Damian Hinds
MP for East Hampshire · Conservative · United Kingdom
“There are moments in debates like the one we have had today that are difficult to sit through and listen to, but it is the most immense privilege to be a Member of Parliament and to hear some of these testimonies.”
“Today is once again a day of heavy responsibility for all of us to decide on what we in this House call “conscience issues”. Many of the people who we represent hold strong and immutable views, and we hear from them. However, we represent many others who hold much more nuanced views and we are less likely to hear from them.”
“Members who support the Bill should not have their motives questioned, Members who oppose the Bill should not have their motives questioned, and Members who have reached a different conclusion from one they reached at an earlier stage should not have their judgment questioned either.”
“We have heard from royal colleges and other professional bodies, many of whom have a neutral stance on the principle but raise significant questions about particular aspects. We know from Ministers that there would need to be some reprioritisation of NHS resources, but we do not know the extent.”
“If there is the prospect of the Parliament Acts being used, that would increase the importance and the salience of the text as it is now. Today, it is reasonable and entirely in order for hon. Members to consider information that is available now that was not available in those previous parliamentary deliberation.”
“The Government have said, rightly, that the time taken to implement other schemes is not directly comparable, because none are as in this Bill. This is a free vote on a matter of conscience—there is no party line on either side of the Chamber. No one, I suggest, finds this issue easy.”
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“This Bill is about abolishing the independent institute that sets standards and passing those powers not to Skills England but to the Secretary of State. That is what Skills England is. Ministers are bandying about all these fancy terms about agency this, and agency that, but it is part of the Department for Education. When it comes to working across Government, I have no reason to believe that this new part of the DFE will be any more equipped to work across Government, let alone across the whole economy, in solving some of these issues.”
“I say to Ministers that if all it takes to solve our skills challenges is a new body, a machinery of Government change, do they not think that one of the previous 12 would have managed that already? Ministers, especially those in new Governments, like to create something new, and, in this case, they think that they have something new that business wants, which is a quango—except Skills England is not even a quango. I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for indulging me thus far in talking about all these things, because none of them is in the Bill. This Bill is not about Skills England. There are, I think, two mentions of Skills England in the text of the Bill and I think that they were both inserted by the House of Lords.”
“Over 50 years in this country, we have had industrial training boards, the Manpower Services Commission, the Training Commission, training and enterprise councils—TECs—which were different from another TEC, the Technician Education Council, which existed alongside the Business Education Council, or BEC. BEC and TEC would eventually get together to give us the Business and Technology Education Council, or BTEC. There were national training organisations, the Learning and Skills Council, sector skills councils, the UK Commission for Employment and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency, or SFA, which would later become the Education and Skills Funding Agency, or ESFA. Lately, we have had local skills improvement plans and IfATE. Now we will have Skills England, which will be the 13th skills agency in 50 years.”
“It was a job for employers in the industries that would employ those apprentices. We thought that those principles had become a matter of cross-party consensus. I am sorry to say that we were wrong. We have already had from this new Government a rowing back on the streamlining of qualifications. They have said that they will have shorter apprenticeships but still call them apprenticeships. Now, in the Bill, they will abolish—not reform or evolve—the body that is independent of Government, which sets the standards and ensures the integrity of the system.”
“I say the blueprint, but it was also a red print, because it was the vision of Lord Sainsbury, a Labour peer. In his landmark report, he set out that we needed to reform the system so that we had a streamlined set of qualifications with clear paths to vocations. His recommendations included: a minimum length of time for apprenticeships, along with a minimum length of time off the job; for T-levels, a minimum length, which was much longer than usual for industrial placements; and standards set by employers. There was also the expansion of the remit of what was then the Institute for Apprenticeships to become the broader Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, linking apprenticeships and T-levels. Lord Sainsbury was also absolutely clear that specifying standards was not a job for Ministers in the Department for Education.”
