for variety. As I said, it is not about equal balance; it is about sufficient balance in a programme, with different perspectives.

Q9                Dr Rupa Huq: GB News was fined for the Rishi Sunak election show that was seen as blatantly having no balance at all.

Dame Melanie Dawes: One show is still subject to a court process in fact. We are being challenged on that.

Q10            Dr Rupa Huq: I thought there was a £100,000 fine.

Sir Ian Cheshire: A fine of £100,000, yes.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, we are being challenged on that.

Q11            Dr Rupa Huq: They are appealing it. There has also been Boris Johnson being interviewed by two MPs who are married to each other and from the Conservative Party. That all looked a bit cosy. In what world is that balanced?

Sir Ian Cheshire:  If there is an appetite to change the current guide and codes, that would be something to discuss. We have asked the same thing. The board asked the same thing as well as asking whether we are too big, which I think is a reasonable strategic question to ask if we could be more effective. I genuinely think that this is something that we will keep asking ourselves, but I am satisfied, having been round this with the team, that it is applying the code in a consistent way.

I think the channels are very different. I wanted to understand it, so I took time out to meet the people at GB News, to understand their compliance effort. It is fair to say that they started very chaotically, with their technical transmissions all over the place. They have invested in compliance and are moving in the right direction. The sheer fact that we have had 23 investigations into them shows that we are not just sitting there letting them do anything they want.

Q12            Dr Rupa Huq: I think the public feel you are not applying the rules enough, going hard enough and so are letting them get away with it. For example, Andrew Neil left. He is not of the left; he said it was from the nutty end of politics. People like Stewart Purvis and Chris Banatvala—he set up Ofcom in the first place—have been highly critical. They are not of the left.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I would urge them to say that we also have a duty on free speech and freedom of expression, so there is a balancing act.

Q13            Dr Rupa Huq: This seems a new dimension from what was originally set up in the 2003 Act.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I encourage Stewart and the others to set up a left-wing version of GB News.

Q14            Dr Rupa Huq: I would disagree with that if that happened as well, but I will get a pile-on now for saying it. So bring it on. There will be a huge pile-on coming my way now.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I did not see that coming.

Chair: We will move on. Thank you, Rupa.

Q15            Liz Jarvis: It is now nearly a year since the GB News interview with President Trump that prompted multiple complaints about impartiality. Why did it take you so long to decide to investigate?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Sorry, are you talking about the “Panorama” programme?

Q16            Liz Jarvis: The Beverley Turner interview.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, we actually looked into that straightaway. There were in fact two versions of that show. We investigated one and are now investigating the second. We were pretty quick on that, I think. 

Q17            Liz Jarvis: As far as I am aware, it took six months for you to launch an investigation. Is that right?

Sir Ian Cheshire: No, it is not.

Dame Melanie Dawes: I do not think so. It may well have taken that long to run it through because these processes take time. You have to ask the broadcaster for information; you have to give them time to respond. There can be a bit of a to and fro. I do not have the timescales in front of me but can happily come back to you on that. I think our initial investigation was quite quick.

Q18            Liz Jarvis: When will a decision be made on that?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We have already decided that one programme was not in breach of the rules, and we are looking at the second. I believe that that is still outstanding.

Q19            Liz Jarvis: What lessons has Ofcom learned from the High Court judgment in the GB News judicial review, and how have those lessons influenced your approach to future broadcasting standards investigations?

Dame Melanie Dawes: There was a court judgment where, again, GB News appealed our decision. That appeal was upheld. That was interesting, because it underlined the point that freedom of expression is a very serious consideration before a court in these cases, and we should not go beyond what is necessary to secure the requirements of the broadcasting code. In that case, the question was whether a programme could count as both news and current affairs, if it had a news bulletin in it and it was a current affairs show, and therefore could we apply the rule about politicians presenting news in the way that we had done in that case?

The court said no. We consulted on changing the rules. In the end—we concluded this a little while ago—we decided to keep the rules as they are but strengthen our guidance in a number of ways. We broadened the definition of “politician” so that it can include a slightly larger group of people. In the end, we rest on that principle of due impartiality, so that if you have a politician presenting a current affairs show, you have to work that little bit harder to make sure the public get the range of views that they are entitled to expect under the code.

Chair: Thank you. Let us move on to Chi.

Q20            Dame Chi Onwurah: Thank you, Dame Caroline. It is a great pleasure to be here, and to see Sir Ian again and Dame Melanie.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Thank you for the process.

Dame Chi Onwurah: I want to follow on from Dame Caroline’s question. You stressed to us that you understood that Ofcom’s primary duty is to the British public, but you have another duty, which is to support growth in the economy. I know that for many of my constituents and other stakeholders there is a sense that the support for growth, for the investment by the big tech companies, is preventing you, or may be preventing you, from taking the swift action that so many people want to see against harms online. How do you balance those two duties? How can our constituents know that you are balancing those in their interests?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I will give a board view and then some more practical examples. First, I do not see those two in practice being traded off. We have two clear duties. The growth agenda particularly applies to things like digital broadband, notspots and investing in the future, particularly mobile quality, which will be the next big investment cycle that firms will have to do. There is also developing the encouragement of appropriately sustainable data centres and the others bits of physical infrastructure, including spectrum.

Q21            Dame Chi Onwurah: Sir Ian, just to clarify, are you saying to the Committee that you are not aware of any threats from or concerns by large tech investors with regard to the regulatory environment in the UK?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I would say that the experience of people who have never been regulated when they come here and find that they are is that they are not big fans of being regulated full stop. What they say and do, we cannot control. I will not be worried about that. It is quite clear that we have an economic duty, which the Government are very clear on. I think that with the investment in fibre that has gone on, and the upgrades coming in mobile, we are absolutely underpinning the growth of the digital economy in the UK. We are very clear on that.

However, the question of the overriding duty to our citizens is absolutely paramount. On the harms issue, there can never be a trade-off that says we will turn a blind eye to harms because we want more investment and growth. That is not going to happen.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, and our primary duty is to further the interests of citizens and consumers. That is right there in the Communications Act 2003. Then we have further duties. One of those is on growth. There has actually been a carve-out from online safety to the growth duty. We asked for that a few years ago because we did not want to create another potential stick for the tech giants to beat us with in court by saying that maybe we had not taken into account growth.

Generally, I agree with Ian: in most of what Ofcom does, there is a real synergy between growth and supporting consumers. What do consumers need? They need really great communications infrastructure. That is about building fibre.

There was an article this morning in the papers about what the EU is trying to do to get satellite direct-to-device services going across the continent. We have already done that in the UK. Ofcom has already licensed all our mobile network operators so that they can partner with satellite companies to do direct-to-device satellite phone calls. That is a good example where it is great for the consumer and really powerful for growth. We do a lot of that across our remit.

Q22            Dame Chi Onwurah: Can I just clarify that? I have heard threats from tech companies saying that they will not invest in the UK if there is more regulation on artificial intelligence or online harms, for example. Have you not heard those threats?

Sir Ian Cheshire: They have been reported. Do I think people would play that card if they are trying to lobby? I am sure they would. Would we pay attention to them? No.

Q23            Dame Chi Onwurah: You do not pay attention to those threats.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We would not pay attention to them. I should add that we have not had any pressure from the Government on this at all—rather the reverse. They want us to crack on with online safety, definitely not to hold back for the reasons you describe.

Q24            Dame Chi Onwurah: Sir Ian, one commitment you gave to my Committee was to take on the tech bros, which we appreciated at the time—and still do. Meta recently wrote to me saying that, as to the changes and safeguards being implemented in the US in response to litigation there on the mental health of children specifically where they were obliged to change parts of their algorithm etc, they will not be implementing those in the UK. Can we rely on you to ensure that children in the UK have at least the same levels of safeguards as in the US?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We recently opened enforcement action against Meta because they have introduced a new service. Our question is whether they have done a risk assessment. Again, we are already in enforcement with them and many other large companies.

Q25            Dame Chi Onwurah: I asked specifically about the changes being made in the US. Will you ensure that they are brought here?

Dame Melanie Dawes: The changes in the US are voluntary commitments by Meta. They are broader than the Online Safety Act, in that they cover addiction. That is just not covered by the Act, although of course the social media ban for under-16s will be much more draconian for Meta than anything that will come out of the US settlement. It has committed to some other measures, for example on anti-grooming. We have not seen anything there that is not already in our codes. We are looking into it but we think they are already part of the UK system.

Q26            Dame Chi Onwurah: I think you are saying that they are already in the system, but if they are not, and are not covered by the Online Safety Act, you do not have the powers now. Will you ask for those powers?

Dame Melanie Dawes: The social media ban will remove under-16s from the social media services, so if you are concerned about addiction for teenagers, that will achieve a stronger effect. That is the Government’s intent.

Q27            Dame Chi Onwurah: The under-16s ban is for only under-16s, not all teenagers.

