Government is taking a range of measures to protect children and young people from harmful online content.

Through the Digital Economy Act 2017, the government is introducing a requirement for commercial providers of online pornography to have robust age verification controls in place to prevent children and young people under 18 from accessing pornographic material.

In addition we have worked with Internet Service Providers to introduce a rigorous and comprehensive system of family-friendly content filtering, through which parents can help protect their children from viewing harmful content over home broadband networks.

Through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety we have produced a practical guide for providers of social media and interactive services, in which we set out best practices for preventing children from encountering harmful content.

Furthermore, the Data Protection Act 2018 introduced a new requirement for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to produce a statutory code of practice on age-appropriate design. This code will ensure that websites and applications are designed in a way that makes clear what data is being collected on children, how this data is being used, and how both children and parents can stay in control of this data.

Nevertheless there is still more to do, which is why we will shortly be publishing an Online Harms White Paper, which will set out a range of legislative and non-legislative measures detailing how the Government will tackle the full range of online harms and set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe.

The Government takes the welfare of detainees extremely seriously and has carefully considered the HM Chief Inspector of Prison’s (HMCIP) report on Morton Hall immigration removal centre. The service improvement plan will be published on the HMCIP website shortly.

We will closely monitor progress towards implementing these recommendations. Stephen Shaw CBE has been invited to carry out a short review later this year to assess progress against his previous review into the welfare in detention of vulnerable persons.

Unquestionably, there is more that can be done. Some of those sites, certainly some of the pornographic sites, are being addressed in the Digital Economy Bill that is going through the House at the moment. But we are working with the national council and the Samaritans, which in turn are talking to people like Google and YouTube and the digital providers to see what we can do in this area. We have also commissioned a new prevalence study to look at cyberbullying and all those sorts of issues, which will, unfortunately, not produce its results until 2018. So we are very much apprised of this, but, frankly, there is always more that we can do.

The Government takes the issue of child safety online very seriously and has engaged intensively with industry; as a result we have set out a series of measures to help parents keep children safe online. The four main ISPs have committed to giving their customers an easy way to install family friendly filters that will protect all devices in the home. These allow parents to prevent their children from accessing potentially harmful content. All the major ISPs have a category which covers self-harm and suicide, allowing parents to prevent their children from viewing this content.

In addition, the new national curriculum will see children aged 5 to 16 taught about internet safety in a sensible, age-appropriate way, a really important step to help children and young people understand some of the issues.

However, there is no silver bullet and social media sites and users also need to take responsibility. If individuals are having conversations about harming themselves, then both social media sites and other users should point them to places where they can get help.

We have been clear that we expect social media companies to respond quickly to incidents of abusive behaviour on their networks. This includes having easy to use reporting tools, robust processes in place to respond promptly when abuse is reported and where appropriate, suspending or terminating the accounts of those who do not comply with the acceptable use policies. We will shortly be meeting a number of social media companies to discuss what more might be done to protect young people when they are online.