Charlotte Nichols
MP for Warrington North · Labour · United Kingdom
“Does the Minister accept that although people co-infected with HIV and hepatitis C represent only around 7% of those on infected blood support schemes, they make up roughly 14% of those receiving special category support, because of the disproportionate harm caused by early hepatitis C treatments?”
“I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s points, and those of the victims whose voices he is bringing to the fore. Does he agree that both the proposals by the Government and the amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill that was agreed to in the other place, which says that victims will have the right to access a transcript of the jud…”
“In the spirit of cross-party consensus, I commend both the hon. Member on securing this debate and the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) on her campaigning work in this area.”
“The violence against women and girls sector has not had the opportunity to come together to discuss it, and the Government’s framing and narrative has been to pit survivors and defendants against each other in a way that I think is deeply damaging.”
“I thought long and hard about speaking today. I will allow right hon. and hon. Members from the legal profession to make the legal arguments better than I can, and will allow Members who rightly have procedural or rights-based concerns for defendants, which I share, to raise them. I trust that those points will be satisfactorily covered.”
“Shamefully, the tariffs have not been uprated in line with inflation since 2012 and have no eligibility for non-contact sexual offences, which can cause significant and lasting harm.”
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“We have a chronic lack of long-course pools across the country, and it is tragic to think that access even to our short-course pools could be even further curtailed. Swimming is a vital life skill, especially in communities such as mine, which have rivers and canals running through them—it saves lives. It is also a vital skill for participation in other sports, especially rowing, which we are trying to make more inclusive and accessible in Warrington, through the incredible work of Warrington Youth Rowing and the Warrington Rowing Club.”
“First, charitable trusts and community interest companies should be named as a vulnerable sector in January’s energy review, with support offered beyond March 2023. Secondly, any future cap should be more generous than the current cap, which still resulted in significant losses for CICs such as LiveWire. I am very aware of the demands on the public purse, but I also note the role that this sector plays in keeping the public healthy. We all know that preventive healthcare is far cheaper than later interventions, and these facilities in the heart of our communities, which subsidise getting fit and keeping healthy for people who need it most, are truly vital. Swim England states that swimming alone saves the NHS more than £357 million every year, and the contribution to the nation’s mental health will be enormous.”
“Services that would not be operated in a market driven solely on a for-profit basis.” Now, due to increased energy costs, higher than budgeted pay awards for staff, a lack of customers returning post covid, customer cancellations because they have less disposable income due to the massively increased cost of living, and increased prices for raw materials and services, LiveWire tells me that its expenditure has increased by £2.3 million compared with 2021, which is not sustainable. It is at serious risk of being unable to operate after March 2023 without financial support, despite increased demand for swimming and aquatics activity, for example. I have already written to the Chancellor about this situation, and would like to repeat LiveWire’s plea to this Minister today.”
“That means that it is designed to re-invest in services and facilities; it is not a private business, it does not have shareholders and it does not own any assets that it can leverage bank loans against. It is therefore specifically vulnerable to the economic storm that we face. As LiveWire has noted in a letter to me: “Our income-generating activities underpin discounted access to many health programmes—such as rehabilitation, prehabilitation and preventative services—to some of the poorest and most in need of support.”
“The building my office is in, the Orford Jubilee Neighbourhood Hub, also houses our local gym, pool, library and other services, such as the pharmacy, Macmillan Cancer Support and even a Subway—which I spend far too much of my money in on the days I am in my office, but I digress LiveWire is an employer of more than 352 people in Warrington, delivering leisure, library and lifestyles services that attract more than 422,000 visits from local residents per quarter and make a vital contribution to the health and wellbeing of the community. LiveWire operates three neighbourhood hubs, two leisure centres, one community hub and 13 libraries. It is important to note here that it has been managing those services in Warrington since May 2012 as a community interest company.”