Dame Melanie Dawes: No. I think the Government are looking into what the remaining requirements should then be for 17 and 18-year-olds. You are right: addiction is not covered under the Online Safety Act. I think it is a policy question for the Government and Parliament as to whether we want to expand that in future years. The social media ban will go quite a long way, certainly for younger teens.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Rather than just mirror it across, because we have different existing and incoming legislation, as I said earlier, we want to keep looking at this and say, “Is it moving the right way?” If we see holes that we think do not match, in that they are not doing something here and we think it is material, we would be more than happy to talk to the Government again about where we have not got coverage in the legislative capability. Ex that, we are very clear we are trying to achieve at least that sort of outcome.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We have spoken to the Attorneys General in the US who have been pushing this litigation. I think it is very good that the US is doing what it often does best, which is to deal with these problems through class actions at state level in the courts rather than through a regulatory environment. It is just different.

One of the big breakthroughs was with big tobacco. This is all very helpful, but the UK regulatory system is more comprehensive; it has the law behind it, and I think that in the short term we need it to drive progress because, if you rely on voluntary commitments by companies like Meta, it will never go as far as you want.

Q28            Dame Chi Onwurah: My question is almost the opposite. I am saying that there are voluntary commitments in the US as a result of litigation. How will we ensure that UK children and teenagers benefit from those commitments in the UK? I am still not entirely clear that that is going to happen and that Ofcom has been proactive in ensuring it does.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Many of them are in our codes and they have committed to doing stuff in the US that we are already doing.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes, they are sort of catching up.

Q29            Dame Chi Onwurah: It is the ones that are not in our codes, like addiction specifically.

Dame Melanie Dawes: With the ones that are not in our codes, that is because they are just not covered by the Online Safety Act. The coverage of the Act is a question for the Government. The social media ban will go part way, and then I think they will be thinking of 16 and 17-year-olds as well. I think the cup is half empty on this for the UK, but it is a different way forward and it will be slightly different from what we are able to achieve. Did I say the cup was half empty? I meant the cup was half full.

Q30            Dame Chi Onwurah: I am not clear about how we get to that point quickly and practically. My next question continues on that theme: the former Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology asked you to “conduct an urgent review of whether Ofcom has the right capabilities in place” to enforce the Online Safety Act. What progress have you made on that review, and will you send this Committee a copy?

Sir Ian Cheshire: It has just been finished, and yes.

Q31            Dame Chi Onwurah: Can you give us a—

Sir Ian Cheshire: As I think I alluded to earlier, I agreed, partly because of contact with the Secretary of State, that I would go back to the now responsible Secretary of State at DCMS to talk through the outcome of that review. It has been a comprehensive, blank-sheet-of-paper start. I think the team has taken the chance to reflect particularly on this inflection point about what we have been doing for the past 18 months and what we can do now. As soon as I have got past that conversation, I will certainly share it with you anyway, but if you want to have a further chat with me or Melanie we are very happy to do that.

Q32            Dame Chi Onwurah: Will it address the Molly Rose Foundation’s criticisms, which mirror other criticisms that we discussed when you came before my Committee, that Ofcom has a “weak and unambitious approach” and does not prevent harmful content being recommended to young people?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I understand Andy’s views on this, but I do not agree with them. I got quite personally involved in the process of the suicide forum and whether we could go to the final business disruption measure and further legal options. Again, that falls for me under a bit of learning, which says that I thought we had more capability of going to BDMs, say, if people did not pay their fines. We do not, legally. If it is geo-blocked, as that site has been, we have exhausted our remedies under the Act.

Now, I believe we should go further, if we can. On that agenda with the Government, the question is: what are the options we can have? By the way, that includes having pressure without a legislative position on things in the States. That is a particular issue for us. We have a US website that has no UK assets. It is extremely hard to go running round the world switching off websites, so we have to think about other routes and signals. How can we have impact? Fundamentally, I think there is a question about the design of the business disruption measures and whether you can potentially invoke them earlier, but at the moment, technically, the legal opinion is pretty robust and I did challenge it.

Dame Melanie Dawes: To be clear, we went to the absolute full extent of our powers for the suicide forum. It was our first enforcement case. It has been geo-blocked in the UK. No other jurisdiction has achieved that, and we were unable to go any further. There was nothing more that a court could have done to block the service beyond the way that it has already been blocked. That is a really hard one. The families obviously really care about this. We have met them several times and tried to keep them up to date with what we are doing, but we need to go further.

In particular, on business disruption measures we are concerned that, if we see something urgent, we have very little capacity to apply for an urgent interim business disruption order. Those powers in the Act are very clunky; they take a very long time and do not really deal with the problem. We have a bit of a list of where we would like our tools to be strengthened on the enforcement side. Now that we have been running for 18 months, we are much clearer about where the limits of those things lie. We are discussing that with the Government, and it is very much part of the review that Ian has led since he arrived. It is not the only thing, but it is one of them.

Q33            Dame Chi Onwurah: Let me press you on the question of algorithms and algorithmic transparency. As I am sure you know, my Committee’s review into social media and algorithms recommended that individuals should have the power to reset their algorithms and there should be algorithmic transparency.

Sir Ian, you talked about knowing what was happening, but actually there are no transparency duties or reporting, and no applications that can enable you to see what is going on. We see now an avalanche of AI slop and misinformation permeating and polluting a lot of public discourse. The Online Safety Act does not deal with that. Are you asking for extra powers to address that? Is that part of the review?

Dame Melanie Dawes: On algorithms and some of the AI slop, under the Act for adults there are no requirements for platforms to deal with so-called legal but harmful—

Q34            Dame Chi Onwurah: That is why I am asking whether you are asking for additional powers. I know this very well. We did a whole review into it.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Exactly, and we have explained it before. That covers things like mis and disinformation.

Q35            Dame Chi Onwurah: I know that.

Dame Melanie Dawes: It also covers quite a lot of hate, harassment and bullying online. We are not saying to the Government that they should change the overall policy and shape of the Act. That is quite a big, high-level policy question, but we are clear about the limits of what we can do there.

Q36            Dame Chi Onwurah: You are not asking for any other powers.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Just as—

Q37            Chair: No, we do not want to spend too much time on that. You are not asking for any other powers with regard to algorithms.

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is not so much powers. We are not asking at this stage anyway for the scope of the Act to be broadened. We are asking, in some areas, for our tools to enforce it to be sharpened.

Q38            Dame Chi Onwurah: That is not what I am asking you about, and it is not what my constituents are suffering from as they see this avalanche of misinformation and AI slop. I just want to be clear that you are not asking to address that.

Sir Ian Cheshire: We are very clear that that is a matter for Government and Parliament. If I could share with you just one thing on this issue, part of my learning since I last saw you was to be genuinely surprised that two instances that I found personally difficult were legal but awful. People putting online RNLI volunteers’ names and addresses is absolutely outrageous, but lawful. People going on TikTok drives at 100 mph, then crashing and killing people, is apparently legal. Why that is the case personally I do not know, but I have done the rounds and asked. Those questions need to be part of a public discourse. I would welcome that conversation, but have also asked, “Can we do something ourselves?” The answer has been, “No.”

Q39            Dame Chi Onwurah: My point is: are you part of that public discourse? You have the expertise. Are you part of that public discourse in talking to Government? Just say yes or no, because I want to move on to YouTube.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, in the sense that—

Chair: Okay, excellent.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are doing a lot of work with them, for example, on prominence for news on social media and VSPs. We have called for YouTube to be brought into the prominence regime. Part of this is about where the regulatory boundaries lie on legal but harmful speech, but part of it is also about how we make sure that that wider ecosystem of information is what the public need. We are very active in that second space, and in the media literacy side as well.

Q40            Dame Chi Onwurah: To finish on this, as you may be aware, in the US over the weekend there were huge No Kings protests, as they are called, against the Trump presidency, and Meta censored and switched off posts about those protests—and was able to do that—whereas, in speaking to my Committee and others, it said it was not able to respond as rapidly as necessary to, say, the riots in Southport or, this year, in Belfast. Are you going to look at that specifically in terms of its rapid response protocol and see if there are lessons we can learn here?

Sir Ian Cheshire: We already have.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We pioneered a rapid response protocol.

Q41            Dame Chi Onwurah: Specifically in response to what happened in the US?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I am not familiar with that specific example, but if in the UK they are categorised services, which the Meta platforms will be, they have to respect news publisher and journalistic content. That is not a rule; that is pro freedom of expression.

Q42            Dame Chi Onwurah: My point is that what happened in the US and the reasons given for it demonstrate that the reasons they have given us as to why they could not respond more rapidly were not credible. Are you going to take that up with them?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We will certainly hold them to account for having a crisis response protocol.

Q43            Dame Chi Onwurah: Will you take that specific example up with them?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I am very happy to take that one away. I am not familiar with that bit of US context, so we will need to have a look at it, but they will be required to do the crisis response protocol and we will hold them to account for having it in place.

