Tom Collins MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Sept 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Worcestershire Royal hospital has pioneered a project to ensure that every patient it treats is addressed by the name by which they are known—surprisingly, one in four patients are known by a different name from the one that is on their hospital records. It is a simple step that has improved accessibility, treatment, safety and dignity, and rolling it out across the NHS requires no change to the law, but it does demand leadership from the Government. Will the Leader of the House provide Government time for a debate on how we can modernise the NHS’s culture and practice, to better put patients as people at the heart of its processes?

• 8 Sept 2026 · Online Safety · Hansard source

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  I really welcome the Secretary of State’s statement. We have a massive crisis of digitally enabled child sexual exploitation in the UK. As an illustration, there is a global industry for livestreamed abuse material from the Philippines. The UK is the second largest global consumer and is second only to the US, which is a much larger country. The abuse extends beyond our borders. It extends to adults as well as children on adult devices, and it extends to interfaces as well as content. We will need a broader approach. The Secretary of State is right to identify that technology has disrupted society before. In such cases, we have seen massive expansion, harm and then regulation, and then moved to product safety. I have been working with experts and innovators on how a product safety approach might work. Will she meet me to discuss that?

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  I have been campaigning on modern slavery for over 20 years. Back when I started, most modern slavery in the UK was sexual exploitation, and let me be clear that it was of girls. I put myself in the shoes of a parent whose child was in another country, suffering unimaginable abuse and exploitation. I realised that I would pray every night for someone in that country not to rest until my child was rescued. I realised that I had to be that person in this country, and I brought that sentiment with me to Parliament. The Government have taken some good steps to tackle modern slavery by breaking down the criminal gangs and international organised networks behind small boats, starting to open up more safe and legal routes, and clearing the operational backlog of immigration cases. That is good, but if there is diminishing consideration of cases in which people do not disclose that they were victims of modern slavery straight away, or in which the victims had carried out criminal activity, that goes against the very basic, fundamental, “modern slavery 101” principles of how to tackle modern slavery. Recognising who is a victim and who is a perpetrator, and recognising the effects of trauma, were great accomplishments of the Modern Slavery Act, but I fear that there is now a risk that we will start to see tackling illegal immigration and tackling modern slavery as being in conflict or in tension, when in fact they are entirely aligned. The Secretary of State raised some powerful examples, but they are examples of decision making that was clearly bureaucratic, detached and lacking professional judgement. I echo the comment by the right hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Dame Karen Bradley) that disclosure does not automatically mean a referral under the national referral mechanism. We should be fixing those operational problems. We should be fixing the system, rather than hoping that changing the law will suddenly result in it making better decisions. In fact, I would say that deploying that approach—right the way down to policing and through our multi-agency response to modern slavery in local areas—is a job still to be done, even since we introduced the Modern Slavery Act. We should not be going backwards. We should be surging and pushing forwards to eradicate modern slavery in the UK. If we were to do that, we would find that much of what concerns our communities about illegal immigration would be solved. We must tackle modern slavery head-on. We must strengthen our systems, which are failing at an operational level in their design, decision making and implementation, and we must bring in good governance. For that reason, I really welcome the further discussions with the Government following today to improve this Bill.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  This Government have set out to change culture across the DWP in order to make it far more focused on people, not faceless processes. However, in my constituency of Worcester, people are finding that when DWP services have made mistakes, the reaction continues to be delay, denial and sometimes outright refusal to fix errors. What is the Secretary of State doing to improve the attitudes, values and approaches of frontline client-facing services?

• 16 Jun 2026 · Draft Digital Waste Tracking (England) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  In my constituency, we have already paid dearly the price of waste crime and seen its impacts on our city and the surrounding area, so I really welcome this measure. I think most people would expect that we use digital tools these days to track, trace and gather data on the movements of value streams like this one. As we move forward into a more circular economy and see higher energy waste streams being handled, that becomes all the more important. As an officer in the all-party parliamentary group on critical infrastructure and heritage crime, it is good to see measures coming into place to tackle those areas of crime as well. I note that the regulation introduces a fee and I am interested in the future value for money of that fee. In particular, I note that the Secretary of State has responsibility for the operation of the digital waste tracking system, but it is not clear how that will be administered in practice or to whom the fee will be paid. Can the Minister explain the Secretary of State’s intention on the day-to-day administration of the waste tracking system? Will that be done by the Environment Agency, some other public body, or will it be contracted out to a private entity? Will the Minister also comment on the development of the software? I note from the accompanying papers that it is currently in a private beta test stage, but the optimism bias being used is 400%. Does that indicate a problem or some very high uncertainty on the final areas of development of that software? Apart from those small details, I strongly welcome the regulations and all the Department’s work.

