...but ex spy chief thinks children should spend more time online

CHILDREN should be encouraged to spend more time online to improve their cyber skills so they can ‘save the country’, a former spy chief said yesterday.

Despite warnings the internet could be bad for youngsters’ mental health, Robert Hannigan, ex-head of Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ, told parents not to ‘despair’ if their children were glued to computer screens.

He said it was the patriotic duty of parents to encourage more time in the virtual world during the summer holidays as Britain was lagging behind other countries in online warfare.

‘If you are spending a disproportionate amount of your holiday unsuccessfully attempting to separate your children from WiFi or their digital devices, do not despair,’ said Mr Hannigan, who was the director of GCHQ until earlier this year.

‘Your poor parenting may be helping them and saving the country.’

He said the UK was ‘desperately’ short of computer scientists – and needed children who ‘have been allowed to behave like engineers’ by exploring, breaking and reassembling things.

‘The assumption that time online or in front of a screen is life wasted needs challenging. It is driven by fear,’ Mr Hannigan wrote in the Daily Tele- graph. ‘ We need young people to explore this digital world just as they explore the physical world.

‘Fortunately, today’s young people have become good at learning through seeing and doing online.

‘They are teaching themselves in new ways. It follows that the best thing we can do is to focus less on the time they spend on screens at home and more on the nature of the activity.’

He said no parents want their child to eat junk food all the time and added: ‘For those same reasons we shouldn’t want our children to do the same with their online time.’

His comments were in contrast to those made by Children’s Commissioner for England Anne Longfield earlier this week. She said when social media was making children ‘stressed and out of control’, it meant ‘we haven’t got the balance right’.

Studies have found that children who spend large amounts of time glued to a computer risk developing mental health problems.