Q44            Mr Alaba: Sir Ian, to take a journey into my world, a few months ago I came home from work and my 14-year-old daughter spoke to me about the online Bill.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Really.

Q45            Mr Alaba: She does not normally take an interest in anything I do. It is coming into effect next spring. The Government said they want you to enforce it rigorously and have promised funding. How confident are you that Ofcom will be ready to implement and enforce the Act from day one?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I will say a few introductory words on this and then go into detail. The reality is that we have been preparing for this as soon as we knew it was going to be a piece of Government policy. The Government have yet to lay the regulations, so we are waiting; we cannot start some of the things we need to do until they get going, but we have already scoped out the key issues.

There are two themes on this. One is that at the heart of it will be a highly effective age assessment. We have learnt a lot over the past 18 months about what really works in terms of technology and the practical issues of enforcing that, because that is the centrepiece of what we are going to look at.

Secondly, we have learned enough over the past 18 months to know that no one thing will be the magic bullet. You don’t just go, “Ping,” and that’s now turned off. It involves relationships with the platforms; it involves a lot of detailed work and questions about how far device-level interventions can go. I think we will see an initial enforcement, which I hope will be more successful than the Australian example because we have had the opportunity to learn from them and some of the gaps that developed, but I do not think you will see a blanket switch-off and 100% invisibility on day one. We will have to work over 12 or 18 months, or three years, to get this to happen, and the cultural change will take longer.

Q46            Mr Alaba: You mentioned earlier continuous programme change. Is that part of this?

Sir Ian Cheshire: Absolutely.

Dame Melanie Dawes: As Ian says, the Government will lay the regulations before Christmas, we hope, and at the same time we will consult on what highly effective age assurance needs to look like, say, at age 16, because that is at the core of this.

The single thing that platforms will have to do is to get that age gate working to screen out under-16s. Next week, we are coming out with our initial report on that. That will be a public report from Ofcom. We have done that extremely quickly. That is putting the platforms on notice, giving them advance warning of the sorts of things we think they will need to do to implement this. Once the implementation is in law next year, we will be absolutely opening enforcement where we see that that requirement for age assurance is not in place.

The good thing about this is that it is quite simple. Our experience of implementing the Online Safety Act so far is that, where the rules are really clear, we have been able to make very quick progress. I am confident that we can push very hard and fast on this right at the beginning, but Ian’s point is absolutely valid. If in the end parents decide to help their kids to stay on social media, no matter how good the age assurance is, there will be circumvention through VPNs, for example, that will be available to children. We will absolutely get the age assurance in across the industry, but whether children are removed from social media will be a wider societal effort that needs to happen. It will require communications, and I think the Government are very much alive to those issues.

Q47            Mr Alaba: In terms of the structure of Ofcom, do you anticipate changing the way you operate and how you set up ready for it?

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes.

Q48            Mr Alaba: Can you elaborate?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I would like to put that in the context of the overall online safety review. I am sorry that the timing of this is literally weeks away, and we are slightly the wrong side. As soon as I have checked in that the Government understand what we are doing and we have not missed anything, I am super happy to come back and talk it through.

Dame Melanie Dawes: I can certainly give you a flavour of the sorts of things we are doing. A couple of weeks ago, we advertised for a new group director for enforcement. I took the decision that we should separate out our enforcement function and now stand it up with somebody reporting to me, because that work is now big enough across Ofcom to justify that as our telecoms work, as well as online safety. That will beef up the senior leadership at Ofcom on enforcement.

We have learned a lot over the past few years about what achieves change in online safety. For example, we have learnt that when we levy fines, what is interesting is that that often drives the compliance measures being put in place, or a site geo‑blocking the UK and removing it from being accessible to the British public. We have learnt a lot about which tools work and achieve impact quickly. For example, we have learnt that with X we have had commitments on hate and terror to take down faster than in other jurisdictions, and we are getting data that no other jurisdiction is getting from X on that every three months, which we are now able to monitor. That was done through a structured supervisory conversation, rather than by opening up enforcement action, but when it came to the Grok episode in the new year absolutely we moved straight to enforcement.

One thing you will see and hear from us, I hope, is a bit more explanation when we are trying to get this outcome, such as getting child sexual abuse material dealt with online, here is the compliance plan for that and here are the different levers we are pulling—without telling the industry and giving them all the cards, because we do not want them to see exactly what we are doing. You will hear a bit more from us about getting under the bonnet, if you like, about what is effective and what we are doing.

Q49            Mr Alaba: Brilliant, thank you. On that question, Sir Ian, you have said, when the Online Safety Act was passed, that “there weren’t AI chatbots or ‘nudification’ apps, and there’ll be something else in two or three years’ time.” How confident are you that Ofcom has the tools and powers it needs to address emerging AI-related harms?

Sir Ian Cheshire: That is a great question, not just because I said that. Thank you for reminding me. I genuinely think we have to work in a developmental, organic way and keep going. This is not a one-time fix and forget; we need a combination of urgent attention for what is going on. These texts change in the blink of an eyelid.

The big difference between my childhood and now is that the rate of adoption is so instant. Look at the rise of ChatGPT, with 500 million people in the blink of an eyelid. We have to be horizon-scanning, watching what is coming. The big difference for me is to build the compliance framework that I experienced at BT, which was quite proactive, and, “Before you take a decision, let’s have a conversation.” That is not the way the tech industry works. We need to say to them, look, if 90% of under-16s are basically on YouTube, WhatsApp and TikTok, our engagement with those three platforms is fundamental to changing the numbers. If we can engage with them early, keep abreast of the technology and then speed up where we can, subject to the legality of enforcement and investigation, we have to recognise that this will be a continuing arms race, so we had better gear up for that. I am happy that the team understands that and is now organising to make sure it is fully on the front foot.

Q50            Mr Alaba: You just mentioned an emerging arms race. I totally get the analogy. What other emerging risks are you most concerned about in this context?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I am terrified about lots of things.

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is cybersecurity and our telecoms networks, to be honest. On online safety, we have seen over the past few years things we could never have imagined. I did not imagine that nudification apps would exist. The Government have taken steps to ban those. Sometimes that is what we need: a really quick law change. Sometimes, things are in scope of the Online Safety Act and we have been able to act on them. For example, with the Grok launch on Twitter on Christmas eve, we were the first regulator in the world to open enforcement against that. We think the Online Safety Act covers it, because intimate image abuse is covered under the Act.

Some things, like chatbots, may be covered sometimes by the search requirements of the Act. The requirements on search firms are not as strong as some other requirements, for example on social media. We need the Government to look at this—as they are—and to be thinking about what tighter regulations might be needed that we can then enforce against new services like that which come along.

It is a bit of an arms race. When you go to Silicon Valley, all anyone talks about is AI. They do not talk about safety; they never have and still do not. They are talking about AI deployment; that is where all the money is going. In the UK, we have to be really clear-eyed about that and be quick to legislate where needed. For us, as the regulator, we need to be clear when things are not covered and when we need that from Government. When they are covered by the Act, we need to get on to it, which is what we have been trying to do. I cannot think of any other area of regulation of public policy that is moving quite as fast as this, and that is not going to stop.

Q51            Mr Alaba: Sir Ian, I know you want to come back on that. You mentioned at the beginning that there is a hearing coming up this week, or the next few weeks. I do not know whether it was a throwaway statement, but you mentioned that you had a couple of lawyers attending compared to the mini-army that some of the social media have. Is that a usual occurrence?

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes. Currently, in tennis scores we are 3:1 to Meta. It has three cases against us; we have one against it. Typically, when you have multiparty, which is what the fee dispute was about, you get multiple lawyers.

One challenge for us is that, while we are not a burden on the public purse, we have to think about public money and be quite careful we are not taking on law cases where we will potentially lose and pay millions of people’s legal fees. This is going to be a continuing theme about their ability to litigate. I take it as a slight badge of honour that we are standing up and doing the right thing.

Q52            Mr Alaba: And being able to enforce.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes.

Dame Melanie Dawes: To be absolutely clear, we are defending all of those cases robustly. We are being challenged by Meta, X and TikTok on whether we are able to collect the information we need to do our job, and we are being challenged by Meta on the fee regime. Those cases have been heard in the past few weeks. We will see where they go, but I am very confident in my legal teams being able to defend these cases. We will do that robustly, particularly where we are being challenged on our very ability to carry out the job and have it funded so it does not fall on the taxpayer.

Q53            Chair: Does that ongoing threat of litigation affect your ability or appetite to enforce the Online Safety Act?

Dame Melanie Dawes: No, absolutely not. If anything, it reinforces our understanding of the motivations of these companies. We get experience every time we work with them, so that is helpful.

Sir Ian Cheshire: It is a great calling card to recruit new lawyers: you get to do fun stuff against Meta.

Dame Melanie Dawes: I would not recommend any lawyer coming to Ofcom now if they are risk averse.