• 15 Jun 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T7. The Department for Education has recently released new guidance for local authorities on the role of family hubs. It describes a significant departure from conventional delivery models; there will be a high degree of network and partnership delivery, not only with public bodies, but with the voluntary sector and businesses—a change in culture that will improve all areas of local authority delivery. What measures might the Department consider to foster and facilitate networking and best practice across local authorities, and will the Minister meet me to discuss how the all-party parliamentary group on family hubs, which I chair, might help to deliver that culture change?

• 8 Jun 2026 · Digital Safety: Children · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Government’s position on this issue. We know that the technology is capable and present. I have spoken to those in the UK developing it, but it is being realised against headwinds, because there is no pull. For every other product area or technology, consumers rightly expect safety, and that is built into our product safety laws, but that is not the case with digital. There is no pull for this technology from the big tech companies. Does the Minister agree that we should move in a direction that creates this pull for innovation, for safety as a value and for technology that delivers safety? Such innovation could be enriching our economy as much as the technology at the moment is threatening people’s health.

• 2 Jun 2026 · Milburn Review: Interim Report · Hansard source

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  The report identifies the importance of the home learning environment, a dry term that recognises that children do not grow up in isolation but are in rich relationships, and that parental skills, parental relationships and secure attachment all matter. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on family hubs, I am pleased that the Minister has mentioned the Government’s investment in family hubs. With the new guidance, they are set to be a rich network of partnerships to support families. Does he agree that that should be cause for us to double down on our plans to roll them out quickly and successfully?

• 19 May 2026 · Energy Security · Hansard source

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  I agree with so much of what my hon. Friend is saying. We need to be ambitious, and we need to be looking at the big picture and fixing systems as well as situations. Like her, I want to see us being far more ambitious from here onward. The headings of the Bills in the King’s Speech offer huge potential for us to do things that are far more transformative and meaningful, and address the root causes of many of the problems we face. Does she agree that if the Government take a radical, different approach to working through the Bills in this King’s Speech, there is a chance to deliver the kind of change we have been hoping for?

• 18 Mar 2026 · Royal Mail: Performance · Hansard source

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  Many people in Worcester are very frustrated by the delays in the Royal Mail service, which are impacting their healthcare and their access to money. However, having spoken to Citizens Advice, I know that this is not an issue of the moment, nor one restricted to Worcester; it is much bigger than that. I thank the Minister for his action on this issue. However, having met Royal Mail representatives myself, what is even more concerning than everything else is how hard it is to get acceptance from the company about the issues that exist, a straight story and openness. That makes us question the character as well as the competence of Royal Mail’s management. We need meaningful discussions, and truthful and realistic dialogue. We also need to reflect on reality and to consider our part in this situation. Royal Mail is under obligations that are not commercially sustainable and it does not receive the money to meet them. It is now in a doom loop of increasing prices and declining demand. We all deeply value Royal Mail. We want it to be healthy, thriving and serving us well. We need to tackle this issue head-on, so I urge the Minister to help us to get everything on the table, get everyone around the table, and fix this situation.

• 5 Mar 2026 · Palliative Care · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) for leading on this topic. I have seen palliative care fail. My mum, Alison, had ovarian cancer. She died lonely and in dreadful indignity in a hospital ward intended for recovering liver and kidney patients. She felt a burden to a nursing team who were used to people getting better. She was waiting for a hospice bed, but, as it turned out, the waiting time was longer than she had. In my constituency, we have hospices with superb facilities. Both Acorns children’s hospice and St Richard’s hospice are beloved institutions in our city, but they are struggling and it is vital that we support them. Clearly, we need more hospice capacity, but the deficiencies in palliative care are vast, and my lurking, uneasy suspicion is that many of them are not hospice-shaped, but reflect deeper deficits across our NHS.

