Source: Department of Science Innovation and Technology published on this website Wednesday 20 November 2024 by Jill Powell

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has set out his priorities for the online safety regulator, Ofcom, as it prepares to implement and enforce the laws set out in the Online Safety Act next year.

The Statement of Strategic Priorities (SSP), published Wednesday 20 November, includes ensuring safety is baked into platforms from the start so more harm is caught before it occurs, pushing for more transparency from technology companies on what harms are occurring on their platforms, and creating a digital world that is inclusive and resilient to harm, including disinformation.

Government is also announcing the launch of a study to explore the effects of smartphone and social media use on children, to help bolster research and strengthen the evidence needed to build a safer online world.

Ofcom will have to consider each of the government’s strategic priorities as it enforces the Online Safety Act from next Spring. Ofcom will have to report back to the Secretary of State on what action it has taken against the priorities to ensure the laws are delivering safer spaces online.

These reports will be critical to inform next steps as the government commits to learning from the implementation of the Online Safety Act and building on it where necessary.

The priorities will be finalised with the input of online safety experts and campaigners to ensure government action is informed by those with those who have experienced the offline impacts of failures in online safety. Ofcom is due to start enforcing the first duties on online platforms under the Online Safety Act from Spring next year.

Technology Secretary Peter Kyle said:

Keeping children safe online is a priority for this government. That is why today I will be the first secretary of state to exercise the power to set out my strategic priorities.

From baking safety into social media sites from the outset, to increasing platform transparency, these priorities will allow us to monitor progress, collate evidence, innovate, and act where laws are coming up short.

While the Online Safety Act sets the foundation of creating better experiences online, we must keep pace with technology as it evolves to create a safer internet, especially for children.

We’re also firing the starting gun on research which will help build the evidence base we need to keep children safe online.

I am committed to using all the tools at our disposal from monitoring the impact of new laws, creating more and better evidence, and working with online safety campaigners and charities to achieve this goal.

The government is committed to implementing the Act as quickly and effectively as possible and has already acted to deliver safer experiences for people online. Earlier this year platforms’ responsibilities to remove intimate image abuse content were strengthened, whilst new data laws will help researchers gather critical evidence about online harms

A new research project has been launched to boost the evidence base around online harms, The first stage of the project will examine what methods will best help the government understand the impact of smartphones and social media use on children after a review by the UK Chief Medical Officer in 2019 found the evidence base around the links to children’s mental health were insufficient to provide strong conclusions.

The project will improve policy makers understanding of the relationship between children’s wellbeing and smartphone use and help direct future government action.

Maria Neophytou, Director of Strategy & Knowledge at the NSPCC, said:

We’re pleased to see the Secretary of State echoing many of the priorities that we have been campaigning on over the last few years.

Through Childline, we hear daily from young people about the range of harms they are experiencing online, including online bullying, access to content encouraging suicide and eating disorders and child sexual abuse and exploitation. 

Tech companies must be transparent about the harm happening on their platforms. They should be disrupting ‘safe havens’ for offenders by tackling the hidden abuse taking place through private messaging. It is right that the government is focusing on driving innovation and new technology that can identify and disrupt abuse and prevent harm from happening in the first place.

The regulatory framework has the potential to change the online world for children. We continue to campaign for an ambitious approach to the enforcement of the legislation, and for children to be listened to and actively included. We look forward to engaging with the Secretary of State’s strategic priorities.

The Statement of Strategic Priorities five key areas

1. Safety by design: Embed safety by design to deliver safe online experiences for all users but especially children, tackle violence against women and girls, and work towards ensuring that there are no safe havens for illegal content and activity, including fraud, child sexual exploitation and abuse, and illegal disinformation.

2. Transparency and accountability: Ensure industry transparency and accountability from platforms to deliver online safety outcomes, promoting increased trust and expanding the evidence-base to provide safer experiences for users.

3. Agile regulation: Deliver an agile approach to regulation, ensuring the framework is robust in monitoring and tackling emerging harms - such as AI generated content.

4. Inclusivity and resilience: Create an inclusive, informed and vibrant digital world which is resilient to potential harms, including disinformation.

