Speeches by Hinds.

“Okay. I want to make sure that everybody gets a chance to say what this guidance should be. But the challenge back to you, Sam, would be that that is all very well, but that is expecting every mother and father in the land to be an expert on neurodevelopment, to be able to categorise different pieces of content and to …”

“Can I put to you the proposition that is not realistic in an algorithmically driven system to say that parents should control what their children watch? Even if a lot of the time you do manage to co-view—let’s say you have three children; as it happens, I do—it is not physically possible to be there all the time, with …”

“Let’s put any of the three of you in the policymaker’s chair. We heard, I think, yesterday that there is now going to be guidance on screen time and content type for babies and toddlers. Given that somebody will have to come up with something in pretty short order, and all this research cannot be short-circuited, …”

“A couple of months ago, I put a parliamentary question to the Government to ask what research they had commissioned on the effect of media on babies and toddlers. The answer that came back was, “Well, we expect the platforms to do a risk assessment and think about the effect it will have on children.” In other words, i…”

“Hang on—I think this is going to be advice to parents. If you say, “This whole industry should go away and do something different,” good luck, but that is at one remove, and you are dealing with people in another jurisdiction. If there is going to be advice to families—I hope it will be from either the Department for E…”

“If the proposition I put was correct—maybe it is not, but if it was—part of the advice could be, “If you are going to put your child in front of something for an hour, you are much safer putting them in front of one of the few public service media channels than sticking them in front of something with self-selection”—a…”

“That might be an argument in favour of preferring channels, not against.”

“Yes, do you remember them? Why is no one arguing for that? It is impossible to say, “I’m going to pick all these individual, one, five, 10 or 20-minute pieces of content and put them all together, and I will know which ones are good and which ones are bad.” That is what channels are for. We call them curated playlists …”

“I have a couple of quick-fire follow-ups. Away from TikTok and YouTube, is there any evidence on any harm or goodness that comes from binge watching something on Netflix relative to waiting a week for the next episode? Or do we just not know?”

“Sorry?”

“Okay. Quickly to Gemma, is there any evidence on the Turn on the Subtitles campaign? Is it beneficial to very young children to have the subtitles when they are hearing speech on the television?”

“To any of you, have you ever met a parent who has used every parental control available to them—with two or three children, two different operating systems, three different Meta apps, two different Google apps? Have you ever met anybody who has mastered parental controls? And can you introduce me to them? We will have …”

“It was kind of a rhetorical question. My hypothesis is that that person does not exist, because it is not physically possible. However well educated you are, you just cannot be on top of all these different systems. They all have their own individual parental controls. TikTok says, “We have parental controls”—well that…”

“Exactly.”

“Obviously, academic independence and freedom are also very important; you cannot only be working to the requirements of Government or some agency. We are going to be writing a report with recommendations. Would a recommendation of yours be that, say, annually there should be some, probably publicly available, discussio…”

“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for his response. The housing formula has resulted in huge increases for parts of rural England, including a doubling of the number in my East Hampshire constituency, and it should be reviewed overall. However, this question is about one specific aspect, whereby in an unintended …”

“1. If he will review the methodology for assessing housing affordability used to set local house building targets.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

“You have to have dwell time.”

“So that counts as having engaged with the BBC once a week. Would another individual, who was a regular listener to World Service news, count the same?”