• 5 Mar 2026 · Palliative Care · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is entirely right. We need far better integration across those services. I was heartbroken to see that the palliative care that my mother was receiving seemed to have been outsourced to charities, and was not being provided by the NHS at all. That specialist care ought to be something that is native to our NHS. I was recently talking to a couple of GPs in Worcester. Speaking with them is a refreshing change. While their work is in diagnosing and treating illness and, to a good extent, preventing it and promoting healthy lives, for them, palliative care is not an exception; it’s a Monday. With an ageing population, end-of-life care is really an emerging flavour in medical care. Bodies do not last forever, and the balance of benefits of treatment versus the very human costs of pain, inconvenience and indignity starts to change. Medics dealing with palliative care understand that our bodies are intermingled, complex systems, and that they are one part of what we are: complex, intermingled physical, psychological, social and spiritual beings with rich tapestries of relationships, values, perspectives and experiences. “See the problem, name the problem, fix the problem” just does not cut it as an approach. We must treat the whole person, or we risk mistreating them. Sadly, our urgent and acute systems of diagnosis and treatment are simply not designed for this approach. Palliative care is by and large out of mind and out of scope. Care is siloed into specialties, patients become units of flow and relationships are substituted out for transactions. This is reflected in the stories I hear from constituents in Worcester: stories from people with multiple complex conditions who are locked in the flip-flop between specialisms, where alternately one gets managed well and the other slips into neglect; stories of people who feel unheard, unvalued and anonymously shipped to different hospitals in different areas under different trusts; and stories of people who, when their wellness takes a dip, do everything they can to avoid calling an ambulance and the inevitable prodding, poking and a long, cold night in A&E corridors that follows. This has to change. Addressing our gaps in palliative care demands a fundamental shift in the way our NHS thinks and works. Here and there, there will be a place for the cut-and-shut quick surgical procedure, a course of antibiotics, or a cast, a sling and a suggestion not to do it again, but the primary role of healthcare needs to be one that sees the human being and works in relationship for their wellbeing. In fact, best practice in palliative care is often remarkably similar to treatment for recovery: setting small, achievable goals and working with patients to fulfil them. An NHS informed by this approach would most likely be more effective across the board. With that foundation, the opportunities for a better, more holistic and properly resourced approach to palliative care can start to open up. I would like to touch on the topic of assisted dying. I found debate on the Bill difficult to navigate, largely for the reasons I have discussed. The overwhelming message I have heard from medical professionals is that we need to improve the way we navigate the end of life as things stand today, break the taboo of death and develop care that meets the practical, physical, psychological, spiritual and social needs of patients and their families, and make that available to all. As we do that, treatments that shorten but enhance life would undoubtedly play a role, but they must sit at the apex of a well-developed practice in end-of-life care that we do not yet have. This should be a major and urgent priority for us, not least because the drive towards excellent palliative care can only improve our systems and approaches overall, enabling us to deal better with complex needs, putting patients’ perspectives at the centre of system design, and plugging gaps so that patients are no longer able to fall through them. By taking proper ownership of palliative care, we can end experiences like my mum’s, and in doing so, we will also make a better NHS.

• 3 Mar 2026 · Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill · Hansard source

