The Parental Controls Roundtable: Note
DCMS: Wednesday 18th May 2011
Attendees:
Ed Vaizey MP Minister for Peter Robbins, Internet Watch
(Chair) Culture, OBE Foundation
Communications
and the Creative
Industries
Tim Laughton MP Minister for Safe Hamish McLeod Mobile Broadband
Guarding Children Group
Clare Perry MP Matt Rogerson Virgin Media
Baroness Howe Crossbencher Jon Carr CHIS
Katie O’Donovan Mumsnet
Reg Bailey Mothers’ Union John Brown NSPCC
Chris Woolard Ofcom Andrew Heaney TalkTalk
Mike Short 02 – Telefónica Ian Walden Queen Mary,
Europe University of
London
David Wheeldon BSkyB
Mike Galvin BT Steve Creed DfE
Marc Watson BT Rachel Clark DCMS
Juliet Kramer Everything Simon Miller DCMS
Everywhere
Nicholas Lansman Internet Service
Providers’
Association
The Roundtable was chaired by Minister for Communications Ed Vaizey, who
thanked the group for their continued engagement with this important workstream.
Ed Vaizey also congratulated Talk Talk on the launch of their Homesafe product and
noted that further work on parental controls would be taken forward by UKCCIS.
Mike Galvin provided an update on the progress made by the UCCKIS working group
on parental controls. The group’s objectives are to deliver an improvement in the
parental controls offer to consumers. New technologies such as that underpinning
Homesafe were making new and more effective offers possible.
Reg Bailey – the Bailey Review into the sexualisation of children is concentrating on
the views of parents and looking at how to raise parental awareness. It would not
though look into user generated material.
The Review would make clear that children should not be considered as a separate
pocket of the population and that it had started to look at sexualisation more widely.
View was increasingly that the views of parents need to be upweighted.
Dido Harding - spoke about the soft launch of Homesafe, following a live trial with
20,000 customers. 140,000 customers have now been emailed with details of the
Homesafe scheme and 10,000 existing customers have now opted for Homesafe
55,000 blocks have occurred since the launch.
Marc Watson – BT is working hard to improve its PC based offer of parental controls
to consumers. This work is based on improved marketing and information initially
targeted at 100,000 customers. Take up is about a third. BT are aware that this
technology is blocking about 100,000 sites per week.
Work is being undertaken by all other ISPs: Virgin is conducting research into this
issue and will refresh its parental control offer; Sky is also undertaking research and
is committed to the forthcoming code of practice; Orange offers PC level parental
controls available to consumers in all range shops; and, O2 has offered McAfee
parent controls since early this year.
Clare Perry said that there was a clear demand for improved parental controls as
well as a mismatch between the available offer and consumer demand. ISPs needed
to focus on network level controls as figures demonstrate that take up of PC-based
controls was static.
Tim Laughton – there is merit in the active choice approach made through a simple
user-friendly interface. The July UKCCIS meeting will take stock of work to date but
there needs to be an acknowledgement that time is running down.
Further discussion
There was some limited discussion around the offer of parental controls in
comparator countries and agreement that the UK is the world leader in this
area.
The group also discussed the relative merits of router based controls which
employ complex technology.
There was agreement that any measures adopted would need to be backed
by a robust reporting mechanism.