Sir Ian Cheshire: It is not the right place right now.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are pushing the boundary on so many cases. To go back to Ian’s review and this moment on online safety, 18 months in we have learned so much, but it is now time for us to double down. That is what we think we can do. We may need the powers in the Act to be strengthened in a few areas; we are calling for that. I have a number of other examples, if you are interested, in where we would want to go.

Q54            Chair: AI-generated content, for example.

Dame Melanie Dawes: When it comes to things we would like to be able to do in our code, it would be to require platforms to use AI to search for illegal content more than is currently allowed by the Act. The bar for us to require that is very high. We think the technology is there and that it should be deployed more on illegal harms in particular, so that platforms can find this stuff proactively rather than relying on members of the public to report it to them. That is another example of quite a specific, practical thing that we think would really help us in the Act.

Sir Ian Cheshire: It is a great example of something where, if you had said that three years ago, the tech probably was not up to scratch, but the latest releases are.

Dame Melanie Dawes: That is a very good point.

Sir Ian Cheshire: We now see that they can do things they said they could not do before. They probably could not because they would have needed 5 million people checking facts.

Q55            Chair: That kind of safe-harbour aspect basically works against you.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Safe harbour is another question. That is one of the fundamental principles of the Act. It means that if a company does all the things that are in our code then they are compliant, even if they have a big risk that they have identified in their risk assessment that they are not mitigating. That means that all the onus is on the regulator to come up with the measures, and we are constantly playing catch-up. I think that turns it too far away from a responsibility on the platforms if they have assessed a risk.

The issue is that we then have to launch a consultation to put something in the codes, and that can take a long time. Safe harbour was there for a reason. Parliament debated these issues, partly to provide certainty to the industry. That is quite important. This is more at the policy than practical level, but it is another example of where again we have learnt that the Act does not go as far as parliamentarians probably thought it did.

Q56            Liz Jarvis: I want to go back to the issue of Grok, which, as you know, was used to generate sexualised images of women and children. When that happened, there were calls for an immediate temporary business disruption order to protect victims. Instead, Ofcom’s investigation dragged on while material circulated. Action was taken only when public outrage forced the platform itself to act. If the creation of child sexual abuse material does not warrant immediate business disruption, how can Ofcom be deemed fit for purpose at a time when AI-generated abuse spreads online in seconds?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I am afraid I do not accept that characterisation of what happened on Grok. This new so-called service was launched on Christmas eve and we launched enforcement action against that service on 12 January. We were faster than any other regulator in the world in doing that. In parallel, there was a public outcry about that and Ministers led that charge. Yes, Grok acted very quickly before and in the first weeks of our enforcement action to change the way the service operated and mitigate some of the risks it had created. I do not think that is a bad thing; that is the Government and regulator working in partnership, using public outcry and our regulatory tools at the same time.

That investigation continues. I need to be clear here that you cannot conclude an enforcement investigation on topics like this in a matter of weeks; it takes months and sometimes these things can take even a year or more. We are pushing very hard to try to get this done as quickly as we possibly can, but it is a completely novel area of regulation. The test is not whether there was illegal content online, but whether that company had adequate systems and processes to address that and take it down. It is quite a complicated question for us to look at.

We have been looking at whether there were child sexual abuse images and whether this was intimate image abuse. Many senior people—at Ofcom, it was only senior women—had abusive images of them online, and I think many parliamentarians did as well. It was very widespread back in the new year, but we were on this. As I say, no other regulator moved as fast as we did. The European Commission was a couple of weeks behind us.

Q57            Liz Jarvis: But in the eyes of the public it seemed to take quite a long time for you to respond and take action. Also, I would like to go back to the question of the immediate business disruption order. Why was that not able to be done?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We did think about that, but, as we said earlier, what we discovered on the business disruption measures is that they just simply don’t really work; the interim measures simply do not work. The bar is too high for us to be able to go to a court and ask it to disrupt in real time. It is one of the areas where we really need change in the Act if we are to move faster.

Also, because the company—in response to political leadership here and the public outcry—changed its approach, the ongoing harm was already quite quickly mitigated, or at least some important elements of it, so it may have been above that threshold at the beginning but not after a few weeks.

Our problem at Ofcom is that sometimes the expectations on us are more than any regulator would ever be able to achieve, particularly in terms of the timing in carrying out an investigation like this. There is more we can do to communicate and to work with parliamentarians on this to explain how this works.

A group of Members of the House of Lords spent some time with our enforcement teams a few months ago, to really get under the bonnet of what they do. That was quite a constructive meeting. We are very happy to try to explain this, but sometimes we simply cannot do what I think the public would like to be done. It is not that we do not get the harm; it is just that we are a regulator carrying out our job with tools that take longer to have the impact than perhaps we would all want.

Sir Ian Cheshire: To pick up on this point, until you try using these tools, they are a little bit theoretical, and then you find that the burden of proof and the legal system involved means that they are not quite fit for purpose. Rather than just say, “I’m terribly sorry, I can’t do anything,” which I do not think is the right posture for Ofcom, we say, “Right, we’ve got a problem here. What are we going to do about it?” I am sorry to say that there will be something else in the future; we will find some other technical issue.

One question, as Melanie said earlier, is: what is our interim business disruption measure that is slick, efficient and more like an injunction than the current design? If we can do that, brilliant. Ofcom would like to do that. It is not a question of Ofcom not being willing or capable in terms of its own capability. Since we have identified this, we need to have a conversation now, if we want to stop something like that, about what you actually do, because, frankly, the tools did not work.

Q58            Jeff Smith: Just a little bit more on enforcement. Dame Melanie, you said that you see the companies resorting to geo-blocking as a win. Do you worry about those measures being circumvented by VPNs, which effectively then allow companies to get off with not paying their fines or whatever?

Dame Melanie Dawes: That is a central question here. Our reading of the Act is that we do not have any capacity to require a website, for example, to block themselves in the United States just to deal with the risk of circumvention using a virtual private network by a UK citizen. We do not believe that the Act gives us that extraterritorial jurisdiction. I am not quite sure how you can carry that out. The Americans are pretty clear about that as well, it should be said. That means that, in essence, the furthest a UK court could go even if we had applied for a business disruption measure is to secure a geo-block, and to do so with the telecoms companies, with search and so on to make sure it is comprehensive, but it is as far as you can go. That means then that there is a risk that people will find a way around it and seek out harmful content, children will find pornography or whatever.

There are then questions about whether you restrict the use of VPNs, but that is not something that western democracies have yet decided to do. For me, it goes back to the fundamental point about the Online Safety Act, particularly when we think about the social media ban. We can change systems and processes on platforms. Our job is to drive that progress, but a lot of what will really achieve impact is actually societal change, whether it is schools or parents, or just the way that adults behave towards each other, and pulling as many levers as we can, whether it is through education, media literacy or, as I said, schools. It has to be a multi-layered approach to what in the end has become quite a deep-seated set of societal issues and behaviours.

Q59            Jeff Smith: You have kindly given us a list of your enforcement actions, and it lays out that quite a number of companies have had a penalty issued. Not all have paid. Can you update us on what penalties are outstanding and, more importantly, what Ofcom is doing to get that money?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We have issued 11 fines. Two have been paid, one is being appealed, and one is not yet overdue. Seven fines are overdue. Of the nine that are unpaid in total, two are porn companies that have now implemented highly effective age assurance, and another four have geo-blocked the UK. That leaves three that are still available without the risks being mitigated, out of the 11 services that we fined.

We always seek to recover fines, and we have a pretty good track record of doing that. This Committee will be familiar with Star China Media, the Chinese broadcaster, from which we took the licence after it broadcast forced confessions. We found against it on due impartiality grounds. It challenged the fine and did not pay it. We eventually tracked that down and got the money back.

We have a track record there. We will not be able to recover every single fine on online safety. If foreign courts decide to try to get in our way, there will be a point at which we have to accept that we will not be able to recover that money, but we will always seek to go as far as we can. In the end, what encourages me about the companies that we have fined is that they have done the things that we want to protect the public, and that is the real test of our implementation of the Act.

Q60            Jeff Smith: This question is about the extent to which the enforcement regime that you operate is adequate, and you touched on this already. What priorities would you have for legislative change that would make a real difference to your ability to enforce?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Improving the business disruption measure process, and in particular interim disruption measures.

Q61            Jeff Smith: What would the interim disruption measures look like?

Dame Melanie Dawes: That would essentially be a lower bar that allowed us to go to a court if we had evidence that there was ongoing, urgent, immediate harm to the public that required a company to be geo-blocked while we then were able to carry out an investigation. It is putting a prisoner on remand rather than releasing them on bail, which is all we are really able to do at the moment. That is top of our list.

The second on our list is being able to require proactive technology to detect illegal content more than we are able to do at the moment. There are also issues of safe harbour, which is a tricky one. We are not saying there is an easy solution here. We think it is too open that companies can have a big, open risk that they have identified themselves and it is constantly on Ofcom to come up with a measure. We will always be playing catch-up if that is the case. There are a few other issues. We want to discuss the longer list with Government in the next few weeks.

