The House of Lords has voted decisively to ban social media access for children under sixteen, passing an amendment to the children's wellbeing and schools bill by 261 votes to 150 on Tuesday evening—a result that puts Westminster on course to implement one of the world's strictest digital age restrictions despite considerable uncertainty about how such a ban might actually work.
Baron John Nash, the Conservative peer who championed the amendment, described the current situation as "nothing short of a societal catastrophe," citing surging mental health service usage, eating disorders, school disruption, and child exploitation. Their Lordships, it seems, have decided that the precautionary principle trumps concerns about enforceability—a quintessentially British approach to legislating first and working out the details later.
The amendment requires social media platforms to implement age verification systems within one year and mandates chief medical officers to publish parental guidance on children's social media use. More controversially, the measure extends to prohibiting the provision of VPNs to under-eighteens, a provision that raises immediate questions about how internet service providers might distinguish between legitimate educational uses and attempts to circumvent age restrictions.
As they say in Westminster, "the constitution is what happens"—precedent matters more than law. This vote follows a pattern familiar from past moral panics, from the video nasties debate of the 1980s to concerns about violent video games in the 2000s. The difference this time is that Parliament appears willing to legislate before the evidence base is fully established.
Baroness Floella Benjamin exemplified the urgency driving supporters, declaring that "we have to stop this catastrophe now" and opposing further delays. Baroness Claire Fox, however, warned against oversimplification, cautioning that parliamentarians shouldn't "scapegoat social media for all society's ills." The Open Rights Group raised concerns about the implications of widespread age-verification requirements across the internet.
The amendment now returns to the Commons, where the government faces a choice: remove the provision outright or, more likely given the political winds, allow it to proceed through secondary legislation. Ministers have already launched a three-month consultation on child online safety, which includes considering both the ban and raising the digital age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.
The practical challenges are formidable. Age verification systems remain imperfect, raising privacy concerns about collecting identification documents from millions of users. The VPN prohibition appears particularly problematic—such tools are widely used for legitimate purposes, from accessing work systems to protecting privacy, and distinguishing teenage circumvention from adult use presents technical difficulties.
Yet the overwhelming margin suggests that concerns about mental health and online safety have overtaken traditional British skepticism about state intervention in family life. Whether the measure survives contact with the realities of internet regulation remains to be seen, but for now, their Lordships have sent a clear message that something must be done—even if precisely what that something looks like in practice remains rather hazily defined.