“We cannot just wish it into being, we cannot assume it or assert it, and we cannot legislate for it: esteem is in the eye of the esteemer and parity of esteem is earned. In technical and vocational education and training, that requires a clear and understandable set of qualifications with high standards and specifications that people know cannot be fiddled because they have been set independently. It also requires equipping the individual with what they need to know and what they need to be able to do to succeed in a trade, craft or sector because those standards have been set by employers in that trade, craft or sector. Those things were at the heart of the blueprint set out for technical and vocational education in this country, which has been followed for the last number of years.”
“These are novel technologies, and we are facing these questions now for the first time. In this country, there are two main thresholds for the transition from childhood to adulthood, and they are 16 and 18. Those are not the only ones, but they are the main ones. In English law, there has never been a concept of an age of digital consent and nor, to my knowledge, was there a non-digital concept of consent in contract law previously for somebody under the age of majority. I grant that it is arguable, but it seems that 16 is the most appropriate threshold.”
“There is already a minimum age for using social media; it just happens to be an arbitrary age that is based on some legislation—not even from this country—from the 1990s. When the GDPR came in through the European Union, which we were in then, countries could choose an age anywhere between 13 and 16. Different countries chose different ages; we happen to have settled on 13. Most people would say that we have to set the bar somewhere, so the question becomes, where? Of course, we could, alternatively, say that the Government or a regulator have no role in setting an age at all. However, if that is not our view, and we accept that there should be an age, we have to ask the secondary question: what should it be? There is no ancient right to be on TikTok at age 13.”
“And we’re not talking about getting rid of the good stuff; we’re only talking about getting rid of the bad stuff.” This, of course, is the easy stage in the legislative process, and things become much harder later, when we have to define precisely what we mean. I am about to recommit that sin: I am going to talk about an ill-defined “it” that we may in some way want to restrict. That “it” is something about smartphones and social media that I will today fail to define, but I hope to come back at the end to say a little about more precisely what I mean. I am not in the business of trying to put new restrictions on how parents manage their families or of trying to do things to them that they could do for themselves.”
“Some also value things that can be done only on a smartphone—such as using a map to find the way home—and there is a whole other debate about education technology and the use of Show My Homework and all the rest of it. Some parents are totally happy with the entirety of the electronic world—smartphones and social media. Let us be honest: it is parents who often help children get around the minimum age limit to be on these platforms. Sometimes, we say that they do that only for fear of the child missing out, and that may be true, but we do not know that it is in the majority of cases. In addressing these questions as legislators, we often fall back on saying, “Hang on, we’re not talking about banning all phones; we’re talking specifically about smartphones.”
“She said that there was a possibility that some social media functionality could be removed, rather than an entire app being blocked; that “messaging and gaming sites and anything that delivers education or health care information” would be exempt; and that, ultimately, it would be for the Minister for Communications to “decide which platforms are in and which are out.” Well, I hope they have invested in their legal defence budgets. It is true that parents vary widely in what they think is good or acceptable. Everybody agrees that their child should be able to call or text home to let mum or dad know that they are delayed or feeling worried, or that their club has been cancelled.”
“I thank Kim Campbell and the petitioners, including almost 400 from East Hampshire, for bringing this debate to Parliament. There has been a lot of interest of late in Australia’s upcoming ban on social media for under-16s, and I was interested in how the Australians are going to implement it, considering some of the complexities and definitional difficulties. I recommend to colleagues a very good interview on American National Public Radio with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, in which she said that it is not about flicking some big switch.”
“Friend the Member for Reigate (Rebecca Paul) covered this very well—these technologies can also crowd out other things. Whether they, in and of themselves, are good or bad, there are only 24 hours in a day, and we want children, in the time they are not at school and not asleep, to be able to access the full range of things that childhood should be all about.”
“All of the above have risks attached, and they all have negatives, but we are unlikely to say that we want to ban them all—far from it. There is also a different risk: if we take one thing and ban it based on its specific features—its specific definition—we just push people to other places. Other things will then get more social-media characteristics, and children may end up in darker places on the internet. All of that is probably why the Australians ended up where they did: saying that it is probably more about specific functionality and that, at the end, it might be about having to make case-by-case judgments. We worry about content; unwanted, inappropriate contact, as others have said; the excessive time children spend on platforms; potential addiction; the effects on sleep and concentration; and myopia. Crucially—my hon.”