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  A few of my colleagues have been offering jokes. I was not able to prepare detailed remarks, so I hope they will forgive me if I just wing it. [Laughter.] Although we have discussed decarbonisation a number of times in this debate, it has not been said yet that the Bill is about addressing the climate crisis. That incredibly important and urgent piece of work demands the utmost urgency and ambition. For that reason, I naturally support it and what it is trying to achieve. Similar mechanisms have been incredibly successful in developing the thriving renewables industry that we now see in the UK, which provides a lot of our energy. It is worth while recognising that the Bill is part of a much longer journey to decarbonising aviation. I declare an interest early in my remarks: I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on hydrogen. In a very long timeframe, we can potentially see aviation using cryogenic hydrogen as a fuel source, so we should keep that in view. Similarly, SAF has various generations of development, with different feedstocks and mechanisms of production. The fuels also have different characteristics and ways of interacting with gas turbine technology. Therefore, the devil will absolutely be in the detail of the mechanisms that the Government are putting forward to build a market for the various generations of SAF. I hope we will see more detail about that strategic approach as this legislation goes forward. It is important, as the amendments make clear, that the UK benefits from what we are doing in the Bill. I am passionate about seeing the whole UK low-carbon energy supply chain building and scaling rapidly. That includes electrons—the Government already have very ambitious goals around decarbonising electricity—as well as molecules and hydrogen. We are still awaiting the hydrogen strategy. I recently spoke to the Minister about that, and I understand that it is close. It is incredibly important that we have an ambitious and comprehensive strategy for the development of the hydrogen economy in the UK that does not just serve a small number of industrial clusters but underpins our decarbonisation of electricity, provides dispatchable power and provides an opportunity for industrial renewal as we move forward. Hydrogen is an important feedstock for producing SAF by any route. We need a hydrogen economy, and for that we need a price. For a price, we need storage and transmission. As we fulfil our desires for SAF to be ambitious, bold and effective in decarbonising, we must also do the work as a Government to build a hydrogen economy to establish that anchoring price, as well as demand and production, so that we can see a thriving, decarbonising aviation sector, the renewal and regeneration of the whole UK industrial sector, and an absolute renaissance underpinned by low-carbon energy—both electrons and molecules.

• 23 Feb 2026 · Kinship Carer Identification · Hansard source

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  Sometimes, a child’s birth parents cannot look after them. Around 100,000 children in the UK are looked after by the state, and most of us are familiar with the concepts of adoption and fostering. But it is estimated that well over 100,000 children in the UK are being raised by members of their extended family, or by friends of their family: they are being cared for by kinship carers. An ever-increasing number of children are now in kinship care, and staying with a family member or friend has a range of benefits over being looked after by the state. Kinship care can reduce trauma, provide valuable stability and help children preserve their sense of identity and connection to their community. Yet, despite being both widespread and beneficial, kinship care has remained undervalued and under-recognised by our systems. It is astonishing that, as of yet, councils are under no obligation to ensure that potential kinship placements are always explored and assessed for suitability before children become looked after. Yet children who grow up in kinship care are more likely to be kept with their siblings compared with those in foster care, have better social and emotional wellbeing and better long-term physical health, and are more likely to have stable permanent homes, achieve higher levels of employment later in life and report that they feel loved. Making kinship care the first choice rather than the lucky product of chance is a simple change, and I hope the Minister might speak to its pursuit. There are other ways in which kinship carers could be put on a more equal footing. For example, many would be helped to stay in active employment by being allowed employment leave rights equal to those of parents who are adopting. That is another simple change that could make a big difference. There is one way in which our systems are very clearly failing children and their dedicated carers that I would like to address. I would like to share some experiences of kinship carers that, sadly, are typical, as they frequently struggle to prove to hospitals, schools, doctors and dentists that they have parental responsibility.

