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Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill [Lords]

I agree. The matter came to my attention through coverage of one of the big CeBIT international fairs in Hamburg. In the massive exhibition, someone had surveillance products, especially child location products. He said, ““I can’t understand why every parent hasn’t rushed to pick up my teddy pack. You can just pop it in your child’s rucksack and have peace of mind.”” How can there be peace of mind if we do not know whether the person who provided the equipment and popped it into a child’s rucksack was a parent or a paedophile? How does the organisation selling the product know whether parents or paedophiles have bought it? My hon. Friend the Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) is right that the escalation of the technology is getting grossly out of hand and we must take hold of it and regulate it somehow. The mass market is being bombarded with one product after another. It is getting bigger and bigger, with more and more different products. It begins with a simple Teddyfone, which is attractive to a child. It would be easy for someone to persuade a child to take one. One may know the location of the Teddyfone, but not necessarily that of the child or whether the child is with the Teddyfone. It should not give peace of mind. The person who has given it to a child could also be tracking it because it can act as a listening-in device. As soon as someone phones it, it states the child’s location. That is dangerous and we have not got the matter under control. My hon. Friend is right that there is a code of practice, which was drawn up with the mobile phone networks, so it covers only that part of the technology—not new forms of satellite technology. That is great if people need to know where someone is if they have had an accident or if somebody wants to use the sat nav system in their car, but not so good if a child is being tracked through that technology, or a jealous stalker is chasing someone. We really do not have the way of controlling it that we need. Although there is a code of practice, it has turned out to be woefully inadequate, and I gave some examples in my speech on my ten-minute Bill. Just in the previous couple of weeks, three journalists had managed to track people without their knowing, outwith the provisions of the code, and they did not meet the requirements of the code. Even in respect of the technology to which the code is meant to apply, it has not been operated properly. We need to get to grips with this matter. Indeed, the person who put me on to looking at it was the adviser to the children’s charities on internet and technology issues, who himself was involved in drawing up the code of practice—he definitely knows about it. One of a number of organisations that have contacted me since I introduced my ten-minute Bill is a company, whose representative has"““sat on the Codes of Practice for Location Based Services since its inception and run what has been ‘audited’ by the networks as the best of the best. I strongly support licensing of this industry””." That comes from within the respectable end of the industry. Action on Rights for Children welcomes my Bill, saying:"““We are extremely concerned about the rapidly expanding market in devices to track the whereabouts of children and young people. We believe this to be a classic example of a technology looking for a market, which in this case has been created by the exploitation of parents’ understandable, though largely groundless, fears for their children’s safety.””" We need to manage—to regulate—this industry. What made me realise that we might be able to do that through this Bill was the welcome inclusion of the provisions on vetting those involved in moderating chat services, which already introduce an element of control of the use of technology on the internet. We have done extraordinarily well in the work that has been done in trying to control other areas of abuse on the internet, such as child pornography, although we are always running to catch up, but let us grab hold of this one before it is too late. I suggested on Second Reading and in Committee that we should try to amend paragraph 2(1)(e) of schedule 3, which is about moderators of chat rooms, but my hon. Friend the Minister wrote to me to say that that would not work in terms of the wording. I accept that, which is why my colleagues and I have tabled an amendment proposing a separate paragraph 2(1)(f), which would make this an additional activity to be regulated. It would not have the same force and range of licensing measures, which I would like us to move towards, but at least it would ensure that those who are involved in providing devices that can be a force for good, but also a potential force for evil, are subject to checks to make sure that they are responsible enough to be allowed to do so. We could then perhaps follow up from that and talk about what other provision we should have for licensing, which I would like to have, in ensuring that the products are given only to the right people, and that there are checks, proper regulations and a proper regime in force on the provision and use of such equipment. We are walking into a world where we could each easily be subject to surveillance without knowing it. If we do not get to grips with that now, it will be too late, and perhaps in a year we will be asking, ““Why didn’t we get to grips with it?”” We have been very slow. The Department of Trade and Industry even gave an enterprise award to one of those products. When we queried whether it should not have checked that out with the children’s organisations in relation to child safety issues, it said, ““Why should we?”” That product supposedly deals with child safety, but the DTI had not clicked about that. Often, there is no matching up between Departments on what should happen, so the DTI does not necessarily know about the good work and expertise that rest, for example, in the Home Office. The Department for Education and Skills does not necessarily know about some of that technology and some ways in which we need to control it. I urge that we take this issue on board and include it as an activity in relation to which we at least ensure that the people providing such services are properly regulated and vetted. We should move to a system of proper licensing for this area of technology. Otherwise, we may just find, even in a year, that we regret not grabbing it early when we had the chance.