“For many people, YouTube is not social media; it is a place where they go to watch videos or for music. But because it has user-generated content, it is also social media; it is certainly capable of sucking up a lot of young people’s time, and it has potential rabbit holes that people can fall down. What about gaming? Gaming is different from social media, but modern gaming also has quite a lot of social media-like functions, such as lists of friends. Certainly, it is a way of trying to create communities of people with common interests. It is also often linked to the use of Discord or to streaming on Twitch. And, again, it certainly takes up a lot of time—unless, of course, someone is in China, where the Government will allow them to do it for only one hour a day, on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.”
“Yes, we probably do, because of the association with bullying and the disappearing messages. But some families like the snap friends function, because they can see where different family members are. Do we worry about Instagram? Yes, we probably do, and it has a particular association with issues around body image. But it is also a way for people to share lovely family photos, and for extended families to keep in touch. A lot of families allow children to have WhatsApp, when they would not allow them to have TikTok, and up until quite recently, some would not even have called it a social media platform. Where we think we have problems with disinformation on TikTok and Facebook, other countries have them with WhatsApp. What about YouTube?”
“Everybody who worked on it— including myself—was always clear that it would not be the last time we had to come back to this subject in legislation. It is inevitable that there will be further regulation and restrictions in the interests of greater child protection. I therefore urge the Government to move from working out whether there will be further protections to working out what those will be. Of course, to write legislation—to return to where I started—one needs to be able to define things precisely and, in reality, there is no bright line between a smartphone and a brick phone, and no slam-dunk definition of social media either. It can be instructive to think about individual platforms and services. One of the things we worry about is TikTok. Do we worry about Snapchat?”
“There is also the rising incidence of mental ill health among teenagers, which—for the avoidance of doubt and to take politics out of it—is not unique to this country and not uniquely a post-covid effect. Causality is still hard to prove, but it seems extraordinary that, when we are talking about children, we allow something to happen because we cannot prove 100% that it causes harm, rather than allowing it to happen only if we can prove that it is safe. That is not the way we deal, for example, with children’s food or toys. I would turn the question around: are people really suggesting that the prevalence of self-harm is nothing to do with the prevalence and normalisation of certain imagery on social media? The Online Safety Act was a landmark piece of legislation, and we will debate it again in Westminster Hall on Wednesday.”
“If everybody else is in a certain group or has a certain means of communication, we tend to want our children to have that too. The evidence is not perfect. There is even evidence that some screen time is a positive good. A programme for international student assessment study in 2019 talked about a Goldilocks effect, where about an hour of screen time was beneficial for mental wellbeing, after which the benefit declined. That same study found wide differences in life satisfaction between what it called “extreme internet users” and others. There are now plenty of other studies on everything from happiness, the quality of relationships and eyesight to the effect on sleep and concentration.”
“To be fair to the Minister and previous Ministers, I think they do make efforts to hear from young people. An interesting survey by the Youth Endowment Fund, which I commend to the hon. Lady and others, put an extreme proposition to 13 to 17-year-olds: “If you could turn off social media forever for you and everybody else, would you do it?” While a majority did not say yes to that extreme proposition, something like a third did. We also have various other surveys. It is true that when we talk to children, as I am sure many colleagues have done in schools across their constituencies, we get a variety of views. In particular, children do not want to be left out, and as parents we do not want that for our children either.”
“We also need to enforce the existing age limits, particularly the one at age 13, and to recognise that some people who falsely proved they were 13 when they were eight, nine or 10 are now showing up on social media lists as being over 18, when, in fact, they are still in their much earlier teens.”
“I confessed myself a sinner at the start, Mr Stringer, and I will now come to a close. In the Online Safety Act, we covered a lot regarding content and contact, but we need to do more on the issues of time and addiction, and I am pleased to see some of that in the work of the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister). In the meantime, as others have said, we also need to do more on parental controls. I would like to see NHS advice to parents, which can be very powerful, on what an appropriate amount of time would be for children.”
