Speeches by Hinds.

“The Minister speaks with a great deal of knowledge and authority, particularly on acquired brain injury, but I want to come back to the covid point. Obviously, a Westminster Hall debate is not the place to establish correlation versus causality in any sense. However, if we look at a graph of what has happened with chil…”

“I confessed myself a sinner at the start, Mr Stringer, and I will now come to a close. In the Online Safety Act, we covered a lot regarding content and contact, but we need to do more on the issues of time and addiction, and I am pleased to see some of that in the work of the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (…”

“I know I am going on for way too long, Mr Stringer.”

“To be fair to the Minister and previous Ministers, I think they do make efforts to hear from young people. An interesting survey by the Youth Endowment Fund, which I commend to the hon. Lady and others, put an extreme proposition to 13 to 17-year-olds: “If you could turn off social media forever for you and everybody e…”

“Go on.”

“I rise to speak in favour of the new clause. Unusually, I will start by saying what the new clause will not do, and the limits of the change it proposes. The truth is that the vast majority of online harm does not happen at school. Banning phones or social media in school will not necessarily reduce the total amount of…”

“I have been trying to exercise my best patience as the Minister entreated me to do. I think he is saying that it will never be possible to know, in reality, what the effect of this tax change is. Is that right?”

“Does the Minister not accept that there is a fundamental difference between a projection of what is expected to happen and the reporting on what has actually happened? It is the latter that helps with future policy development by learning from experience.”

“We can have the classic, “Oh, the wording is technically flawed” argument—which to be fair to the Government, they have not deployed in this Bill Committee yet. We hope the amendment will be subsumed into the Bill, but the Government would never say, “Oh, we’ll just take that amendment and put it in.” Whoever is in Gov…”

“I am very grateful—”

“You cannot intervene on an intervention.”

“The hon. Lady makes an important point. This is an incredibly serious issue, and we should not be introducing anything that might inadvertently mislead. The Government control the time of the House of Commons. This Bill should probably have been two Bills to begin with; there are two distinct subjects in part 1 and par…”

“Can the hon. Member please explain what she means?”

“If the hon. Member has counter-examples, let us hear them.”

“There have now been four waves of updates from the children and young people’s mental ill health prevalence survey conducted by the NHS. That invaluable resource has provided annual data and enabled us to look at ourselves against other countries, although the data are not perfectly comparable. I gather that there is n…”

“Will the hon. Lady give way?”

“The hon. Lady is quite right. I was only going to speak about this for three minutes or so, but the hon. Gentleman tempted me into other areas. On the promise that he was making one last intervention, I indulged him, and I am grateful to him. In an earlier intervention on the Minister for School Standards, I mentioned …”

“School uniform guidance?”

“Yes, of course; we are legislating, and that is the case. It is also the case that, in my experience in Committee, the Government side never just accept an amendment put forward by the Opposition or another opposition party—or indeed by their own Back Benchers. If that has ever happened in modern history, it has yet to…”

“I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says. I had my most recent constituency session with parents on the matter last Friday, and with some things, there is a bit of a grey area. Lots of parents say, “I don’t really mind so much about this”, but others do mind. With tracking technology, for example, some parents say tha…”