The Bishop of Oxford spoke in support of a group of amendments to the Online Safety Bill designed to encourage a focus on safety by design in technology and online services, and to provide frameworks for assessing risk, on 6th July 2023:
The Lord Bishop of Oxford: My Lords, I broadly support all the amendments in this group but I will focus on the three amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and others; I am grateful for their clear exposition of why these amendments are important. I draw particular attention to Amendment 281A and its helpful list of functions that are considered to be harmful and to encourage addiction.
There is a very important dimension to this Bill, whose object, as we have now established, is to encourage safety by design. An important aspect of it is cleaning up, and setting right, 20 years or more of tech development that has not been safe by design and has in fact been found to be harmful by way of design. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, just said, in many conversations and in talking to people about the Bill, one of the hardest things to communicate and get across is that this is about not only content but functionality. Amendment 281A provides a useful summary of the things that we know about in terms of the functions that cause harm. I add my voice to those encouraging the Minister and the Government to take careful note of it and to capture this list in the text of the Bill in some way so that this clean-up operation can be about not only content for the future but functionality and can underline the objectives that we have set for the Bill this afternoon.
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Baroness Kidron: I think it is a bit wrongheaded to imagine that if we “solve” the porn problem, we have solved the problem—because there is still sexualisation and the commercialisation of sex. Now, if you say something about feet to a child, they start to giggle uproariously because, in internet language, you get paid for taking pictures of feet and giving them to strange people. There are such detailed and different areas that companies should be looking at. This amendment in my name and the names of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, should be taken very seriously. It is not new ground, so I would ask the Minister to reconsider it.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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