“The Minister speaks with a great deal of knowledge and authority, particularly on acquired brain injury, but I want to come back to the covid point. Obviously, a Westminster Hall debate is not the place to establish correlation versus causality in any sense. However, if we look at a graph of what has happened with children’s and young people’s mental ill health in this country, France, Germany and the United States, while the data are not perfectly comparable, the shape of the line is not consistent with the hypothesis that it is mainly the result of covid. It predates covid, and it carries on going up afterwards.”
“The Minister would be making perfectly adequate points if we were talking only about this country. We could make all sorts of points about what Government policy was and what happened to Sure Start, the curriculum and youth clubs, but those things did not happen in France, Germany or the United States.”
“It was disappointing to see in the January figures that fraud has risen again after it had been coming down, but I commend the Government for proceeding with the Payment Services (Amendment) Regulations 2024 to slow down payments where there is a reasonable suspicion of fraudulent activity. What effect does the Minister believe that change will make?”
“Does the Minister not accept that there is a fundamental difference between a projection of what is expected to happen and the reporting on what has actually happened? It is the latter that helps with future policy development by learning from experience.”
“I have been trying to exercise my best patience as the Minister entreated me to do. I think he is saying that it will never be possible to know, in reality, what the effect of this tax change is. Is that right?”
“There have now been four waves of updates from the children and young people’s mental ill health prevalence survey conducted by the NHS. That invaluable resource has provided annual data and enabled us to look at ourselves against other countries, although the data are not perfectly comparable. I gather that there is no current commitment to wave five. I know the Department of Health and Social Care said that it would keep an open mind, but will the Minister join me in strongly encouraging his colleagues at the Department to maintain that data series, because it is incredibly important?”
“In 2024, we introduced non-statutory guidance on how the use of mobile phones should be prohibited throughout the school day, which, crucially, included breaks. We were also clear that there was the option to make the guidance statutory if necessary. The world has continued to change since then. As my right hon. Friend the shadow Minister described, when it comes to mobile phone use and our worries about children, that change has not made things slightly less bad than they were before. Worries have only deepened and intensified.”
“Member is right that the Labour instinct is to say, “Let’s have a national rule on everything; we like consistency.” There is nothing wrong with consistency. He is also right that our instinct is to say, “Leave those rules to the schools wherever possible.” There are, however, times when an overriding national rule is beneficial and makes sense. In 2019, when I was at the Department for Education, this question came up for me. At the time, we decided not to put a national rule in place. Politicians are always expected to have a firm and clear view on everything, and Ministers are expected to be absolutely certain about every decision they make, but it does not always work like that. Things can often be argued both ways. I was never 100% sure at the time that I was doing the right thing, but I thought I was.”
“I think it is an important principle that the entire school day, including break time and lunch time, should be reserved for what school is about: learning, developing and being with friends. The question, as always, is whether we leave that to individual schools or have a national rule, and the hon. Member for Bournemouth East was right to speak about the tension between the two. I confess that that is a question I have personally had to grapple with on more than one occasion, and there is not a single, simple answer. In the Bill, there are many national rules for things that arguably do not need a national rule, and that could be left to individual schools so that they can do what is best for their school community—from the precise number of school uniform items to the exact length of breakfast. The hon.”
“Rules in this area are still important, however, and behaviour in school is crucial for teacher recruitment and, particularly, retention. Three big things have changed in schools in the last few years. The first is an attitudinal shift that came about around the time of covid, and that it will take us some years to understand. The other two are vapes and phones. It cannot be overstated how much those three things affect what happens in a school, the feel of the school and what teachers and headteachers report back. The first thing that schoolchildren need for learning is to be able to concentrate. There is good reason to believe that even when a child is not using a phone, the fact that it is in their pocket—that it could buzz, vibrate or whatever at any point—can distract them.”
