Communications and Digital Committee
1 September 2026
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Communications and Digital Committee House of Lords
00:02 - 01:41
Speaker 1
Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting of the Communications and Digital Committee. It's our first meeting back after Parliament's summer break and it's also the first evidence session of our inquiry into the Online Safety Act. Our aim in launching this inquiry is to examine what impact the Act has had since it was passed in 2023 and how successful its implementation has been to date. And it seems a really timely moment to investigate these issues. It's now a little over a year since the key duties focused on protecting children came into effect in July 2025.
More recently, as we know, the government has proposed introducing new restrictions on children's access to social media, as we know, quite a debate about calling for a ban on under-16s. But just last week in the US, we saw the trial with Meta reach a landmark settlement that will see the company introduce a range of protections for under-18s on Facebook and Instagram. So we will be looking in our inquiry at how the Act has affected a range of different groups and individuals, but children's experiences will be our key focus. And as such, I'm delighted to welcome the Children's Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, to our session today, and thank you for being here. I don't have any relevant interests, but members, if they do have interests to declare, will do that as we're going through.
So, Dame Rachel, you and your predecessor, Anne Longfield, have been working to understand what children's online experiences are like. You've been trying to do that for several years, I think. Could you start by describing for us the online environment children were growing up in before the Online Safety Act was passed and the main risks they faced?
01:41 - 02:09
Speaker 2
Yes, so I came into role in 2021. I'd been a head teacher for 20 years and run a large trust of schools out in East Anglia. And I knew there was a problem. Just before I came in, one of my head teachers, came into this role, one of my head teachers had a young girl who had been bullied online and took her own life and said that that was a factor. So I knew, you know, we knew things were changing.
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