HC Deb 17 May 2004 vol 421 cc680-2W
Brian White

To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what steps her Department has taken to export the UK model of co-operation between Government, police and industry to tackle child pornography on the internet. [173047]

Mr. Timms

The Department of Trade and Industry attaches great importance to protecting children from illegal or harmful material on the internet. The Government are primarily addressing it through the Home Secretary's Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet. The Department takes part in the activities of the Task Force, and in particular, supports cooperation between Government, law enforcement, industry and other stakeholders to develop self-regulatory responses to problems arising, in order to strengthen the take-up of the internet and the growth of e-commerce. We strongly support the work of the industry-led Internet Watch Foundation.

Child protection on the internet is a common challenge in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. The UK's approach has served as the model for the EU's main programme to tackle it, the Safer Internet Programme. Since 1999, Safer Internet has funded over 130 projects across Europe bringing together Government, industry, law enforcement and child protection agencies in the following streams of activity: hotlines: Safer Internet supports at least one hotline along the lines of the UK's Internet Watch Foundation in each of 17 countries in Europe, allowing users to report internet content they regard as illegal or harmful. INHOPE, based in the UK, is the European hotline coordinating body, responsible for monitoring standards and spreading best practice for these hotlines. rating and filtering technology: the programme encourages the development of software that empowers users to filter or otherwise limit the amount of unwanted material they receive, as well as ways to measure and benchmark its performance. promoting cooperation: it has created European-level forums to drive consensus on the challenges and solutions among experts from industry, law enforcement, government, educators, consumer groups, child welfare and other NGOs. raising awareness: support is offered to initiatives at country, regional or other levels to inform parents and educators of means to use the internet more safely, using techniques based largely on practice developed by members of the Home Office Task Force on Child Protection on the Internet.

UK companies and NGOs are very well represented among the participants in the various projects, and some of them act as coordinators at European level (e.g. for best practice for ways of promoting awareness of self-help techniques).

In March 2004, the European Commission adopted a proposal for Safer Internet Plus, a programme to continue these activities for the next four years. It will increase the international reach of the UK's model approach because it will particularly encourage hotlines and awareness activity in the 10 new member states, and provide resources for the EU to pursue effective cooperation and solutions in international forums and with third countries, especially those which are the origins of a large proportion of illegal, harmful or unwanted material, such as child pornography and spam.

The Government also take opportunities to raise the profile of a cooperative approach to online child protection in international discussions: for example, at the conclusion of the first phase of the United Nations sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in December 2003, the UK, working with its EU partners, strongly supported a statement to the effect that all actors in the Information Society should take appropriate actions and preventive measures, as determined by law, against abusive uses of ICTs, such as … all forms of child abuse, including paedophilia and child pornography…" (Declaration of Principles, para. 59).

As part of its strategy to promote a globally competitive environment for electronic communications businesses, the Department has developed a number of dialogues with other countries' regulators, officials and industry representatives. These discussions have frequently covered the implications of offensive or harmful online material. The Internet Watch Foundation and other leading UK players take part to give a first hand account of the UK's cooperative approach, and also actively pursue their own extensive international contacts, supported wherever possible by the Department of Trade and Industry and other Departments. In addition, meetings recently arranged or to take place within the framework of dialogues with the United States, Japan and Australia will address cooperative solutions to the issue of unsolicited messages (or "spam"), some of which can be linked to child pornography.