Sir Ian Cheshire: We definitely want to share those with you. I am almost certain we will learn something more next year and come back with another request.

Q62            Chair: Most of the online safety fines remain unpaid. There seems to be a sense out there in the public that you focus mainly on smaller companies rather than taking action against the major social media platforms. Your own group director said he was underwhelmed by the Act’s impact. What does “good” look like? What is the measure of success for you? Is that something that you would publish? How do we mark you?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is a very good question. As Ian said at the beginning, we want to do a lot more to try to say, “Here are the outcomes that we are really going after, and here are the things that Ofcom will be accountable for delivering towards that.”

On the social media ban, it is our job to get compliance with highly effective age assurance on these services so that under-16s are not able to get on them. The ultimate outcome that we all want to see is that children are not on those services, but that will depend on more than what Ofcom can do. It will depend on the actions of parents and of kids themselves. It is a broader societal question. We will track it, but it is something that we do not have the control over because it will be decided in families, ultimately.

On the enforcement steps that we have taken so far, I think what Oliver Griffiths said is that we are underwhelmed by the response of the industry in protecting children—and we are. We do not see a safety culture from these large social media companies. When I visit them, you simply do not get that. You get lots of PowerPoint presentations about how they are changing their services, but they are very slow to acknowledge that there are risks of criminal action, child grooming and issues of the way the algorithms feed suicide and self-harm materials. They are extremely low on that.

Perhaps it is not a surprise that they have not been very quick to change their services. That is the context in which the Government are now taking forward a ban, so that these companies will be banned from allowing access to under-16s, because the level of trust that they can clean up their own services is simply not there, and there is good reason for that. I think that is what Oliver was really pointing at.

In terms of our enforcement in the first 18 months, it is true that at the beginning all our cases were small but risky companies. There is a reason for that. To be honest, many people were quite pleased to see that, because they were worried that we were not going to go after the small but risky ones, and we did. That is because they did not engage with us. They did not respond to our efforts to contact them. They did not do risk assessments. They were clearly in breach of the Act very fast. We had a serious concern about harm, so we went straight in there.

Of our 41 investigations, we have closed more than half now, and that was a lot of the small but risky companies because they needed age assurance on porn. In a way, I am not saying it was simple, because none of these cases was simple, but we had clear reason to go in fast, and we did.

The bigger companies have generally played ball with the process. They did risk assessments, and it was not until those risk assessments had been concluded that we were then able to say, “Right, are you applying the code measures?” That is when we were able to move into enforcement. Since the new year, Ofcom has opened enforcement against X for the Grok episode, TikTok, Telegram, Aylo, which owns Pornhub, and now Meta. We are definitely moving into the larger companies where we have concerns, and unless they change their behaviours you will see that more and more from us.

Q63            Chair: Part of the business model is that you recover your costs through fees, and if people are not paying those—

Sir Ian Cheshire: That is slightly different. Basically, the fines are probably the bonus to the Treasury. It is something like that with a spectrum auction. They go back there. With fees, which is one of the litigation points, it will get settled at some point. At that point, that is unrelated to the enforcement. The fees are a separate legal—

Q64            Chair: You do not rely on the fines.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We do not rely on the fines. We rely on the fees. We are still charging fees and expecting them to be paid, even though some contest them.

Q65            Chair: When it comes to the enforcement of the new social media ban on under-16s, you spoke about how there is a lot of learning to be taken from what happened in Australia. The fact is that any self-respecting young person knows how to create a VPN. I spoke to a group of teenagers the other day, and they have zero bother about this new online ban because they all already have plans in place to be able to circumvent it. How significant a challenge does circumvention pose to the effectiveness of this regime at all? Is it going to be worth the paper it is written on?

Dame Melanie Dawes: For current teenagers who are already on social media, know what they are doing and already have that as part of their lives, we may well see, as has happened in Australia, very large numbers of teenagers circumventing it through VPNs and their parents helping them in that. I do not think there is an awful lot that we can do about that, short of taking action against VPNs. That will be a decision for the Government. It is not one that western democracies generally like to do.

I believe that the real prize here is today’s eight to 10-year-olds going to school without the norm that you sign up to the group Snapchat chat in your class, without the norm that your sports fixtures are organised by your teacher on Instagram, and so on and so forth. The real prize here is a sense that the social norms change.

The thing that I find quite shocking—again, this is what Oliver Griffiths, our group director, said recently in Parliament—is the fact that all these social media companies have had a minimum age of 13 for a very long time, and they have completely failed to enforce it. All our data shows that these numbers have not budged: 45% of eight to 12-year-olds on TikTok, a third on Snapchat, a quarter on Instagram, and about two thirds on the adult version of YouTube. Simply requiring them to enforce and put in place those protections will protect a lot of younger kids who are able to get on social media when they are still at primary school at the moment, even though it is not designed for them and it is not what the platforms say they are doing, although they are.

Q66            Nigel Huddleston: I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests.

I want to turn now to the thorny issue of prominence and media literacy. We will park EPGs for the moment—because, Sir Ian, I will come to you on that. Dame Melanie, Ofcom has a requirement to promote media literacy in this digital world with overcrowding of media. It is very confusing. There is a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there. Your remit covers so many areas: it is online, broadcasting, streaming and increasingly now AI. You have come up with a host of recommendations for media literacy. Can you give us a summary of what you are trying to do there?

Dame Melanie Dawes: This is a very good example of where Ofcom’s broad remit makes a lot of sense, because, as you say, media literacy needs to be seen across what is on TV, catch-up, online, YouTube etc. We have, as you say, recently published guidance for online services and broadcasters, joining up across our sectors, under the Online Safety Act.

Essentially, we are saying that there is a lot that platforms can do to equip their users with the ability to navigate what is going on. That may be flagging trusted content. It may be flagging more risky content. It may be giving people more control over their algorithms. We have made a whole raft of suggestions where the design essentially allows people to be more in control and more able to navigate what they receive from the algorithm. It is only guidance. We cannot enforce against it. That is the way the Online Safety Act works.

Q67            Nigel Huddleston: Would you like enforcement? That is my next question. You do not really have teeth to require this, do you, because it is not part of the legislation. Would you like that? Is that desirable?

Dame Melanie Dawes: There are big questions about how you take a prominence regime that we are familiar with on the EPG and on TV, where the public service broadcasters get the priority and that is what you see first. That is now being applied to smart TVs. We will be finishing that work in the next few weeks and that is going live very soon, so that the big PSB players are on the front page and their content is also prominent on the front page through the algorithms.

We have said that we think the next big question is YouTube, because increasingly it is the TV in people’s homes. It is very TV-like. It is highly relevant to this question. All the big broadcasters try to negotiate ways of working with YouTube. There is a question as to whether there should be some statutory underpinnings as to how that should work. The Government are very much looking into that on the back of our recommendations last year.

The final frontier then is social media. That again is under consideration from the Government. It is quite hard, though, because the algorithms are personalised. If people want to have just their own view of the world reflected back to them, they will. That is a much more difficult question. Are there things that you can do to make sure that trusted news is available in a crisis, for example? Are there forms of prominence that can be given to selected trusted media outlets? There is a big question then as to who those are. That tends to be very contentious across the industry. That is all important to have in play. The Government are looking at all of that at the moment.

Q68            Nigel Huddleston: You are right. We had a debate and discussion in Parliament about this already with the Government’s Green Paper. Regarding the point that you raised there of trusted news, we had a bit of a debate earlier with Rupa about this. Is GB News trusted news? Is it the BBC? Is it The Guardian? Is it a press release from No. 10? People will have different views and opinions about this. Are you concerned that Government or a regulator looking into these things will get involved in what is “trusted news”?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are already in that space. The Online Safety Act requires consideration to be given to news providers, as I said earlier. To be honest, freedom of expression and the need for diverse ranges of media is sometimes underplayed in these debates. You have to be quite careful about not excluding providers. If they are not regulated under Ofcom’s broadcasting code, they may be very partial.

There are a lot of podcasts out there, for example. GB News is highly trusted by those who watch it. One person’s trust means something else to other people. It is difficult territory. At the same time, although our public service news providers, and Sky and others, still get a lot of eyeballs on them and are highly trusted by the public, especially in a crisis, that viewing is more fragmented. We need to think about the experience that people are having online, on social media, on YouTube, and elsewhere—and with chatbots, by the way.

Q69            Nigel Huddleston: This is raising the point, though. The Government are looking at trustworthiness and consulting on it at the moment. Is that not a load of nonsense then, for the very reasons you just gave? Is this not really dangerous territory for us to go down? If you have this responsibility as a regulator in the future, are you a bit worried about this?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I do not think it is a load of nonsense. These are difficult questions to answer, but it is right to ask the questions. In the end, were the regulator to decide what is trusted news, that would be quite a big responsibility, and I would want to do that within a very clear framework that Parliament decided, having ironed out some of the complexities already. Are we right to be having this debate? Yes, we are. What are the solutions? They are complicated and challenging, for some of the reasons you described.