• 23 Feb 2026 · Kinship Carer Identification · Hansard source

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  It is true that there is a real diversity in the situations of kinship carers, both in the causes of people finding themselves caring for young people and in the legal structures that they are operating under. We totally recognise that, as we move forward in trying to tackle these issues, we need to be really open-eyed to that full range of different experiences and situations. Caroline tells her story: “Eve landed on her arm, screamed out in pain, one look and I knew it was broken. I took her to the emergency department…and she was admitted immediately to the children’s ward. An X-ray was taken and Eve was administered morphine. The consultant booked Eve in for an operation the following day. She had been on morphine all night to help her with the pain. The surgeon came round and explained the procedure. Eve was prepped and then the anaesthetist came with a form to sign. He asked who I was. I told him I was aunt and the legal guardian. He then asked to see my legal order. I told him that no one had asked…He said, ‘I refuse to administer anaesthetic without seeing the legal document.’ I had been up all night with a crying young girl; the last thing I thought about was a legal order. I called my husband, who had to leave work to go home and find the document. It took two hours for the photo ID to be sent…During this time, Eve was hooked up to morphine. We had to wait for the anaesthetist to finish his surgery list to look at the photo on my phone, which was accepted in the blink of an eye.” Steph points out that this happens consistently: “I have to show copies at all doctors, dentist, school, etc. Any time we have to make a decision for him I have to show proof. Can you imagine if I lost that piece of paper? It’s not right having to explain that you are the carer in front of the child again and again. Imagine how the child feels.” Sadly, these situations are typical and, as Steph points out, they can be deeply traumatising for both children and carers. Christine says: “I really don’t want to carry my SGO with me; I’m worried I will lose it or it will get into the wrong hands.” She is not alone. It is also perhaps unfair of us to expect clinical professionals to recognise the various forms of legal document that are not recorded on any Government system but instead live as paper artefacts with mysterious acronyms such as SGO, special guardianship order, or CAO, child arrangement order. How can we be failing children and kinship carers so badly? Yet there is hope. Christine goes on to say: “We should be given a card with a barcode and all the details they need to know so that you can keep it in your purse.” Caroline agrees: “We need an ID card that will live in my purse, so I don’t have to go through this again.” Kinship Carers UK, a national charity based in my constituency of Worcester, has the answer. It is ready to help develop an authorised photographic kinship carer ID card and app for all carers, regardless of the type of legal order. This card would allow kinship carers to live fully prepared for any eventuality. It would allow clinical staff to immediately recognise and validate a kinship guardianship situation and to deliver best practice in trauma-informed care, never requiring a family to retell their story or relive past trauma simply to access basic care. The benefits go further. Preventing the situation described by our kinship families would save money as well as distress. The cost savings to councils on social worker time no longer spent answering queries or to the NHS in rebooked appointments are hard to quantify, especially as the Office for National Statistics has not managed to identify all kinship children, and health trusts do not record instances of rebook treatments for that reason. Even conservative estimates show a kinship carer ID card paying for itself within a year. Kinship Carers UK has already been in talks with the Department of Health and Social Care and has received a positive response. It is ready to fundraise to secure resources for development, but talks have stalled, as work on the NHS app pushes a full digital implementation of a kinship carer ID back to potentially 10 years away. For kinship families, that is too long, and we as a Government of action, innovation, partnership and collaboration can do better. With a co-ordinated plan in partnership with the Department for Education, DHSC and possibly the Ministry of Justice, Kinship Carers UK can lead a consortium of charities to realise the ID card and information resources for NHS workers. That could be realised within two years, with later digital integration with the NHS in a decade. My ask of the Minister is simple: will he and the Secretary of State for Health arrange to meet Kinship Carers UK and myself to formulate a plan with the goal of having authorised kinship carer ID cards issued by the end of 2028, for final adoption by the NHS by 2035? It is time for us to act and do what kinship carers are asking us to do and make the system work for them, not against them. Kinship carers work tirelessly to give the children they raise the very best opportunities in life; let us match their commitment. Let us commit to ending the stories we heard this evening and begin a new one: when this Government stepped up and delivered the kinship ID card.

• 23 Feb 2026 · Kinship Carer Identification · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising good cases and good examples that we might like to follow. I also appreciate his having spoken to me beforehand about his experiences with the situation in Northern Ireland. I would like to share the experiences of Clare. She said: “I rushed into A&E in a complete panic. I was carrying my two-year-old nephew…who was struggling to breathe. The receptionist barely looked up as she asked me my nephew’s name and date of birth. Her next question filled me with fear: Who are you? As I answered, she looked up and I knew what was coming—a barrage of questions about why I had taken care of this child. Where was his mother? Could I prove that social services knew he was in my care? And—most terrifyingly of all—did I know that the hospital could not treat him without the consent of someone with parental responsibility? He was struggling to breathe, his face white as a sheet and his chest heaving, while this person was calmly telling me they couldn’t help.” Donna’s step-grandchild was badly injured. The only thing she could do was call the local authority to see if it would vouch for her. It took two hours for the call to be returned. The child had lost blood and was in tremendous pain. Only once it was explained by the social worker that Donna was the legal guardian did they give him pain relief and begin to treat the injury. However, the injury required surgery and at a hospital in the next county, an hour’s drive away, Donna once again had to explain who she was. No one from the first hospital was there to verify that Donna was the carer. She had to call children’s services again and wait four hours for verification.

