Government ‘fails to implement’ NSPCC online recommendations

NSPCC call over online safety

THE GOVERNMENT has failed to properly implement about half of the child safety online recommendations the NSPCC made a decade ago, the charity says.

Professor Tanya Byron made a series of “urgent recommendations” to help keep children safe online in 2008. Ten years later, the NSPCC claims the Government is “dragging its feet”.

The ‘Safer Children in a Digital World’ review was commissioned by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown to look into how young people use the internet and play video games. A decade on and the Government’s Internet Safety Strategy is in the process of developing a code of practice for social networks – something the original report recommended.

But the NSPCC said it will not include anti-grooming measures as part of its remit. Of the 38 recommendations made in the original report, 16 were implemented, 11 were not, seven were partially implemented and a judgement could not be made on the other four as the landscape had changed too much, the charity said.

Ideas that were implemented include parental control software, family-friendly internet filters and statutory age classification for video games. But ensuring online safety features heavily in school curriculums and encouraging schools to offer family learning courses in ICT and e-safety were two of the recommendations that the charity says were not addressed. When the recommendations were made, Instagram, Snapchat and Whatsapp did not exist. The three are now some of the most popular social media apps.

Professor Byron, NSPCC trustee and clinical psychologist, said: “The Government said they want the UK to be the safest place for children to be online. Yet only now are they starting to play catch-up on recommendations I made ten years ago, while other recommendations have been ignored entirely.”

TO BE fair to Theresa May, she is the world leader pressing for global action to force social media giants to remove offensive material posted online. “No one wants to be known as the terrorists’ platform or the first choice app for paedophiles,” she has said.

Yet, as the Prime Minister continues to press for international action, Mrs May also needs to take heed today’s wake-up call by the NSPCC. Ten years after the leading children’s charity made a number of recommendations on safety, they have still to be implemented in full.

Given that many youngsters are likely to be digitally savvy before they even start school, it’s surprising, to say the least, that the charity’s plea for compulsory lessons in e-safety has not been adopted by any government in the past decade. If it raises awareness and saves just one vulnerable youngster from falling prey to those criminals and predators who exploit the anonymity of the internet, it will have been a worthwhile exercise.