For months, I and my Conservative colleagues have pressed the Government to do what most parents in Thirsk and Malton, and across the country, have been crying out for: get our children off social media. In the past fortnight, they finally listened. The Government has announced a ban on social media for under-16s.
This victory does not belong to politicians. It belongs to the bereaved families, health professionals and campaigners who refused to give up, even after Labour voted against this protection three times. Those families deserve our gratitude above anyone else’s.
The evidence is now undeniable. Social media algorithms are deliberately engineered to be addictive, and they expose children to violence, pornography, self-harm content and criminal exploitation. The impact on young people’s wellbeing, behaviour and schoolwork is real and measurable. As a father, I do not need a study to tell me what every parent already knows in their gut: our children are spending too much of their childhood staring at a screen.
Restrictions on mobile phones also have social and academic benefits. For example, St Edward’s, Oxford, where boarders have severe controls on access to their phones, the results speak for themselves. Participation in after-school sports, dance classes, music lessons and stage productions has risen and the number of books being borrowed from the school library has increased markedly.
When I visited schools in Pickering and Thirsk and asked students directly whether they supported a ban, the vast majority said yes. They want their time back. They want to be children again. Nine in ten parents agree. This is not a fringe position imposed from Westminster. It is common sense that families here worked out long ago.
Some people have raised a serious and legitimate concern: if adults must now prove they are adults to use social media, does this open a back door to mandatory digital ID? Let me be completely clear. Absolutely not. That is not what I believe, it is not what Kemi Badenoch believes, and it is not what the Conservative Party will ever support. These two issues are not bound together, and they must not be. Proving your age online should be no more onerous than walking into an off-licence to buy a bottle of wine. You confirm you are old enough. That is the end of it. There is no world in which we would support this policy as a Trojan horse for a compulsory national identity scheme, and I will oppose anyone who tries to tether the two together.
The onus now falls squarely on Government and the technology companies to find a workable solution, one that protects children while fiercely defending the civil liberties of every adult. These firms have spent years designing systems to capture our children’s attention. They have the resources and the ingenuity to verify age without building a surveillance state. We must hold their feet to the fire and demand it.
I have already heard the obvious objection: won’t determined teenagers simply use VPNs to get round the ban, as some have in Australia? Of course some will try. But we must never let the pursuit of the perfect become the enemy of the good. We all know children who have snuck off to buy cans of beer. Nobody sensible responds to that by saying the law has failed, so we may as well let every child drink. The law sets a clear standard, shifts the culture and stops the vast majority. A protection that works most of the time is infinitely better than no protection at all.
There is detail still to get right in implementation, and I will keep pressing Ministers to ensure these safeguards are robust, meaningful and respectful of our freedoms. But make no mistake: this is a genuinely good day for the children and families of Yorkshire and the whole country. It has been a long time coming.
