This Week in Parliament

Deny, deny, deny — then approve to spy

House of Commons · 10 Jun – 17 Jun 2026

Under-16s are to be banned from holding social media accounts — Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X — on the Australian model, with regulations promised by the end of the year and the ban in force in early 2027. The striking part is the about-turn: this spring the Commons voted an under-16 ban down (307 to 173 in March, with more than a hundred Labour MPs abstaining), and in December the Prime Minister called himself “personally opposed” to a blanket ban — yet the statement uses the very discretionary power MPs granted instead, to bring the very ban they declined. And the consequence runs well past teenagers: to keep under-16s out, platforms must age-check everyone — adults included — an age-verified, identity-checked internet the Free Speech Union and privacy campaigners call surveillance by another name. It was the week’s defining story, and it came wrapped in a rebuke: the Deputy Speaker opened by recording the Speaker’s displeasure that the Prime Minister had unveiled it from Downing Street, not the House. Around it ran a tech-and-online-safety cluster — disinformation, online hate speech, a cyber-security bill — while the division bell rang nine times, most loudly to send the Railways Bill out of the Commons and up to the Lords.

It is rare for a statement to be rebuked before it has begun. On Monday afternoon, before the Secretary of State could say a word, the Deputy Speaker, Nusrat Ghani, placed on the record “Mr Speaker’s disappointment that the Prime Minister chose Downing Street over this House” to announce that under-16s would be banned from social media — the Government’s own rulebook says important policy should be unveiled to Parliament first. Then there was applause from the Chamber and the public gallery, which the Deputy Speaker also had to put down: clapping is not allowed, and the Doorkeepers were warned they might have to remove people. Both moments told you how charged the morning was. Liz Kendall, the Science Secretary, called it “a defining moment for our children, and for future generations, as we lay the foundations of a new settlement for the online world” — children given “the freedom to be children again”, power put back “into parents’ hands”.

The remarkable thing is not that the ban is happening, but who is bringing it. As recently as this spring the Commons voted the idea down three times as it kept arriving from the Lords as an amendment, tabled by the Conservative peer Lord Nash, to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. MPs rejected it 307 to 173 in March and again 260 to 161 in April — the third time the House had thrown it out — with more than a hundred Labour members abstaining on the spring votes and only John McDonnell crossing the floor to vote for it; ministers argued that a consultation should come first, and handed themselves a flexible, discretionary power — to set curfews, throttle infinite scroll, or block named sites by regulation — in place of a binding ban. In December the Prime Minister had said he was “personally” opposed to a “blanket ban”, that it was “more about how you control the content children can see”. Six months on, that same discretionary power is the mechanism by which the same Government is now imposing the very ban it declined to be bound by. The Shadow Secretary of State, Julia Lopez, did not let it pass: this was, she said, the Prime Minister’s “shot at a legacy”, and “something that six months ago he said he was personally opposed to”.

The shape of the policy: a ban on under-16s using established social media platforms — Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X — built on the same definition Australia used, “user-to-user platforms… that allow users to post material, alongside algorithms”. Messaging services such as WhatsApp are out of scope, because parents want to be able to reach their children; education, e-commerce and music-streaming get narrow exemptions, kept under review. Livestreaming would be banned for under-16s across all platforms, and stranger contact blocked — including in games — to close off a grooming route; sexualised “companion” chatbots would be barred for under-18s, which the Government says makes Britain the first country in the world to do so. The route is secondary regulations under the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, to be laid and voted on by the end of the year, with the ban live in early 2027; Ofcom has been asked to work out what “highly effective age assurance” actually looks like, and enforcement would land on the companies, not the children — but the reach does not stop at the young: to know who is under 16, a platform has to age-check everyone, which is why the Free Speech Union’s Lord Young and privacy campaigners call it surveillance by another name — an internet where proving your age, and with it your identity, becomes the price of entry. More than 116,000 people answered the “Growing up in the Online World” consultation, the Government says, and around nine in ten of them wanted an outright ban. The hardest questions went largely unanswered — Damian Hinds asked what the net effect is of exempting messaging apps while banning stranger contact; Dame Chi Onwurah, who chairs the Science and Technology Committee, said British children “have been the subjects of a malign mass experiment designed purely to optimise corporate profits” — and the detail was promised in regulations, and a further package, in July. The Lords took the same statement on Tuesday, where Baroness Benjamin, who has pressed this case for years, said the Government had “finally reached the door of common sense”.

For all the noise about online life, the division bell rang for older arguments. Of nine recorded votes, four were on the Railways Bill, which we left a week ago at a money resolution and which cleared its third reading on Wednesday night, 278 to 149, on its way to the Lords — three opposition amendments fell first (77–271, 167–266, 155–279). Three more came on the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill at report stage on Tuesday, every opposition amendment defeated (77–255, 151–258, 162–246). The biggest majority of the week, 262 to 86, waved through fee regulations for England’s clean air zones. And the smallest, oddest vote of all — 24 to 37, in a near-empty Chamber — was a motion to revive the perennial Royal Albert Hall Bill, which the House declined to grant. Upstairs, the Government’s ownership agenda was on the move: both the Railways Bill and the Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill had their Lords second readings this week.

In the written questions — 2,063 of them, from 243 members — Health drew the most fire as always (313), ahead of Housing (232) and Transport (194). The online-safety argument echoed quietly here too: Graham Stuart asked the Science Department which apps eight-to-14-year-olds are using after 9pm and 11pm (the answer pointed to the consultation, and to Ofcom research on usage “after 9 PM”); Gill German pressed on what Ofcom had found about TikTok and YouTube; and, a sign of the times, Sir John Hayes asked whether ministers and officials are allowed to use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek or Grok at work (answer: approved enterprise tools only). The queue ran, as ever, from the absurd to the grave. At the absurd end, Richard Holden made the Business Department account for every lanyard it owns — a 4,530-strong, £6,306.41 ledger, itemised down to the ten “special” £28.50 ones for the first-aiders, the rest withheld at “disproportionate cost”. At barely £1.39 each the money is a rounding error; the point was the needle, not the spend — lanyards have been a culture-war token since the 2024 drive against civil servants’ rainbow ones — and a sliver of a parliamentary day went on counting neckwear. And Tessa Munt asked the Treasury whether it held any papers on the Chinook ZD576, lost on the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994; it did not, but sent its “thoughts and sympathies” to the families, thirty-two years on.