“I hope that the Minister will take all those on board, and confirm that he is engaging with the LGA on these specific points to save our leisure centres. I want to turn now to our leisure services in Warrington, provided by LiveWire. At this point, I should declare an interest, in that I rent my constituency office from Warrington Leisure and Library Trust at commercial rates—I am not sure whether that is strictly declarable, but I wanted to flag it up.”
“As the voice of local government, the Local Government Association has called for discussion of a number of measures to address the immediate financial pressures: an in-year grant with an increase to the local government settlement from 2023-24 to ringfence and protect public leisure facilities; an immediate review of sector taxation and regulation that minimises other outgoing costs, with longer-term business tax reform to collectively support the sustainability and growth of the sector; and support for a move to non-carbon-intensive heating methods, including opening up existing capital funding programmes to ensure that new build facilities are eligible for support, improving energy efficiency for the future, while also ensuring that they meet the needs and expectations of future communities, encouraging them to be active.”
“The LGA believes that, without Government intervention, large numbers of public sector leisure facilities are unlikely to make it through to next spring, with service restrictions and facility closures already growing.”
“Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes an important point. As I will come on to, we cannot put a pounds-and-pence figure on the value of leisure centre provision locally and what it means to our communities, and particularly our most vulnerable residents. That is why this debate is so important, and I am grateful that she has come to support it. In October, ukactive research found that 40% of council areas are at risk of losing their leisure centres or seeing reduced services at their leisure centres before 31 March 2023. Three quarters—74%—of council areas are classified as “unsecure”, which means there is a risk of leisure centres closing and/or reducing services before 31 March 2024.”
“In my own area in Warrington, the funding available from central Government has been cut by about 60% over the last 10 years, which means that approximately 70% of the council’s spending is on statutory services, particularly things such as adult social care. Clearly ,those cannot be cut back on, and we expect the proportion of council spending spent on statutory services will only rise, as an ageing population will have more complex health needs. While I appreciate what the Minister says, that leisure facilities cannot be prioritised since they are not a statutory service but that he encourages councils to do all they can to support them, does he not agree that councils are being put in a difficult position, and that without additional public support and finance, they are fundamentally not able to do that?”
“On a point of clarification, I asked what support would be available beyond March 2023, because a lot of leisure centres look as if they will not be able to survive after that cliff edge. I know the Minister will not be able to make a financial commitment today, but is he having conversations with the Treasury about the continuance of a scheme of that kind, in the hope that that support might continue beyond March 2023?”
“A specific case on the platform TikTok relates to a misogynist who goes by the name of Andrew Tate, who has been banned from a number of social media platforms. However, because TikTok works by making clips shorter, which makes it more difficult for the company to identify some of this behaviour among users, young boys looking for videos of things that might interest them were very quickly shown misogynist content from Andrew Tate. Because they watched one video of him, they were then shown more and more. It is easy to see how the habit-forming behaviours built into platforms’ algorithms, which the hon. Lady identifies, can also be a means of quickly radicalising children into extreme ideologies.”
“They would not only give clear ministerial direction to Ofcom and the technology providers, and allow Ofcom to take the measures that we are discussing, but would pivot us away from placing the onus on the recipients of abusive behaviour, or people who might be exposed to it. Instead, the onus would be on platforms to make those risk assessments and take the middle ground, where that is a reasonable and proportionate step.”
“Turning off the capacity to use direct messages is a much more effective way of addressing abuse by direct message than banning the person who sent it altogether—they might just make a new account—or than relying on the recipient of the message to take action when the platform has the capacity to take away the option of direct messaging. The adage is that sunlight is the best disinfectant. When people post in public and the post can be seen by anyone, they can be held accountable by anyone. That is less of a concern to me than what they send privately, which can be seen only by the recipient. This group of amendments is reasonable and proportionate.”
“We have people on watch lists—people we are aware of. If we allowed them to use a social media platform but not the livestreaming parts, that could go some way to mitigating the risk of their livestreaming something like that. Their being on the site is perhaps less of a concern, as their general use of it could be monitored in real time. Under a risk analysis, we might be happy for people to be on a platform, but consider that the risk was too great to allow them to livestream. Having such a provision would be helpful. My hon. Friend the Member for Luton North mentioned the onus always being on the victim. When we discuss online abuse, I really hate it when people say, “Well, just turn off your messages”, “Block them” or “Change your notification settings”, as though that were a panacea.”
