Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill

The government’s draft Online Safety Bill does little to protect democracy from damage caused by online actors, despite a previous commitment to take action. Alex Walker argues that this was an error. Here, he analyses the December report of the parliamentary joint committee tasked with examining the bill. A post in early February will critique the conclusions and recommendations of the DCMS select committee, which published its report earlier this week.

In December, the joint committee tasked with scrutinising the government’s draft Online Safety Bill published its report, the conclusions of which were outlined by its Chair, Damian Collins, on this blog. The committee recommended significant overarching changes to the draft bill, which represents the first major attempt in the UK at online regulation.

Since its publication in May 2021, the draft bill has been subject to extensive criticism, including on this blog. In previous posts, I’ve highlighted that it fails to address online threats to democracy. The government’s 2019 Online Harms white paper acknowledged the seriousness of this issue and set out measures to tackle it. These proposals were then later abandoned.

Positively, the committee noted the government’s change of direction and concluded to the contrary that online harms to democracy should be tackled by legislation. Whilst the committee’s recommendations have their own limitations, if adopted they would better protect democratic processes from online harm than at present.

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The government’s draft Online Safety Bill has been subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny by a joint committee of MPs and peers: an unusual procedural step. Following on from publication of its report, committee chair Damian Collins outlines its key findings and recommendations.

On 14 December the Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill, which I chair, published our final report on the government’s plans to ‘make the UK the safest place in the world to be online.’

Keen followers of Westminster will know that a pre-legislative, joint committee of the House of Lords and House of Commons is a rare creature, brought into existence little more than once in the duration of a four-year parliament. When there are high levels of interest in a draft bill across all parties and both chambers, such a committee can prove a useful tool to stress test its most critical clauses. Given that the Communications Act 2003, which established Ofcom, was subject to such scrutiny under the chairmanship of Lord (David) Puttnam, it is fitting that the next major reform in media regulation should have followed the same path.

For me this started in 2018, when I chaired a House of Commons inquiry into Disinformation and ‘Fake News’, followed by another in 2019 into Immersive and Addictive Technologies. These were conducted by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee and called out big tech companies for being ‘digital gangsters’ with users’ privacy and safety, and recommended that the UK set up an independent regulator to hold them to account for any harms they caused.

Fast-forward to 2021, and the government set out to do this, publishing a draft Online Safety Bill in the spring, and setting up a Joint Committee in the summer to scrutinise the proposed legislation. Composed of some of the most longstanding experts in parliament on tech policy, media regulation, civil liberties and business governance, we set straight to work. Over the last five months we have held 30 hours of public evidence sessions and read more than 200 pieces of written evidence. We have spoken with over 50 witnesses: ministers, academics, civil society campaigners, industry executives, whistleblowers, and many other parliamentarians, from the UK and abroad. After many hours of closed deliberations, we unanimously agreed on 127 recommendations.

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