Ofcom
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) on securing this important debate. We have heard some very good speeches that demonstrate the sprawling remit of Ofcom. As has been eloquently demonstrated by everyone who has spoken in the debate, the size of that remit is, to a large extent, the reason Ofcom is not proving very effective as a regulator. Whether we are talking about Royal Mail, broadband access, the landline switchover, online safety or broadcasting standards, too many people feel that they are being let down. Too often Ofcom appears slow to act, reluctant to use the powers available to it, and unable to provide the robust enforcement that the public expect. I want to focus most of my comments on one of Ofcom’s largest failings: its failure to protect children from online harms. By Ofcom’s own admission last week, there has been no significant change in the severity or frequency of instances in which children encounter harmful content since the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025. Each hon. Member in this debate has heard deeply distressing accounts from constituents, including parents, carers and young people, about the damage caused by content that young people should not have seen online. It is striking that young people themselves often understand the problem better than those who regulate it. In evidence given to Ofcom for its report on the Online Safety Act, one 16-year-old said: “we need the algorithms to recognise how dangerous these things are, because it only pushes things for them to go viral, it doesn’t consider the safety.” That young person has identified the heart of the problem: left unregulated, social media companies will continue to prioritise engagement and profit through addictive algorithms. That is why we Liberal Democrats called for a parliamentary review within the first six months of the Act, and why the Government must urgently implement film-style age ratings for harmful social media platforms, which should consider not only the content but the risks posed by addictive algorithms, in order to better protect children online. I am conscious that Ofcom today announced its recommendations for age verification ahead of the under-16s social media ban, as referenced by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole. Although Ofcom has set out options including banking-based checks, photo ID or digital ID, it has made it clear that the onus is on social network providers to come up with their own solutions and comply.<span id="254WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="254WH"></span> Keeping young people safe online is essential and we cannot do that if we expose their personal information to big US tech platforms. Leaving social media companies free to choose their own methods incentivises the most intrusive checks, undermining trust in much-needed online safety regulations. As I will set out, the problem with Ofcom allowing social media companies to choose how they comply is that Ofcom does not appear to have the resource to audit companies where risk is identified and then actively enforce high standards. We cannot squander the opportunity to make the internet safer through poor implementation. Ofcom must go back to the drawing board and ensure that age verification is effective, proportionate and privacy preserving, because the reality is simple: social media tech giants do not care about our children’s safety; they only care about how they can profit from them. If we do not act, they certainly will not. The response to the Grok scandal last year illustrates that perfectly. When Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, was used to generate sexualised images of children and women, we Liberal Democrats called for an immediate temporary business disruption order to shut down the site and protect victims. Instead, Ofcom’s investigation dragged on—amazingly, it remains ongoing to this day—while the material continued to circulate. Action was taken only when public outrage forced the platform itself to act. That raises an important question: if Ofcom was unwilling to use its strongest powers in that case, when will it use them? I am not confident that Ofcom has learnt from the incident or that it would use a business disruption order if a similar incident occurred again. Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom has the power to impose financial penalties of up to £18 million, or 10% of global turnover. Ofcom publishes press releases announcing headline fines against non-compliant platforms, but it does not publish data showing how much of those fines is actually collected. It was only during a recent Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee session that Dame Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, revealed that of the 11 fines issued since March last year for breaching the Act, only two have been paid. If nine out of 11 fines remain unpaid, that raises serious questions about Ofcom’s effectiveness and suggests that fines are not acting as a meaningful deterrent. That is why we Liberal Democrats believe that Ofcom should publish clear data not just on how many fines are issued, but on how many have actually been collected and how long enforcement really takes. Parliament and the public deserve to know whether these powers are working in practice. When platforms facilitate the creation or circulation of illegal material, including child sexual abuse material, Ofcom must use all its powers to stop that material from spreading and immediately issue a business disruption order to shut down the platform. Those concerns about enforcement extend to broadcasting regulation, as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole and the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) laid out. When MPs and members of the public write to Ofcom flagging systemic breaches of the broadcasting code, including racist language, disinformation and partial coverage, they are routinely met with a refusal to open a formal investigation. That was also the case when my hon. Friend the Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) <span id="255WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="255WH"></span>—the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport—asked for an investigation into coverage by GB News, a broadcaster that is repeatedly let off the hook despite clear breaches of the broadcasting code. As the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton said, the chair of Ofcom, while giving evidence to the DCMS Committee last week, suggested that a left-leaning alternative could combat GB News—you couldn’t make it up. That is such a problematic statement, which not only acknowledges that GB News is not politically impartial, but reveals that Ofcom does not believe that the solution is to regulate properly. If a broadcaster is failing to meet standards of due impartiality, the regulator’s job is not to hope that another broadcaster can balance them out; the regulator’s job is actually to regulate. We cannot let GB News propaganda turn our Britain into a version of Trump’s America, but I fear that is the way we seem to be going. Misinformation and partial news must be tackled, so either the Government rules are not fit for purpose or Ofcom is not properly enforcing them. At a time when misinformation spreads rapidly with alarming consequences, and trust in our political system is increasingly fragile, effective and impartial regulation has never been more important. In conclusion, we Liberal Democrats have serious concerns about Ofcom’s ability to enforce its regimes overseeing the Online Safety Act and the broadcasting code, as well as a number of other examples that been referenced, such as Royal Mail, broadband and the landline switchover. We believe that the Government must take those concerns seriously and assess options to increase Ofcom’s effectiveness. I am very happy to echo the call from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole for a review. We think that options could include splitting Ofcom into two regulators: one to regulate online and broadcasting content, and the other to regulate communications infrastructure. They could also include the creation of a new online crime agency to effectively tackle illegal content and activity online, which we have been calling for. The public deserve a regulator that acts swiftly, enforces consistently, puts safety first and instils trust in the public.