Q70            Nigel Huddleston: Sir Ian, do you want to come in here as well?

Sir Ian Cheshire: In a world where most people under 16 get their news from TikTok, that is a national conversation to be had. The opportunity then for people to control that, switch it off or do things becomes an issue, and that is generationally different from what we have seen before. It is a proper conversation. Wearing my former hat and talking to the team at “Channel 4 News”, there is a real concern about the fragmentation of media, meaning that the sources are becoming less and less trustworthy, but I do not think it is for us to try to decide who is trustworthy.

Q71            Nigel Huddleston: True, but it raises the question: who is, then? Somebody ultimately will have to do this, and, with the greatest of respect, we have different views as to which Government Minister should decide that. You mentioned earlier, Sir Ian, an alternative left-wing GB News channel. God help us if that happens. There is something to be said for the wisdom of the crowd.

Sir Ian, we touched on this a little bit, but you have been criticised on the speed with which you have been executing EPG prominence. It has been a debate going on since 2018, with the legislation and so on there. The BBC and Channel 4 both said in the consultation that they do not believe that you are fully using the legal powers to deliver guidance for this prominence in electronic programme guides of the broadcasters and are very concerned about the speed. Is that a fair criticism?

Sir Ian Cheshire: Is this specifically about smart TVs?

Nigel Huddleston: Yes, the smart TVs aspect.

Sir Ian Cheshire: When I was wearing that hat, I was quite keen to keep pushing on smart TVs. There has been a set of issues to do with how Government have wanted to see the regulations impact. I do not think that is entirely at Ofcom’s door.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We set out to the Committee before what our expected timescales are, and we have been slower to implement it. I acknowledge that, and some of that is because the process was sequential with the Government. They had to designate. We had a particular issue in 2024 when the general election changed some of those timescales, for reasons that we all appreciate. The other thing that has happened is that this is highly contested. The BBC, Channel 4 and other PSBs all want more prominence. The smart TVs and some of the systems such as Sky’s argue in the opposite direction. We have had to tease out quite a lot of industry reaction in our consultations. We are coming out with this in the next few weeks. It is nearly done. Then we will implement it. I hope that it will make quite a big difference, particularly on some forms of smart TV where there is very little prominence at the moment, particularly for the smaller PSBs.

Q72            Nigel Huddleston: So watch this space.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Watch this space.

Sir Ian Cheshire: One example is video-on-demand guidelines. We were expecting Government regulations in 2025. They came out in mid-2026. We have sat there and gone, “We will go as fast as we can.” To give the Committee general encouragement, I absolutely listen to people when they say that we are not going fast enough or are too timid. I take the job of communicating what it is that we are doing, and I give you the assurance that there is absolute urgency from our end.

Q73            Nigel Huddleston: It is a bit rich of us here as politicians with the slow process of legislation sometimes to be critical of other entities, but there does seem to be a bit of a theme here about speed of reaction and of response. I wonder if this is one where, as we talked about earlier, Ofcom is too big. There is a debate to be had there. Is it not so much whether Ofcom is too big, but whether you have the resources, skills and capabilities to do all the things that you are required and expected to do at speed?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We do get this. A lot of regulators are criticised on speed. We certainly are. Sometimes—I answered this earlier—our enforcement cases in particular take longer than people would hope. We have to be honest that, when you have a to and fro with a company about information and they do not give you what you needed, you have to go back again, and that adds another couple of months to the process. Some processes just take longer.

Particularly when it comes to our consultations, what we are doing across Ofcom at the moment—we have been doing this for the past year, and Ian has been looking at it as we are developing it—is using some of the new forms of AI, as the Government are, to speed up how we digest consultation responses. On online safety in particular, we are cutting by a quarter to a third some of our planned consultation timings from beginning to end over the next year. We do not really have any choice, to be honest, because there is so much work to do.

We are going to need more resources to implement the social media ban because it is simply just an extra task and pretty big. There are also a number of other demands on Ofcom over things like subsea cables and telecoms security where we cannot take the relatively small teams that we have and give them a whole load of extra work without having something else give. But we are also trying to get more efficient, and we think that we can do that. It is partly efficiency and resourcing, and it is partly speed.

Q74            Nigel Huddleston: You have a huge number of stakeholders to engage with, including some of the largest, most sophisticated and wealthiest companies in the world. You are trying to deal with that. I go back to the question: do you believe that you are adequately resourced to do the job that you are expected to do?

Sir Ian Cheshire: The short answer is yes, but we are asking for more resource, and we are going to come back with a report on how we are going to change online safety to have more impact. The question is impact and speed, and part of speed is perception of speed. We need to do a better job of explaining what we are doing.

The challenge internally is quite clearly set, which is how we can go as fast as we can without doing something stupid that will expose us to legal action. A lot of what we do is a quite court-intensive, legal process and does not move at a very exciting pace.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We always have in mind “more haste, less speed”. Sometimes it is right to take the extra few months, and sometimes we are being too cautious. We do quite a lot of challenge to ourselves on those decisions. Sometimes we have to take the timing extension, and sometimes we absolutely should not and we should press ahead.

Sir Ian Cheshire: It is a live issue that we are conscious of.

Q75            Liz Jarvis: Returning to the issue of media literacy, the Online Information Advisory Committee note on threats to elections recommended that Ofcom commission research on the most effective media literacy strategies for under-18s, which is particularly important given the proposals to extend the right to vote to 16 and 17-year-olds. Are you taking that advice?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are very much thinking about that at the moment. The Online Information Advisory Committee is turning out to be a very good thing from our perspective. We have really good people. It is properly independent. It is giving us really thoughtful advice and, I hope, also informing the public debate a bit. Yes, we are thinking about how we can take that and the other recommendations forward.

Q76            Liz Jarvis: Okay. What specific impact has the Online Information Advisory Committee had on your approach to misinformation and disinformation?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It has given us a proper expert view on that landscape that we had in part before but not as fully as we now have it. It has given us information on how these threats emerge and develop online. It validated some of the things that we are doing, such as our crisis response protocol, which is all about controlling things in a crisis before they get worse. It is also helpful to others, in underlining how difficult these issues are to address, by bringing in things like media literacy, prominence and the availability of trusted news alongside the regulatory aspects. It is not just what you do not like and you regulate to try to remove; it is also about what you do like and making sure that it gets sufficient airtime, prominence and attention from viewers and listeners.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I would add the whole question of possible electoral interference through misinformation, which falls short of where the legal bar is, but what can we do? Conversations with the Electoral Commission are ongoing to work out whether there are pre-emptive things that we can do and learn.

Given that we are about to see in a couple of countries around the world some highly contested elections in places such as Israel and the midterms in the States, we are going to see a huge amount of learning on how this plays out in that social world. While we are not covering misinformation and disinformation in the Act, this will go up the agenda, and the Committee is very helpful in helping us keep abreast of that.

Q77            Liz Jarvis: Are you able to share anything at all from those discussions at the moment?

Sir Ian Cheshire: Not just yet, but that is the learning that I would like to come back to after the elections.

Q78            Dame Chi Onwurah: Moving on to the telecoms network, we are switching off the 2G network, the first mobile network in this country, which still hosts critical services and telecare devices. When you came before my Committee, I expressed concerns that there would be similar cases to what happened when the fixed-line network was switched off and Ofcom issued a fine to Virgin Media of £24 million because it did not offer the proper support. How confident are you that this switch-off will happen without affecting vulnerable customers?

Sir Ian Cheshire: I can give some perspective on it from the sidelines as well.

Dame Melanie Dawes: I am very happy to answer that. On 2G, the three mobile network operators have timescales that range from the back end of 2029 and the beginning of 2030, so it is a few years away. 3G has been switched off without incident.

You are absolutely right that 2G, although it is an older technology, is more likely to be used for telecare as well as some critical national infrastructure. The Government developed a voluntary concordat with the industry earlier this year, which is really helpful, underlining that it must make sure that the right information is provided sufficiently far in advance and that it must deal with vulnerable customers carefully. Ofcom’s rules will also be there as a backstop if we feel that people are not doing what they should do.

Q79            Dame Chi Onwurah: Okay. There was also a voluntary concordat or agreement for the switch-off of the fixed-line network. You had to fine companies in the end after the fact. What are you doing now to make sure that does not happen? The year 2029 is only a couple of years away.

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is only a couple of years away. The difference is that the concordat is in place now before the transition starts, whereas before it was not. The concordat was in place in February this year on the fixed—the PSTN. To be honest, Ofcom had already done a lot of work with the industry on the switching off of the fixed line—the PSTN.

Q80            Dame Chi Onwurah: My point is that those were voluntary measures, and this is also a voluntary measure. What are you doing?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is a mix, actually. The same rules that we enforced against with Virgin Media O2 on PSTN can be applied to 2G. We have statutory guidance here that needs to be followed by operators, and we will absolutely use that if we think we need to. It is also very helpful that the Government have assembled the industry and that partnership.