• 21 Jan 2026 · Draft Medical Devices (Fees Amendment) Regulations 2026 · Hansard source

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  I am very pleased that the Government have taken this approach of listening carefully, responding and trying to build a solution that is manageable and predictable, with a phased transition. As an engineer, I know that safety of products is absolutely paramount. Features such as post-market surveillance are incredibly important, along with the rest of the good regulation system. I am therefore pleased that the Government have taken this seriously, with careful thought and while ensuring that, primarily, patients remain safe. I will raise one specific case with particularly significant implications for patients. People who rely on continuous insulin therapy, such as those with type 1 diabetes, depend on devices—insulin pumps, primarily—to live their daily lives. Their interaction with the pump is frequent—the relationship is deep—and the device plays a significant role in their life. People will often keep an insulin pump for a number of years, becoming very familiar with its operation. It is important to note that such devices are increasing in sophistication. In recent years, we have seen some incredible advances in technology, such as continuous glucose monitoring, and there are now more and more pumps on the market with closed-loop control, where the delivery of insulin responds in real time to the patient’s blood glucose level. That has been a transformative technological step forward, but it puts a lot more sophistication into the devices and requires a lot more integration with other devices, such as the CGM devices. That means that patient’s relationship with the pump gets even more sophisticated and deep, and their ability to manage a healthy lifestyle depends critically on the device and their relationship with it. Increasingly, too, patients are dependent on an online platform and a continuous service agreement to maintain the use of the systems and their integrations. My concern is that if we now introduce a way for a registration to expire early, or for its maintenance not to be renewed, that could create a sense of insecurity or some practical insecurities for patients with insulin pumps. Despite the fact that for an individual medical device, the fees are indeed modest—especially when put in context—we can also imagine situations in which unscrupulous manufacturers might decide that withdrawing a product early suits their product road map and their profit margins. It is important that patients understand that they are safe, that we have mitigated such risks, that patients have control over when and how they change their pump technology, and that it will not be taken away from them for any reason, but in particular for commercial reasons outside their control. I am confident that the risks can be managed and mitigated, alongside the draft regulations as they into effect, working with the NHS. I am very grateful for the open and collaborative response that I have had from the Minister and the Government up to now on this topic. I put it on the record that it is important that we investigate the potential impacts on this particularly vulnerable group of users, to ensure that they are not compromised or put at a disadvantage as we introduce these important and valuable regulations.

• 13 Jan 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.

• 13 Jan 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Patients in Worcester are struggling to access urgent care. Far too many are falling through gaps in our system, with devastating consequences and huge amounts of double work, and patients feel that they have to travel too far for treatment. Will the Secretary of State meet me to discuss the results of my deep dive into the failures in Worcestershire’s NHS?

• 12 Jan 2026 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T8. Families in Worcester are trapped in damp and mouldy homes. Disabled tenants are stuck without facilities and access, and repairs are going unaddressed—all because Platform Housing refuses to get its act together. What can we do about failing social landlords such as Platform?

• 6 Jan 2026 · Gas-fired Power Stations · Hansard source

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  3. What estimate he has made of the cost of building new gas-fired power stations.