“I rise to speak in favour of the new clause. Unusually, I will start by saying what the new clause will not do, and the limits of the change it proposes. The truth is that the vast majority of online harm does not happen at school. Banning phones or social media in school will not necessarily reduce the total amount of time that children spend online or address schools’ worries about kids being online, such as the concern about the increasing number of children who turn up to school having not slept sufficiently to be ready for the day. Nor does the new clause address the wider problems—not day to day, but more chronic—with attention span and eyesight. We have recently heard a lot about the greater prevalence of myopia.”
“There are other things that people can get on a smartphone but not on a Nokia that are perfectly benign. Some parents are quite keen for their kids to be able to look at the weather. Some are keen to be able to use the tracking device to follow their child, or for their child to be able to use the mapping device to find their way home, so I agree with the hon. Member.”
“The hon. Member is right about the difficulty with defining the term smartphone. People talk about a brick phone, a feature phone, a basic phone, a Nokia, a smartphone and an iPhone, but the truth is that there is no definition; smartphone is just a term. It originally came about when people did not want to use the brand name iPhone, because Samsung phones and other types of phone were available. It just means a smarter phone; it has more stuff on it. Some of the things that people worry about are not necessarily only available on smartphones. I looked recently at iMessage, and it is starting to look more like WhatsApp. Anything that can be used for a group chat has some of the issues that we find in schools that cover the teenage and sub-teenage years.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend the shadow Minister for refocusing what I was saying, and he is absolutely right. Some of our worries in relation to children apply regardless of the piece of technology. Anything that demands our attention and is ever-present brings such risks.”
“It is possible to do that on essentially any phone on the market, from the highest iPhone—I do not know what number they are up to these days—down to the most basic sub-Nokia brick phone. There are other questions about functionality, and about what social media is. The Australians are having a bit of a debate about that at the moment, because to ban social media, they have to know what they are trying to ban. However, to address directly the point that the hon. Member for Bournemouth East made, much of this discussion relates to all manner of electronica that a child might have in their pocket or bag.”
“I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says. I had my most recent constituency session with parents on the matter last Friday, and with some things, there is a bit of a grey area. Lots of parents say, “I don’t really mind so much about this”, but others do mind. With tracking technology, for example, some parents say that they really do not like being able to know where their child is. There is some variance, but the one imperative that is common to almost every parent is, “I want my child to be able to call me if they are in trouble, and I want to be able to call them on the way to and from school.” Parents want to hear from children if a club has been cancelled and they will be coming home at a different time, or if they are worried, or whatever it is.”
“The second critical data point is that when we look beyond that study at other countries’ studies, we see that none of them are perfectly comparable, but studies in countries such as Germany, France and the United States follow basically the same pattern. There is an increase in the prevalence of mental ill health conditions in all the published data that I have seen for other countries. Whatever people say about domestic politics, whichever party was in Government here and whatever they did, that cannot explain what happens in France or the United States. The fact is that there is a global trend, or at least a trend in the western world, of an increasing prevalence of mental ill health conditions among children.”
“The hon. Lady is quite right. I was only going to speak about this for three minutes or so, but the hon. Gentleman tempted me into other areas. On the promise that he was making one last intervention, I indulged him, and I am grateful to him. In an earlier intervention on the Minister for School Standards, I mentioned the NHS mental health of children and young people survey, which shows us what has happened over time to children’s mental health. There is an inflection point and it comes, contrary to what most people believe, before the covid pandemic. That is the first critical data point to understand.”
“We can have the classic, “Oh, the wording is technically flawed” argument—which to be fair to the Government, they have not deployed in this Bill Committee yet. We hope the amendment will be subsumed into the Bill, but the Government would never say, “Oh, we’ll just take that amendment and put it in.” Whoever is in Government never says that; they say, “Right, we accept this point. Now we’ll work on the detailed wording”.”
“I hope also that the Minister can speak with colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care about the provision of more NHS guidance on safe and reasonable levels of mobile phone use for children’s early brain development. I have gone on a long time, and much longer than I anticipated. I will stop there.”
“It also makes it clear to parents that they cannot contact children during the school day—they can, but they do so through the school office, just as would have been the case in the old days. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston said, a national policy would set a firm norm. More widely, the Government will have to return again and again to all the issues around online safety, social media use and the use of electronics, and they must study the mental health aspects in more detail. However, I suggest that, pending proof—the smoking example speaks to this—it is necessary to take a precautionary approach. When we put things in the hands of children, we tend not to say, “Let’s wait to see if it’s dangerous”; we test them first to make sure they are safe.”