Q81            Dame Chi Onwurah: I don’t think you’re quite getting my point. The fine happened when there was concern that vulnerable customers had died. It was after the fact. We do not want to get to that point. What data are you collecting? What are you observing? What are you watching? What measures are you taking? I do not want you to be fining after people have died or critical services go down.

Dame Melanie Dawes: No, and we do not either. That particular episode against which we fined happened a few years ago, of course. The incident was, I believe, in the autumn of 2023, as I recall, because it takes a while then to run the enforcement through. We did a lot around that time. We had already done a lot, to be honest, and made clear to the industry what our rules were. It is a shame that—

Q82            Dame Chi Onwurah: What are you doing now to make sure those rules are being followed?

Dame Melanie Dawes: I am sorry if I am not being clear enough. I was trying to explain that we are doing exactly what we always do with these transitions. 2G is no different from PSTN. We are absolutely clear with the industry that it needs to follow our rules.

Q83            Dame Chi Onwurah: With PSTN, people died.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Well, to be honest, no coroner has decided that the PSTN switch-off was relevant. That has not been ascertained in a court. We fined them for not having followed the careful processes that they needed to with vulnerable customers. We certainly did and we are doing the same now. We are absolutely clear with the industry, as the Government are, that as they switch off 2G—eventually, we do need to migrate away from these old technologies—they look after vulnerable customers and critical national infrastructure.

Q84            Dame Chi Onwurah: You are not doing anything differently from what you did with PSTN.

Dame Melanie Dawes: No, we are doing a lot differently. There is a lot that we did before, actually, which was to be clear that the rules were there. It is very regrettable that that company did not follow them on that occasion. Sometimes that happens. The other thing that has happened this time that is very helpful is that the Government have been much quicker to get the industry around the table and sign up to these things, and to get this discussed and debated. The preparations should be better. The communication should be better. We will be there as the regulator, as the back stop, if not.

Q85            Dame Chi Onwurah: Do we have a list of vulnerable customers? Do we have a list of critical national infrastructure that is vulnerable?

Dame Melanie Dawes: The Government are absolutely looking at the critical national infrastructure. It is their job to look across the Whitehall system and pull that together. When it comes to customers, that is a job for the companies. They need to work out where they are, as they do for any telecare customer. They need to be taking many steps to make sure that they are as sure as they can be where those customers are.

Q86            Dame Chi Onwurah: This is one of the things that failed last time, and I do not get any sense of confidence that it is not going to fail again this time and you will be issuing fines after the fact. I do not get a sense of confidence on that.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I would say two things having been in the telecoms situation before. First, I would not underestimate the pain of the learning that people went through last time. Organisations that made comfortable operational promises have found out that did not work. There is a difference this time around because it is not the first time, and we have learned.

Secondly, I am afraid to say that nobody can guarantee zero individual outcomes. It is just not possible with millions. The point is: do we have a really robust process, and do companies take it seriously? If they do, they should be able to mitigate it. There will not be a possibility of some ghastly accident in the middle of nowhere, but we want to focus on the total outcome for the country, and that has to be better as a result of the process that Melanie and her team are going through. I know that the telecoms industry understands it a lot better than it did the first time it came around this.

Q87            Dame Chi Onwurah: Okay. There is an improvement in telecoms sector understanding.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Yes, comprehension of the challenge.

Q88            Dame Chi Onwurah: Can I ask one more question? 2G and 3G are being switched off because of the roll-out of 4G and 5G. When Ofcom measures the quality of service of 4G and 5G, I have to say it does not reflect my experience and that of my constituents, which is the very patchy service across the country. Less capacity appears in the network. Are you looking at how you better measure the quality of service on 4G and 5G networks to reflect consumer experience?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, we absolutely are. Eighteen months ago, we completely overhauled our website because it told you whether you had coverage, but not whether that coverage was good enough and the signal strength was strong enough to use your phone or device how you wanted to at home or at work.

The data is a lot better. We use crowdsourced data, so it reflects the public’s view and not just the projections of the mobile network operators. But it is not perfect; it never will be completely perfect. There are ways that people can use our website to tell us if we are missing something at a local level.

The really important thing is also that we then get the actions going that will improve signal strength at a local level. We have seen in the last few years very significant investment. The coverage is now in quite a good place, but we need to deal with trains. The Government are on to that. Ofcom has made millimetre-wave spectrum available for very high-demand areas like train stations and football stadiums. That is another thing that needs to be sorted out.

Ultimately, a lot of the local issues are about not enough masts being available to deliver the power, and that is a lot of the time about planning permissions from local authorities. We published in June a rather revealing set of charts that showed that, for example, in Richmond, still three quarters of planning permissions for masts are refused. Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast and Edinburgh—I do not know why it is in the devolved Administrations—are coming up the league table, doing a smarter job now and getting the numbers up as well.

I know it is really hard for local authorities; I used to run the Department for Communities and Local Government. Those decisions locally are going to be needed now to drive coverage in the places where people do not have it.

Q89            Dame Chi Onwurah: If I want better coverage in Northumberland or when I go to watch my football team, Newcastle United, at St James’ Park and I can never communicate with anyone, you are saying that that is an issue down to approval of planning permission.

Dame Melanie Dawes: I would hope that at St James’ Park the mobile network operators O2, EE and Vodafone now, or will, make use of the millimetre-wave spectrum we have made available. That should make a real difference. If you have a part of the city or a rural area where there is a hill and the mast does not reach around the geography, it is probably going to need another one. Unless that is consented by the local authority, there is very little that can be done to improve the situation for customers.

The one other gleam of light here, though, is that satellite is increasingly coming forward. There was a story recently about the European Union thinking about this. We have already done this in the UK via Ofcom. We have already supported all three of the mobile network operators in being able to partner with satellite companies so that you can get direct calls using satellite technology on your phone. That will really help for some very remote areas.

Q90            Dame Chi Onwurah: Thank you for that. That is useful. I know that that includes Starlink as one of the satellite companies, which raises issues of sovereignty and reliability, but they are not for this Committee.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Actually, the mobile network operators are not all using Starlink. They are using a variety of providers. I agree with you that Starlink is extremely dominant globally.

Q91            Chair: Dame Melanie, you said in a letter to BT about the proposed acquisition of TalkTalk that the situation posed an “unacceptable risk to consumers”. Obviously, it also represents a huge concentration in the market where BT already has quite substantial market power. Can you explain what you meant by “unacceptable risk to consumers”? Which is more concerning: the service disruption, or the risk of a less competitive UK marketplace?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Look, in the end, we were glad to see that a commercial solution had been found to save the TalkTalk business because it had been in trouble for a while with declining customers, it was heavily loaded with debt and was struggling to find a buyer for the two parts of the business. That had been going on for some time.

The risk that the Government decided to intervene over was that it was going to go into an unmanaged liquidation, and that would have had unmanageable consequences for customers, including 55,000 telecare users and a bunch of other vulnerable customers, as well as some critical national infrastructure—not to mention the connectivity of many other hundreds of thousands of people who would have had to switch network quickly. At that scale, that would have been extremely difficult. That is why the Government decided to intervene.

The CMA is now looking at the competition issues. The deadline for it to do that was last night. The Secretary of State will then need to consider that. That was what she was weighing up. Normally, obviously, a deal like this would go through a much longer competition assessment, and there would be issues, as you described. I do not want to go into too much detail on that because it is a statutory process and we are not the decision taker at Ofcom. It was that public interest, and in particular the impact on customers, connectivity and the economy, that lay behind her decision to intervene.

Q92            Jeff Smith: Moving to a different topic, Sir Ian, you will recall the concerns raised about Ofcom’s approach to complaints from reality TV participants.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I do indeed, yes.

Q93            Jeff Smith: At your pre-appointment hearing, you said it would make sense to look again at the broadcasting code in light of those. What have you done to progress those discussions?

Sir Ian Cheshire: The best thing to say is that you learn and evolve  these codes in the light of experience and as issues arise. We are currently close to getting the Channel 4 report on “Married at First Sight”. We also have something that we cannot talk about in detail: privacy issues raised by one contestant, which is a separate process. At the end of that, we will wait to see what Channel 4 suggests it does on the particular issue, and then that will be a precursor to saying, “Do we need to step back and think more broadly?” I would not want to preclude thoughts on that. That is another live issue.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are waiting for Channel 4’s two independent reports into what happened. We need to hear from it first. I hope it will get that out soon. These things usually take longer than companies realise, but it has taken a while. We have not been waiting during that time. We have been looking at our guidance in the light of what we already know so that we can come out very quickly if we need to. We are not going to wait for a long time—

Sir Ian Cheshire: Take years.

Dame Melanie Dawes: —and launch some huge process of consultation. We have guidance on how reality TV should be run and how contestants should be treated. We have strengthened that quite a lot in recent years because it is becoming an ever more popular format and it comes with risks. We will see what has gone on here when we have the full picture, but we already have quite a lot of information that we are building so that we can strengthen the guidance if we need to.