• 6 Jan 2026 · Gas-fired Power Stations · Hansard source

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  The National Energy System Operator’s clean power 2030 plan relies on unabated gas power stations, without a clear plan for their decarbonisation after 2030. The forthcoming hydrogen strategy presents a natural opportunity to set long-term goals for the wider integrated energy system, including hydrogen-fired combined cycle gas turbine generation, and long-term salt cavern energy storage at scale. Will that strategy include a quantified pathway with delivery milestones for transitioning dispatchable power, and will NESO be required to incorporate that pathway into its planning?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. At its birth, the internet was envisaged as a great advancement in a free society: decentralised, crowdsourced and open, it would share knowledge across humanity. As it grew, every one of us would own a platform and our voice. Of course, since then bandwidth has increased massively, which means that we now experience a rich variety of media. Storage and compute have increased by many orders of magnitude, which has created the power of big data, and generative capabilities have emerged quite recently, creating a whole new virtual world. Services no longer simply route us to what we were searching for but offer us personalised menus of rich media, some from human sources and some generated to entertain or meet demands. We are now just starting to recognise the alarming trends that we are discussing today. Such rich media and content has become increasingly harmful. That compute, storage and big data power is being used to collect, predict and influence our most private values, preferences and behaviours. Generative AI is immersing us in a world of reconstituted news, custom facts and bots posing as people. It increasingly feels like a platform now owns every one of us and our voice. Harms are dangerously impacting our young people. Research from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate illustrates some of the problems. On YouTube, the “Next Video” algorithm was found to be recommending eating disorder content to the account of a UK-based 13-year-old female. In just a few minutes, the account was exposed to material promoting anorexia and weight loss, and more than half the other recommended videos were for content on eating disorders or weight loss. On TikTok, new teen accounts were found to have been recommended self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of scrolling the “For You” feed. Suicide content appeared within two and a half minutes, and eating disorder content within eight. Accounts created with phrases such as “lose weight” received three times as many of these videos as standard teen accounts, and 12 times as many self-harm videos. Those are not isolated incidents, and they show the scale and speed at which harmful material can spiral into exponential immersion in worlds of danger for young people. On X, formerly known as Twitter—a trigger warning for anybody who has been affected by the absolutely appalling Bondi beach Hanukkah attack—following the Manchester synagogue attack, violent antisemitic messages celebrating and calling for further violence were posted and left live for at least a week. ChatGPT has been shown to produce dangerous advice within minutes of account creation, including guidance on self-harm, restrictive diets and substance misuse. I am grateful to hon. Friends for raising the topic of pornography. I had the immense privilege of being at an event with a room full of men who spoke openly and vulnerably about their experiences with pornography: how it affected their sex lives, their intimacy with their partners or wives, their dynamics of power and respect, and how it infused all their relationships in daily life. They said things such as, “We want to see it, but we don’t want to want to see it.” If adult men—it seems from this experience, at least, perhaps the majority of adult men—are finding it that hard to deal with, how can we begin to comprehend the impact it is having on our children who come across it accidentally? This can all feel too big to deal with—too big to tackle. It feels immense and almost impossible to comprehend and address. Yet, to some, the Online Safety Act feels like a sledgehammer cracking a nut. I would say it is a sledgehammer cracking a deeply poisonous pill in a veritable chemistry lab of other psychoactive substances that the sledgehammer completely misses and will always be too slow and inaccurate to hit. We must keep it, but we must do better. As an engineer, I am very aware that since the industrial revolution, when physical machines suddenly became immensely more powerful and complex, a whole world of not just regulations but technical standards has been built. It infuses our daily lives, and we can barely touch an object in this room that has not been built and verified to some sort of standard—a British, European or global ISO standard—for safety. We should be ready to reflect that model in the digital world. A product can be safe or unsafe. We can validate it to be safe, design it to be safe, and set criteria that let us prove it—we have shown that in our physical world since the industrial revolution. So how do we now begin to put away the big, blunt instrument of regulation when the problem seems so big and insurmountable?