5. Technology and innovation: Foster the innovation of online safety technologies to improve the safety of users and drive growth.

Source: Department for Education published on this website Monday 18 November 2024 by Jill Powell

The government will 18 November 2024 embark on major reform to end years of neglect of the children’s social care support system – breaking the cycle of late intervention and helping keep families together wherever possible so every child has the opportunity to thrive.

A wide range of new reform measures will be set out in Parliament to deliver better outcomes and a more secure life for children across the country. The government will empower social workers, and all those that work with children, to take action against children’s placements providers that deliver subpar standards of care at sky-high costs to councils and focus the system on early intervention.

It comes as local government spending on looked after children has ballooned from £3.1 billion in 2009/10 to £7 billion in 2022/23, with social workers all too often burdened by heavy caseloads, struggling to deliver the help that children and families need before problems escalate.

Bridget Phillipson, Education Secretary, said: 

“Our care system has suffered from years of drift and neglect. It’s bankrupting councils, letting families down, and above all, leaving too many children feeling forgotten, powerless and invisible. We want to break down the barriers to opportunity and end the cycle of crisis through ambitious reforms to give vulnerable children the best life chances – because none of us thrive until all of us do.We will crack down on care providers making excessive profit, tackle unregistered and unsafe provision and ensure earlier intervention to keep families together and help children to thrive.”

One of the most entrenched challenges facing children and social workers is some private providers, that are siphoning off money that should be going towards vulnerable children, making excessive profits or running unregistered homes that don’t meet the right standards of care.

According to analysis by the Local Government Association, there are now over 1,500 children in placements each costing the equivalent of over £0.5 million every year, while the largest 15 private providers make an average of 23 per cent profit.

New rules will require key placements providers - those that provide homes for the most children - to share their finances with the government, allowing profiteering to be challenged. Increasing financial transparency will ensure the providers that have the biggest impact on the market don’t unexpectedly go under and leave children without a home.    

There will also be a “backstop” law to put a limit on the profit providers can make, that the government will introduce if providers do not voluntarily put an end to profiteering. 

Not-for-profit providers and those backed by social investment are being called on to come forward to set up homes to strengthen the system. 

To protect quality and safety in children’s homes, Ofsted will also be given new powers to issue civil fines to providers, working more quickly to deter unscrupulous behaviour than with existing criminal powers. 

More widely, the government is beginning the process of rebalancing the whole children’s social care system in favour of early intervention, giving every family the legal right to be involved in decisions made about children entering the care system. 

Further plans for funding for children’s social care including investment in preventative services, are set to be laid out in the coming weeks in the upcoming Local Government Finance Settlement.

Sir Martyn Oliver, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector said:

“These new powers will allow Ofsted to do more to make sure all children’s homes are safe and nurturing places, and to combat illegal and poor-quality homes quickly and effectively. We welcome these reforms and stand ready to deliver the Government’s new asks as soon as possible.”

Other key measures set to be announced today include: 

• New powers for Ofsted to investigate multiple homes being run by the same company, acting on the recommendations made in response to the vile abuse uncovered at the Hesley group of children’s homes. 
• Delivery of the manifesto commitment to introduce a consistent child identifier, making sure information can be shared between professionals so they can intervene before issues escalate.  
• The requirement for every council to have ‘multi-agency’ child safeguarding teams, involving children’s schools and teachers, stopping children from falling through the cracks. 
• The requirement for all local authorities to offer the Staying Close programme – a package of support which enables care leavers to find and keep accommodation, alongside access to practical and emotional help, up to the age of 21, ending the cliff-edge of support many experience at 18.  
• A new duty on parents where if their child is subject to a child protection enquiry, or on a child protection plan, they will need local authority consent to home educate that child.

The government will continue to work closely with the sector and local authorities as these changes are introduced to ensure the best possible outcomes for all children and young people, and their families.

Source: Department for Science Innovation and Technology published on this website Tuesday 19 November 2024 by Jill Powell

The country’s most vulnerable, including elderly people relying on personal alarms to call for help, will be better protected during the switch from analogue to digital landlines, thanks to a new government agreement reached with the telecoms industry on Monday 18 November.