“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I rise in support of amendments 99, and 96 and 97, as my hon. Friend the Member for Pontypridd did. I have an issue with the vagueness and ambiguity in the Bill. Ministerial direction is incredibly helpful, not only for Ofcom, but for the companies and providers that will use the Bill to make technologies available to do what we are asking them to do. As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North said, if the Bill provided for that middle ground, that would be helpful for a number of purposes. Amendment 97 refers to livestreaming; in a number of cases around the world, people have livestreamed acts of terror, such as the shooting at the Christchurch mosque. Those offences were watched in real time, as they were perpetuated, by potentially hundreds of thousands of people.”
“The Bill states that we can expect little impact on child protection before 2027-28 because of the enforcement road map and when Ofcom is planning to set that out. Does the Minister not think that in the meantime, that sort of ministerial direction would be helpful? It could make Ofcom’s job easier, and would mean that children could be protected online before 2027-28.”
“Platforms have a duty to attempt to keep certain groups of people, and categories of user, safe. When we talk about free speech, the question is: freedom of speech for whom, and at what cost? Making it easier for people to perpetuate, for example, holocaust denial on the internet—a category of speech that is lawful but awful, as it is not against the law in this country to deny that the holocaust happened—makes it much less likely that I, or other Jewish people, will want to use the platform.”
“I strongly agree with the hon. Member for Aberdeen North about this not being the protect MPs from being bullied on Twitter Bill, because obviously the provisions go much further than that, but it is worth noting, in the hope that it is illustrative to Committee members, the very different experience that the Minister and I have in using Twitter. I say that as a woman who is LGBT and Jewish—and although I would not suggest that it should be a protected characteristic, the fact that I am ginger probably plays a part as well. He and I could do the same things on Twitter on the same day and have two completely different experiences of that platform. The risk-assessment duties set out in clause 12, particularly in subsection (5)(d) to (f), ask platforms to consider the different ways in which different adult users might experience them.”
“I cannot help but see the Government’s planned removal of clauses 12 and 13 as essentially wrecking amendments to the Bill. Taking those provisions out of the Bill makes it a Bill not about online safety, but about child protection. We have not had five years or so of going backwards and forwards, and taken the Bill through Committee and then unprecedentedly recommitted it to Committee, in order to fundamentally change what the Bill set out to do. The fact that, at this late stage, the Government are trying to take out these aspects of the Bill melts my head, for want of a better way of putting it. My hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen was absolutely right when she talked about what clauses 12 and 13 do. In effect, they are an acknowledgement that adults are also harmed online, and have different experiences online.”
“When people decide that I, as a Jewish Member of Parliament, am personally responsible for George Soros putting a 5G chip in their arm, or whatever other nonsense they have become persuaded by on the internet, that is exactly the kind of thing that has meant people coming to my office armed with a knife. The kind of content that they were radicalised by on the internet led to their perpetrating a real-life, in-person harm. Thank God—Baruch Hashem—neither I nor my staff were in the office that day, but that could have ended very differently, because of the sorts of content that the Bill is meant to protect online users from.”
“I could not agree more. I suppose that is why this aspect of the Bill is so important, not just to me but to all those categories of user. I mentioned paragraphs (d) to (f), which would require platforms to assess exactly that risk. This is not about being offended. Personally, I have the skin of a rhino. People can say most things to me and I am not particularly bothered by it. My concern is where things that are said online are transposed into real-life harms. I will use myself as an example. Online, we can see antisemitic and conspiratorial content, covid misinformation, and covid misinformation that meets with antisemitism and conspiracies.”
“People online try to discourage them from accessing the proper medical interventions for their illnesses, and instead encourage them to take more vitamin B or adopt a vegan diet. There are people who have died because they had cancer but were encouraged online to not access cancer treatment because they were subject to lawful but awful categories of harm.”
