MP Joe Powell explains the Safer Phones Bill, which would limit teenage access to addictive social media apps and ban phones in schools.
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00:00So the Safer Phones Bill is a private member's bill and it has three main elements.
00:04Firstly to increase the internet age of consent from 13 to 16 so that means if you wanted to sign
00:11up to an app as a teenager of that age you'd have to get parental permissions to give your data away
00:17and it's that data that drives addictive design elements. The second thing is to give Ofcom
00:21more powers to regulate addiction and the third thing is to invest in research and public health
00:26guidance to talk about some of the damage that smartphones and spending too much time on
00:31smartphones can do to young people especially. What would you say to parents and other people
00:36that say well it's up to parents to decide what's best for their children and whether or not they
00:41get the votes? Well I think I mean firstly the bill would still allow parental consent so if
00:47somebody wanted to allow their children to sign up to an app they could but I think this is you
00:52know this is one small piece of a very big problem that we have as a society and that's about
00:57schools, it's about tech companies, it's about legislation but it's also about the role of
01:02parents and I think you know we've had an amazing event tonight meeting lots of parents and
01:06interestingly the head teacher of the school we're at talked about that one of the biggest challenges
01:11was for convincing parents to keep the phones out of school so I think there's a kind of
01:16conversation to be had around you know is it is explaining the harms is this really having kids
01:23on phones for five hours a day is that really something that as parents we think is a good
01:28idea and I think actually vast majority of parents want help with tackling that problem.