This will include a new requirement for companies to offer an engineer visit to vulnerable customers, who will personally test the vital alarm and ensure it continues to work once a household has moved on the digital network.

Personal alarms are lifesaving buttons connected to phone networks and are known as ‘telecare devices. They offer remote support to elderly, disabled, and vulnerable people, sometimes living in remote and isolated locations. Nearly two million people use these vital alarms in the UK.

Following some incidents happening last year, Telecoms Minister Chris Bryant called on telecoms companies to complete a strict checklist of safeguards before transferring customers from old analogue phone lines onto a digital network, reducing the risk of them being disconnected during the migration.

In a round table at techUK’s London HQ attended by representatives from the sector including BT, Virgin Media, Vodafone and Sky, the minister also urged companies to extend the power of battery back-up solutions beyond the existing one-hour minimum, maximising their resilience as far as possible and access to emergency services in the event of a power outage.

During the roundtable, telecoms providers agreed that non-voluntary upgrades would start on a smaller scale before rolling out more widely, reducing accidental loss of phone services for those most likely to come to harm if their telephone line is discontinued.

Telecoms Minister Chris Bryant  laid out the actions other stakeholders, such as telecare companies, need to take to safeguard telecare users through the digital phone switchover. This includes ensuring that no telecare user will be migrated to digital landline services without the communication provider, the customer, or the telecare service provider confirming that the user has a compatible and functioning telecare solution in place. These actions will be outlined in the first Telecare National Action Plan, which government will publish before the end of the year.

In addition to measures laid out with phone network providers, Telecoms Minister Bryant also agreed the first charter with telecoms companies providing services to of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), such as the water and energy industries, whose services may also be affected by the switchover. This includes an escalation mechanism to allow concerns relating to the switchover to be raised with central government, ensuring continued safe provision of these services.

The digital telephone switchover is necessary as the old copper analogue landline network, which telecare devices have historically relied on for connectivity, is increasingly unreliable with higher incidences of customer-impacting faults. The decision to upgrade the analogue landline network (PSTN) is necessary because its aging parts, many of which are no longer being produced, make it increasingly unreliable.

Source: Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published on this website Friday 15 November 2024 by Jill Powell

More child sexual abuse victims can now be ‘seen’ and counted than ever before, thanks to new tech that allows the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the UK’s front line against child sexual abuse imagery online, to record all the children seen in sexual abuse images. 

Since the beginning of the year, 60,604 additional children who would have previously been ‘invisible’ have been incorporated into a dataset that is used by tech companies and law enforcement to protect children around the world.  

This valuable information gives the IWF greater insight into the impact of child sexual abuse online and accounts for all the children seen abused in online imagery, a gap in knowledge that the child protection charity has urgently wanted to correct. 

The new feature is integrated as part of the IWF’s Intelligrade system, a powerful tool that enables the charity to accurately grade individual child sexual abuse images, while automatically generating unique hashes (digital fingerprints).  

The improvements to the IWF’s Intelligrade system were made possible through Nominet’s Countering Online Harms fund. Nominet is the public benefit company that operates the .UK web domain and works with charities and organisations that seek to improve lives through technology, developing ‘tech for good’. 

In Intelligrade, these hashes are enriched with contextual metadata, such as the age of the child in the image and the severity of the abuse seen. Previously, if an image featured more than one child, only information about the youngest child was able to be recorded. This approach was born out of the necessity to remove confirmed child sexual abuse material (CSAM) from the internet as swiftly as possible. Logging multiple ages could delay that process. 

Now, analysts can easily track information about all the children seen in the image with the Multichild feature. Being able to respond at speed and protect child victims from having horrific images of their suffering be uploaded, shared and viewed across the internet is a driving priority for analysts at the IWF. 

Hashed images are loaded on to the IWF Hash List which is then provided to companies, law enforcement agencies and governments around the world who cooperatively work to block and remove the criminal content.  

To date, there are more than two million hashes on the Hash List, preventing the abuse images from being shared again and again.  

Highly trained assessors at the IWF, who grade each image individually and document the details seen, say it gives them incredible satisfaction to be able to document all the children in the images.