Former Children's Commissioner Baroness Longfield: "Tech Companies Need To Feel Threatened By Online Safety Act"
Baroness Longfield was nominated for a life peerage by Labour last year (Alamy)
7 min read
Former children’s commissioner and newly appointed peer Baroness Anne Longfield has questioned whether the government has the appetite to take on big tech to protect children online.
“I don't think in any way that media companies are feeling threatened by this [Online Safety Act], and they need to feel that it's threatening their business model," she told PoliticsHome.
Longfield has worked in the children’s sector for decades, starting as a researcher for Save the Children in the 1980s. She worked for Kids Clubs Network and 4Children, and was a leading figure in the development of Sure Start, a children’s services initiative brought in by the Tony Blair Labour government, before serving as children’s commissioner for England between 2015 and 2021.
2024 was a busy year for Longfield: She founded the Centre for Young Lives think tank with the belief that “the country needs a reset in its approach to how we support children”. After the general election, Longfield was then awarded a life peerage by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
In her maiden speech to the House of Lords a few weeks ago, Longfield said it “will not surprise” her colleagues that she intends to use her time in Parliament to raise the profile of issues affecting the “children most likely to fall through the gaps”.
"There is something about resetting childhood that I think we do need to think about as a country," she said in an interview with PoliticsHome.
Now that she's in the Lords, she wants to constantly act as a reminder that children's interests should run through the centre of everything that government does.
As a mother to a 32-year-old son, does she think it is harder to be a child now than it was when her son was growing up?
“It’s more complicated,” Longfield said. “If you ask children, the prism of success for them is quite narrow, and a lot of that is down to social media.
“Living in a digital age brings a level of complexity that wasn't there in the past. On one level, the opportunities that open up are immense and far-reaching. The downside of that is that the prism of success to get you there, and also the gaps that are there for children to fall through have actually grown very wide over recent years.”
She added that the Covid-19 pandemic had “baked in” the fact that “more and more children were becoming more and more vulnerable over the last couple of decades.
The peer hopes this year will be a “watershed” moment for protecting children from online harms – helped in no small part by the publicity around the Netflix drama Adolescence.
Despite the Online Safety Act now having passed into law, however, the former children’s commissioner is concerned that the legislation will lack the teeth to actually make a tangible difference to children’s lives.
“People are losing faith... that it doesn't have the teeth, that it's not on the front foot, that it isn't holding media companies to account,” she said.
“I don't think in any way that media companies are feeling threatened by this, and they need to feel that it's threatening their business model. They've got very, very deep pockets when it comes to the amount they can pay in terms of fines without feeling that they've been dented.
“It just needs to be on the front foot. We need an accountable body that really is set to tackle the prominence that those tech companies have.”
She said that she has spent the last 10 years speaking to such tech companies, and had witnessed how “they are never prepared to give any ground willingly”.
“The amount they are prepared to give is usually minute, and it won't damage their business model. They're making billions out of their business model, they want kids to be online, and they want them to be hooked, they want them to stay online. Harvesting data is something that keeps the pounds rolling in.”
Baroness Longfield worked with the previous Labour government under Tony Blair to set up the children's services system Sure Start (Alamy)
Longfield said she felt there was a “much deeper understanding” in government of the power of large technology companies – though seemed less sure whether there was a strong enough appetite in government to hold them fully to account.
“The straight answer is I don't know,” she said.
“It's a fluid situation. Clearly, there may be concerns that there is pressure to water down the response to tech companies.
“Tech companies will take what they can, and we have to make sure that we put the right kind of measures and mechanisms in place which stop them taking from children.”
Current children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said last week that while headteachers did not need "direction imposed nationally by the government", a "whole-society approach to strengthening safety online" would be needed to protect children outside of school.
While Longfield did not agree with an outright ban, she did believe the age of digital consent should be raised from 13 to 16, saying that would make an “enormous difference” as it would “break that link with the algorithms and with the addictive tech”.
“I didn't start off by thinking that, it wasn't always my view,” she added.
In her continued work with the Centre for Young Lives, Longfield has also come to the view that the machinery of government – particularly the Treasury – is inadequately set up to easily respond to children's issues.
“If you look at responding to problems in adulthood, you can often get a result within that Parliament,” she said.
“If you're looking at preventing problems from happening in adulthood or later childhood, it doesn't happen as you don't have the measurements.”
She said that the new government had taken a “huge leap forward” by talking about a “child-friendly government”, but that the upcoming child poverty strategy would be vital for making this sentiment a reality.
In 2023, The House magazine revealed a postcode lottery in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) across the UK, with some young people having to wait up to four years for help. At the time, Longfield said the system was “buckling”.
With this week marking Mental Health Awareness Week, Longfield told PoliticsHome that unfortunately, the situation in CAMHS has not yet improved.
The Centre for Young Lives has launched a new campaign with Young Minds and the Centre for Mental Health to emphasise the need for greater investment in children's mental health.
In February, it published research estimating that the long-term impact of mental health problems in childhood now costs the UK over £1 trillion in lifetime lost earnings.
“It shows the cost of not intervening,” Longfield said. “For the Treasury, that are looking at not only balancing the books, but growing the economy, these are both personal losses to children's lives, but also to the country.”
A government spokesperson said: “The Online Safety Act is about protecting children online from harmful content like self-harm and eating disorders as well as making sure what is illegal offline, is illegal online. The Technology Secretary has been clear these laws are not up for negotiation.
“The Act’s illegal content duties are now in force and from the Summer, platforms will also have to ensure children have an age-appropriate experience online.
"We also know there will be more to do and have already acted, including commissioning a study to assess current research on the impact of social media and smartphones, strengthening the evidence base on their impact on children's well-being. This will enable us to swiftly consider all options to inform our next steps to build a safer online world.”