• 15 Dec 2025 · Online Safety Act 2023: Repeal · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. My hon. Friend is right. All those algorithms now have hidden interests, which are sometimes just to increase use, but I think we all strongly suspect that they may stray into political agendas. It is remarkable how powerful that part of the online world is. My personal view is that it is not dissimilar to the R number during covid. If a person sees diverse enough content, their worldview will have enough overlap with other people that it will tend to converge. In the old days, “The Six O’Clock News”, or the news on the radio, provided us with shared content that we all heard, whether we agreed with it or not. That anchored us to a shared narrative. We are now increasingly in echo chambers of reality where we are getting information that purports to be news and reactions that purport to be from human beings in our communities, both of which reinforce certain views. It is increasingly possible that the R number will become greater than one, and our worldviews will slowly diverge further and further. Such an experiment has never been carried out on a society, but it strikes me that it could be extremely harmful. While we are exploring this theme, I would like to point to the opposite possibility. In Taiwan, trust in the Government was at 9% when the digital Minister took office. They created a digital platform that reversed the algorithm so that, instead of prioritising content based on engagement—a good proxy for how polarising or divisive something is—it prioritised how strongly content resonated with both sides of the political divide. The stronger a sentiment was in bridging between those two extremes, the more it was prioritised. Instead of people competing to become more and more extreme, to play to their own audiences, they competed to express sentiments and make statements that bridged the divide more and more. In the end, as the system matured, the Government were able to start to say things like, “Once a sentiment receives 85% agreement and approval, the Government will take it on as a goal. We will work out how to get there, but we will take it as a goal that the public say we should be shooting for.” By the end of the project, public trust in the Government was at 70%. Algorithms are powerful—they can be powerful for good or for ill. What we need to make sure is that they are safe for us as a society. That should be the minimum standard. Finally, we can imagine harms that apply at a societal level but come through interaction. That comes, I would say, when we start to treat machines as if they are members of our society—as people. When I first started exploring this issue, I thought that we had not seen that yet. Then I realised that we have: bots on social media and fake accounts that we do not know are not human beings. They are not verified as human beings, yet we cannot help but start to believe and trust what we see. I would say that it is only a matter of time before these bots become more and more sophisticated and with more and more of an agenda—more able to build relationships with us and to influence us even more deeply. That is a dangerous threshold, which points to the need for us to deal with the issue in a sophisticated way. What next? It is critical that we first start to develop tools—technically speaking, these are models—that classify and quantify these hazards to individual people and to us as a society, so that we can understand what is hazardous and what is not. Then, based on that, we can start to build tools and models that allow us to either validate products as safe—they should, I agree, be safe by design—or provide protective features. Already, some companies are developing protection algorithms that can detect content that is illegal or hazardous in different ways and provide a trigger to an operating system to, for example, mask that by making it blurred or opaque, either at the screen or the camera level. Such tools are rapidly becoming more and more capable, but they are not being deployed. At the moment, there is very little incentive for them to be deployed. If, for example, we were to standardise in the software environment interfaces or sockets of some kind so that these protective tools could be plugged into operating systems or back ends, we could create a market for developing more and more accurate and capable software. In the world of physical safety, we use a principle called “state of the art”. In contrast to how we all might understand that term, it does not mean the cutting edge of technology; rather, it means safety features that are common enough that they should be adopted as standard and we should expect to have them. The automotive industry is a great example. Perhaps the easiest feature for me to point to is anti-lock brakes, which started out as a luxury feature in high-end vehicles, but rolled out into more and more cars as they became more affordable and accessible. Now they come as standard on all cars. A car without anti-lock brakes could not be sold because it would not meet the state of the art. If we apply a similar principle to online protection software, tech companies with capable protections would have a guaranteed market. The digital product manufacturers or service providers would have to keep up; that would drive both innovation and uptake. These are already practised in industry. They cost the public purse nothing and generate growth, high-value jobs and national capabilities. Making the internet safe in the right way does not close it down; it creates freedoms and opens it up—freedom to trust what we are seeing; freedom to use it without being hurt; and freedom to rely on it without endangering our national security. There is another parallel. We would not dream of building a balcony without a railing, but if we had built one we would not decide that the only way to make it safe was to declare that the balcony was for use only by adults. It still would not be safe. Adults and children alike would inevitably come to harm and many of our regulations would not allow it: in fact, there must be a railing that reaches a certain height and is able to withstand certain forces, and it must be designed with safety in mind and be maintained. We would have an inspection to make sure it was safe. Someone designing or opening a building with an unprotected, unbarriered balcony could easily expect to go to prison. We have come to expect our built environment to be safe in that way; having been made robustly safe for adults, it is also largely safe for children. If we build good standards and regulation, we can all navigate the digital world safely and freely. Likewise, we need to build the institutions to ensure fast and dynamic enforcement. For services, there are precedents for good enforcement. We have seen great examples of that when sites have not complied, such as TCP ports for payment systems being turned off instantly. That is a really strong motivation for a website to comply. It is fast, dynamic and robust, and is very quickly reversible, as the TCP port can be turned back on and the website can once again accept payments. We need that kind of fast, dynamic enforcement if we are to keep up with the fast and adaptive world working around us. On the topic of institutions, I would like to point out—I would not be surprised if my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (John Slinger) expands on this—that when television and radio came into existence, we built the BBC so that we would have a trusted source among those services. It kept us safe, and it also ended up projecting our influence around the world. We need once again to build the institutions or expand them and the infrastructure to provide digital services in our collective interest.