“Again, the idea that we are talking about offence, and that the clauses need to be taken out to protect free speech, is fundamentally nonsense. I have already mentioned holocaust denial, but it is also worth mentioning health-related disinformation. We have already seen real-world harms from some of the covid misinformation online. It led to people including Piers Corbyn turning up outside Parliament with a gallows, threatening to hang hon. Members for treason. Obviously, that was rightly dealt with by the police, but the kind of information and misinformation that he had been getting online and that led him to do that, which is legal but harmful, will now not be covered by the Bill. I will also raise an issue I have heard about from a number of people dealing with cancer and conditions such as multiple sclerosis.”
“Whatever we name those provisions, by taking out of the Bill clauses relating to the “legal but harmful” category, we are opening up an area of harm that already exists, that has a real-world impact, and that the Bill was meant to go some way towards addressing. The provisions have taken out the risk assessments that need to be done. The Bill says, “(e) the level of risk of functionalities of the service facilitating the presence or dissemination of priority content that is harmful to adults, identifying and assessing those functionalities that present higher levels of risk; (f) the different ways in which the service is used, and the impact of such use on the level of risk of harm that might be suffered by adults; (g) the nature, and severity, of the harm that might be suffered by adults”.”
“I accept the points that the hon. Member raised, but he is fundamentally missing the point. The categories of information and content that these people had seen and been radicalised by would not fall under the scope of public order offences or harassment. The person was not sending me harassing messages before they turned up at my office. Essentially, social media companies and other online platforms have to take measures to mitigate the risk of categories of offences that are illegal, whether or not they are in the Bill. I am talking about what clauses 12 and 13 covered, whether we call it the “legal but harmful” category or “lawful but awful”.”
“The minute they tick over into 18, fall off the CAMHS waiting list and go to the bottom of the adult mental health waiting list—they may have to wait years for treatment of various conditions—there is no requirement or duty on the social media companies and platforms to do risk assessments.”
“I am aware of the case that the hon. Member mentioned. I appreciate that I am probably testing the patience of everybody in the Committee Room, but I want to be clear just how abhorrent I find it that these provisions are coming out of the Bill. I am trying to be restrained, measured and reasonably concise, but that is difficult when there are so many parts of the change that I find egregious. My final point is on self-harm and suicide content. For men under the age of 45, suicide is the biggest killer. In the Bill, we are doing as much as we can to protect young people from that sort of content. My real concern is this: many young people are being protected by the Bill’s provisions relating to children. They are perhaps waiting for support from child and adolescent mental health services, which are massively oversubscribed.”
“They should be in the Bill, as should specific protections for adults, not just children. I therefore urge the Minister to keep clauses 12 and 13 in the Bill so that we do not undermine what it set out to do and all the work that has been done up to this point. Inexplicably, the Government are trying to undo that work at this late stage before the Bill becomes law.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Angela. I did not make a note of the specific word I was on when we adjourned, so I hope Hansard colleagues will forgive me if the flow between what I said previously and what I say now is somewhat stilted. I will keep this brief, because I was—purposefully—testing the patience of the Minister with some of my contributions. However, I did so to hammer home the fact that the removal of clauses 12 and 13 from the Bill is a fatal error. If the recommittal of the Bill is not to fundamentally undermine what the Bill set out to do five years or so ago, their removal should urgently be reconsidered. We have spent five years debating the Bill to get it to this point. As I said, there are forms of harm that are not illegal, but they are none the less harmful, and they should be legislated for.”
“The Minister mentions tools for adults to keep themselves safe. Does he not think that that puts the onus on the users—the victims—to keep themselves safe? The measures as they stand in the Bill put the onus on the companies to be more proactive about how they keep people safe.”