Q94            Jeff Smith: Okay. It seems pretty clear that it will need strengthening. If you look at the current code, some researchers from Aston University said that “a production can be found to be compliant with the code and yet serious foreseen harm can still occur”. What do you think you can do to strengthen the code to make sure it addresses that?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We are looking into that. It is a risky format, and there is a decision that broadcasters have to make about what level of risk they are taking. Our guidance is there to make sure that thinking and risk assessment are done rigorously. As I say, we are looking at that right now.

Sir Ian Cheshire: The intent of the code is quite clearly to protect people. The question is, if evidence suggests that it is not, we would like to understand the gap between the intent and outcome before we start figuring out what to do.

Q95            Jeff Smith: Okay. When is the report on Channel 4 due?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Any day now. Channel 4 is running those two investigations. They are independent. We are expecting them pretty soon. We are pushing it quite hard to get them over the line now.

Q96            Jeff Smith: You must have some thoughts already, though, about what you can do to strengthen the code.

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes, we absolutely have, and that is what I am trying to reassure you on, I hope. We have not been putting our feet up and waiting for the reports so that we can read them and start to opine. We have been thinking now. We have been having discussions with Channel 4 already. We have a pretty good indication of what we think we might want to do here. We will come out pretty quickly—certainly as quickly as we can—after Channel 4’s reports are published.

Q97            Jeff Smith: That research also talked about how retraumatising it can be for a participant to be told, “We’re not taking any action,” even though they suffered harm. What more can you do to support complainants in those sorts of cases when you do not pursue a case?

Dame Melanie Dawes: If people want to come to us, they can. In this case, we have had a complaint from a participant, so we are considering that at the moment. We certainly have not dismissed it. It is an ongoing inquiry for us. Look, we would always do everything we can to treat people in that situation with great respect, kindness and thought, recognising that sometimes, as you say, going through these processes can in itself be retraumatising. It is an important part of our job to be really thoughtful about that.

Q98            Jeff Smith: Okay. You are thinking about it, but I am not getting any sense of what might actually happen here.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Is there something specific that you would suggest?

Q99            Jeff Smith: No, that is what I am asking you to do.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Okay. We are looking very hard at the current code, which was obviously intended to do something. There is some difficulty in having zero impact if things go through a process and it does not get ruled in somebody’s favour. The question is what support is around that person. I am not sure that is our job to do, but it is an issue that we need to think about.

Dame Melanie Dawes: There are essentially two things here for Ofcom. One is whether we need to strengthen our guidance. We are looking at that right now. We will not delay on it. Secondly, what will our view be on this programme? Sometimes we decide that, even though somebody is really upset by the way they have been depicted in a programme, it does not fall foul of our rules. I am not saying that that is the case here. We are looking into it. It is a live investigation. We always treat complainants really carefully. Sometimes we do not uphold their complaints; sometimes we do.

Q100       Nigel Huddleston: Isn’t one of the complications the fact that not all productions are in-house and, therefore, there are independent production companies involved? What is the stepping stone in terms of the expectations for the requirement? Is it on the broadcaster, or is it that the broadcaster adheres to those guidelines with all the independent production companies, some of them perhaps overseas as well?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is absolutely clear that the accountability is with the broadcaster, with the licensee who has the licence to broadcast in the UK. If it commissions out, which is a very good thing for the wider creative economy rather than it all being in-house, it needs to manage that supply chain very carefully.

Sir Ian Cheshire: That was very clearly my experience at Channel 4. There was a very clear enforcement process from the channel to the commissioners to the production companies.

Q101       Chair: Thank you very much. I know that you have been very patient with us and we have kept you here quite a long time. I want to sweep up on a few little questions about the broadcasting Green Paper—"Watch this Space”. I want your take on it. One thing that came out of it for me is this issue around prominence and whether you are comfortable being placed in the position of judging which news sources are trustworthy.

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is a bit of a hot potato. We discussed that earlier. The industry has certainly had some very strong views on this. There are some who would say, “Keep it very simple. Make it just about the PSBs,” and others who say, “Absolutely not.”

Some of our non-regulated media outlets—what we would have called print outlets back in the day—are very clear that they should be included as well. We do not want Ofcom to be left having to determine this from first principles. It is important that Government and Parliament, if we go down this route, decide what sorts of rules they want to apply here and make some of those big policy choices, because there are lots of different ways that you could cut this depending on what you are trying to achieve.

Q102       Chair: More broadly, YouTube describes itself as a video-sharing platform, so it is not a broadcaster nor a social media company in its eyes. How do you view it? Can you regulate it effectively under the current regime, or is more regulation needed?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It is kind of everything. It is almost in its own special, extremely successful category. It is very much where children now find news and entertainment, increasingly replacing the TV in the home on a large screen.

As we have said before at Ofcom, it is very relevant for this prominence question of how our traditional broadcasters find their viewers. It is incredibly relevant to that. It is almost like a smart TV in that respect, but it is not actually a smart TV, so it is not part of the Media Act prominence regime. It has an algorithm. It has some qualities that are very much about social media.

There will be a question about a social media ban. In the end, again, it is a really good example of how Ofcom can look across the brief. It is owned by Alphabet, so it sits alongside Google with its huge power on the infrastructure side as well as on the search side, and as one of the main AI frontier investors and developers. You have to see it from multiple different routes. It provides a great service to many of us a lot of the time, but it has risks. We need to think about the contribution that it needs to play to protect the creative economy and the public service ecology that we all hold very dear.

Q103       Chair: My question was: do you think that you have the powers to regulate it effectively under the current regime—

Dame Melanie Dawes: Not on the media side; no, not really, which is why we have called for an extension of the prominence principles to YouTube. We have the power to regulate it on the social media side under the Online Safety Act, but it is more on the media side where there are some gaps that we think you need to fill.

Q104       Chair: What is the message coming back from DCMS on that?

Dame Melanie Dawes: This is very much part of the Green Paper, and about prominence on YouTube as well as on social media. That is a very active conversation.

Q105       Chair: When it comes to the media that we see in our own areas, there is a really delicate ecosystem of print, digital, broadcast and community outlets right across the UK. As the BBC expands its online services quite incrementally and supposedly brings advertising into some of its podcasts, to what extent does Ofcom have a role to analyse the cumulative effect on those community outlets and commercial news publishers as well? Do you have the powers that you need to be able to analyse any collective harm, particularly because this BBC competition review has never been conducted?

Dame Melanie Dawes: We have the powers to do that. That is part of the licence fee arrangement, and it is baked in then to the operating framework that defines how we do our regulation. We do a lot of work in this area, for example when the BBC is introducing new radio stations. We get a lot of noise from the industry about where it is using its market power in a way that is inappropriate. It is quite an active part of our work.

Q106       Chair: Do you have the capacity to be able to continue to look at all this despite everything else swirling around you?

Dame Melanie Dawes: Yes. Over the next years and months, the BBC is going to have to cut some services because of the budgetary challenges that it faces.

Sir Ian Cheshire: I was going to say that.

Dame Melanie Dawes: That is likely to be a slightly different question for Ofcom: whether it is still able to fulfil its operating licence. That is what we are expecting to be a bigger part of our work over the next period.

Q107       Chair: When it comes to BBC Radio, this year the BBC replaced its annual spending breakdowns for individual radio services with an aggregate “listen” figure. Is that something that concerns you? It makes it harder for Parliament and licence fee payers to scrutinise how the BBC is allocating its radio budget. Is that something that has come across your radar?

Dame Melanie Dawes: It has not come across my radar. I am happy to take that one away. Our BBC annual report will be coming out quite soon. I am not familiar with that.

Q108       Chair: In terms of the ability for the public to scrutinise where the licence fees go; okay, thank you. Was there anything that we did not ask you that you were burning to tell us in the last two hours?

Sir Ian Cheshire: You did not say anything about spectrum. That is maybe the only one.

Dame Melanie Dawes: We managed to get a bit of satellite in there for you. It is an important part of our work, especially for growth.

Sir Ian Cheshire: Speaking as a multiregulator, for the Committee, it is a real challenge to get all this breadth of topic back. I completely understand. If you think we have not covered stuff, we are super happy to pick up things either when they arise or in the light of my review on social media. We could take it as an ongoing relationship. One thing I am really keen to do is make sure we have transparency and clarity about what we are doing, particularly on the question about speed and urgency. We have clocked that.

Q109       Chair: The comment that I most regularly make about Ofcom when it comes to online safety is that we think it has the teeth. It is a question of whether it has the stomach to be able to do this.

Sir Ian Cheshire: There is lots of stomach this side of the table.

Chair: Excellent. Thank you for your time today. We could have had you here all day and still never exhausted you.

Sir Ian Cheshire: And it would have been fun.

Chair: I am not sure that is exactly how you would want to spend your day. With all that in mind, thank you very much for your time.