“One gets a slightly different assessment of the situation from Ministers, headteachers, classroom teachers and kids. According to the Youth Endowment Fund survey, which is huge—I think it surveys 7,500 13 to 17-year-olds—53% of children said they used mobile phones in break times, and one in six said they used their phone in lessons. Having a national policy does not solve everything—kids still break rules sometimes—but it does make it easier for everyone. As I say, it does not preclude carrying a phone to and from school, and it does not preclude children with whatever additional needs from carrying them, but it supports leaders and teachers in what they are doing.”
“It is often said that mobile phones are already banned in the vast majority of schools, so a ban is not needed and will not have any effect. That is true to an extent. There are virtually no schools without policy. Clearly no one is allowed to whip out a phone and make a call in the middle of a maths lesson—in fact, we never actually see teenagers use a phone to make a call—and there are going to be some rules to some extent. In the Internet Matters survey, 43% of schools reported having an “out of sight” policy. It is true that lots of schools allow phone use in breaks and at lunch—I know that because I visited a lot of schools where kids had been using their phones in breaks and at lunch. There is sometimes a bit of a hierarchy in how people assess these bans.”
“Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister)—I think he became a Parliamentary Private Secretary overnight, so we hope there is still a good future for that private Member’s Bill. That is one part of what is going on. I also mentioned Australia, where there is a ban of some type to come in. The school phones ban also plays a part. To be clear, it is not a ban on children carrying a mobile phone of any sort, brand or functionality to and from home and school. Nor does it preclude children who need to use a phone because of special educational needs, medical conditions, monitoring requirements or some other reasons from carrying one. Those things can be determined locally by the school. It is not a panacea—far from it—but it will make a difference in schools.”
“Even if we cannot find any other potential cause that would have affected all those countries in the same way over the same timeframe, it is still scientifically invalid to directly infer causality. Logic has its limits, and I know a few people who seriously contest the idea that the spread and use of, and the very high amounts of time devoted to, mobile phones and social media has been a significant causal factor in that. There are lots of different ways that one might address that and there are lots of things going on. The Online Safety Act 2023 was a landmark piece of legislation, and how it now gets implemented by Ofcom is very important. There is also the private Member’s Bill from the hon.”
“We can have an elongated discussion about this, but I would rather just get to the end of what I was going to say about banning mobile phones in schools, and then—I believe I am right in saying—the hon. Lady may also speak. That is probably the easiest way to do it. The increasing mental ill health of children and young people should be a matter of very serious concern for all of us. We should remember that it is something that is mirrored in other countries as well. Now, it is entirely scientifically invalid to infer from a correlation of two things—the increasing prevalence of social media and electronica, and the increasing prevalence of mental ill health—that one caused the other.”
“Yes, of course; we are legislating, and that is the case. It is also the case that, in my experience in Committee, the Government side never just accept an amendment put forward by the Opposition or another opposition party—or indeed by their own Back Benchers. If that has ever happened in modern history, it has yet to come across my bows. What we do is we debate what we are trying to do. If the new clause—which was drafted with expert help from the House of Commons—was accepted by the Government, as I very much hope it will be, they would without doubt say, “Oh, well, you need to change this, that and the other, and we’d do it slightly differently.” They would then bring forward their own Government new clause, and we would then vote on that on Report.”
“The hon. Lady makes an important point. This is an incredibly serious issue, and we should not be introducing anything that might inadvertently mislead. The Government control the time of the House of Commons. This Bill should probably have been two Bills to begin with; there are two distinct subjects in part 1 and part 2, but, for some reason, they were put together. There was nothing to stop the Government, at any point, from separating out parts of the Bill and reintroducing them immediately into the House of Commons—they literally control the timetable. On the Order Paper today, there was a statement on the business of the House. The Government can change the time and change what is considered in the House of Commons as they choose.”