“One of the examples I alluded to, which is particularly offensive for Jewish people, LGBT people and other people who were persecuted in the Nazi holocaust, is holocaust denial. Does the Minister seriously think that it is only Jewish people, LGBT people and other people who were persecuted in the holocaust who find holocaust denial offensive and objectionable and who do not want to see it as part of their online experience? Surely having these sorts of safety nets in place and saying that we do not think that certain kinds of content—although they may not be against the law—have a place online protects everyone’s experience, whether they are Jewish or not. Surely, no one wants to see holocaust denial online.”
“The Minister says that we should have freedom of speech up to a point. Does that point include holocaust denial? He has just suggested that if something is acceptable to say in person, which I do not think holocaust denial should be, it should be acceptable online. Surely holocaust denial is objectionable whenever it happens, in whatever context—online or offline.”
“If this is about companies enforcing what is in their terms of service for the use of their platforms, could it not create a perverse incentive for them to have very little in their terms of service? If they will be punished for not enforcing their terms of service, surely they will want them to be as lax as possible in order to limit their legal liability for enforcing them. Does the Minister follow?”
“I note that many providers of 4G internet, including the one I have on my own phone, already block adult content. Essentially, if people want to look at pornography or other forms of content, they have to proactively opt in to be allowed to see it. Would it not make sense to make something as straightforward as that, which already exists, into the model that we want on the internet more widely, as opposed to leaving it to EE and others to do?”
“I am sure that, like me, the shadow Minister will be baffled that the Government are against our proposals to have to opt out. Surely this is something that is of key concern to the Government, given that the former MP for Tiverton and Honiton might still be an MP if users had to opt in to watching pornography, rather than being accidentally shown it when innocently searching for tractors?”
“I appreciate that this point has been made about the same wording earlier today, but I really feel that the ambiguity of “appreciable number” is something that could do with being ironed out. The ambiguity and vagueness of that wording make it very difficult to enforce the provision. Does the Minister agree that “appreciable number” is too vague to be of real use in legislation such as this?”
“As much as I am keen on the idea of Ofcom special agents conceptually, my concern on the transparency front is that, to appoint a special agent and send them in to look at the data, Ofcom would have to have cause to believe that there was an issue of concern with the data, whereas if that data is more transparently available to the research community, they can then proactively identify things that they can flag to Ofcom as a concern. Without that, we are relying on an annual cycle of Ofcom being able to intervene only when they have a concern, rather than the research community, which is much better placed to make that determination, being able to keep a watching brief on the company.”
“I note what the Minister said about the commercial implications of some of these things, and some of those commercial implications might act as levers to push companies to do better on some things. By that same token, should this information not be more transparent and publicly available to give the user the choice he referred to earlier? That would mean that if a user’s data was not being properly protected and these companies were not taking the measures around safety that the public would expect, users can vote with their feet and go to a different platform. Surely that underpins a lot of what we have been talking about.”
“Rather than relying on a monopoly supplier of this polluting and expensive technology, we should promote reforestation, not just replenishment, and invest in truly green energy sources such as nuclear, hydrogen and other renewables. Will the Minister commit to ending the double bookkeeping of the carbon savings of biomass? Will he confirm that if the numbers do not add up, biomass will not be part of the green taxonomy and Drax’s contract will not be renewed?”
“Biomass is already the most expensive renewable power source, and Drax has received £6 billion in renewable subsidies. Analysis by the climate and energy think-tank Ember found that retrofitting Drax so that it can capture and store the carbon burned would cost the UK taxpayer an estimated £32 billion—more than the cost of building the Sizewell C nuclear reactor. As an unashamed champion of the nuclear sector, and as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on nuclear energy, I would far rather see investment in nuclear, which is a greener, more reliable technology of the future. Our energy and environmental needs are great, while our resources are limited.”
“The Government’s net zero strategy envisages a bioenergy with carbon capture and storage technology that depends both on burned trees regrowing immediately and on the carbon released being captured from Drax’s chimneys. If both were possible, accountants could tally these as negative emissions, but the calculations do not adequately weigh the costs of deforestation and transport or the opportunity cost of other energy alternatives. It is foolish to lean on an energy source that depends on the mass importation of raw materials from thousands of miles away, especially when doing so is likely to drive up the commodity price of the wood involved. One of the dangers of investing in such technology is that it may spur other countries to follow suit, which will mean even more rapid deforestation.”
“In effect, it greenwashes a destructive and polluting process that will take us dangerously past the ecological tipping point. Drax burns 27 million trees a year. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy plans to burn 120 million trees a year by 2050. That is far more than the amount of chicken waste that will be burned and will take much longer to replace. By comparison, the New Forest has 46 million trees; that shows the scale of the importation the process requires. It will add to the carbon cost before the wood is even burned. The wood itself is especially harmful: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that burning wood creates 18% more CO 2 than burning coal. We increasingly recognise the damage that centuries of deforestation have done to our planet, environment and biodiversity.”
“At a time when we are waiting for the Government’s delayed consultation on the technical screening criteria that underpin which technologies will be classified as green under the UK taxonomy—and, indeed, for a biomass strategy—it is important that we state clearly that biomass is not a green option at all. Drax power station is the single largest source of CO 2 emissions in the UK. Its entire justification is that the pollutants it releases are matched by equivalent plant and tree regrowth. Some biomass options, such as burning chicken manure, can swiftly be classed as carbon neutral because they would have swiftly decayed anyway, but replenishing burned trees and forests takes many years—even decades. The operating assumption that the trees are replaced as they are destroyed is a false accounting trick.”
“I am glad to be here with you in the Chair, Mr Gray, and I commend the hon. Member for North Devon (Selaine Saxby) for securing this important debate. I do not agree with much that the former Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Spelthorne (Kwasi Kwarteng), says, but I could not have put it better than him when he stated that importing US-made wood pellets to be burned for energy is “not sustainable” and “doesn’t make sense”. Rather than talk about biomass, I would rather call it what it is: burning imported forests. It is increasingly clear that this method is expensive, causes pollution and encourages deforestation.”
“My hon. Friend mentioned cancer diagnosis rates. I believe he will be aware that one in four people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer dies within a month of their diagnosis, with 70% receiving no treatment at all because they die before they could be treated. Does he agree that cancer diagnosis rates are a disgrace and that early intervention, early diagnosis and early treatment are vital for people with all forms of cancer, particularly the most aggressive types such as pancreatic cancer, to have any chance of survival?”
“I have listened with interest to what has been said about the new hospital building programme, not least because we have been waiting for a new hospital in Warrington for a very long time. We recently opened the new Health and Social Care Academy at Warrington & Vale Royal College with some of our town deal fund money, but surely people need excellent, cutting-edge training facilities to go into in a hospital once they leave the college. The Government’s lack of progress on building us a new hospital in Warrington undermines some of the other excellent work that we are doing locally to try to train up the people we need to fill those workforce shortages.”
“Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, hate speech has ballooned on the platform and the number of staff members at Twitter identifying images of child sexual abuse and exploitation has halved. How can the Minister be sure that the social media companies are able to mark their own homework in the way that he suggests?”
“Intimate image abuse has been raised with me a number of times by younger constituents, who are particularly vulnerable to such abuse. Within the scope of what we are discussing, I am concerned that we have seen only one successful conviction for revenge porn, so if the Government base their intimate image work on the existing legislative framework for revenge porn, it will do nothing and protect no one, and will instead be a waste of everyone’s time and further let down victims who are already let down by the system.”
“Male role models need to front such campaigns in order to change expectations, so that when lads meet in groups, whether that is in the locker room, the pub or anywhere else, they can display character and object to reactive group misogyny, no longer being bystanders implicitly supporting such behaviour. We also need to ensure that women can no longer be financially trapped into abusive situations, or at risk of destitution when they seek to leave. Those are the kinds of holistic changes that we need to see if we are serious about ending violence against women and girls. I know that everyone in this Chamber wants to end violence against women and girls. Our challenge is to tackle the wider context of toxic behaviour that breeds it. I hope that by next year’s debate, we will have made more progress on that fundamental task.”