The House | From steam engines to smartphones: why Parliament must act now to save childhood

200th anniversary of the Stockton and Darlington Railway Gala, 2025 (Alamy Live News)

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That was the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway company, which in 1825 ran the world’s first steam engine carrying passengers. It changed the world forever, turbocharged the industrial revolution, and my town is rightly proud of the role we played in shaping the future as we know it today.

The choices before those grappling with the might of the steam engine then and the choices facing us as we contend with new digital technologies may be centuries apart, but they are more alike than you would think.

Being constantly connected is fundamentally changing what it means to be a child for the worse

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The consequences of the steam engine included the creation of the factory system and a complete reordering of what it meant to work. “Steam engines set the conditions of possibility for this development. They weren’t themselves a ‘problem’, of course; they gleamed and were precise and powerful. Who could see them operate without awe?” as Princeton historian of technology D Graham Burnett and other members of The Friends of Attention coalition recently wrote in The Guardian.

But a “problem” arose as a by-product of the technology: a generation of children being exploited. The positives of these machines were felt by many, in one way or another, but the lack of regulation was felt mostly by working-class children.

Those children were let down by a ruling class sluggish to react, inefficient and uncaring. Yet the sometimes-fatal harms were entirely known and predictable. And the harms were not just from what they spent their days doing, but from what they spent their days not doing. Their childhoods were sacrificed on the altar of booming industry. While campaigners banged on the doors of Parliament, begging it to act, arguments for child protection were smeared as moral panic and those calling for change were painted as anti-business, anti-innovation luddites.

Sound familiar? In our time, in the face of the digital world’s own gleaming, precise and powerful steam engines, we must do better. Being constantly connected is fundamentally changing what it means to be a child for the worse, and it is our job in Parliament to act.

The first meeting I had after I was elected was with secondary headteachers from all of Darlington’s schools. I asked them to help me set up an Online Safety Forum, to hear from local teenagers about exactly what life was like for them online.

The responses I got from my forum members were clear. While most of them didn’t want to be offline, they agreed there should be changes. More than three-quarters of 14- to 16-year-olds in Darlington who took part in my forum had been contacted by a stranger online. “It’s not us that’s the problem, it’s the weirdos,” one told me. He was right: we must protect young people from predators, bad actors and all “weirdos”.

Our response must involve enforceable and evergreen legislation. We could use statutory instruments to age-gate VPN apps to 18 and change the age of digital consent from 13 to 16 under GDPR legislation. This would help prevent age-gate workarounds via VPN and strengthen the tool (or “bot”) regulatory framework by bringing the Information Commissioner’s Office into the online safety space. These two changes alone would also force algorithms and suggested content functionalities to change, and they would help prevent the marketing and monetisation of children online.

We could go further and make a register of children’s broadcasters, organisations and charities that are trusted providers of online content to children. We could make any new or existing social media functionality 18+ age-gated by default. We could empower parents and carers by running a national “five-a-day”-style campaign covering online risks and harms. We could force social media companies that want child users to prove via a licence system that their products are safe for children. They should have to complete a dynamic risk assessment and only after approval of their licence could they allow child users.

These licences would allow us to regulate functionalities used by online technology companies to harvest information, drive behaviour and advertise. By age-gating online products (and their functionalities), requiring proactive highly effective age verification, and creating a licensing regime for products used online, we could replicate the approach we take in the offline world towards age-inappropriate harms or spaces.

Some functionalities are clearly unsuitable for under-16s. There is no reason, for example, for under-16s to have any access to strangers. This has already caused too many children too much harm, and young people have told me they don’t need or want it.

We should ban all functionalities for under-16s that pose the most risk to children, either from strangers, from themselves or from habitual damage. For example, an under-16-year-old shouldn’t be able to publish their own content. Nobody deserves something they said or did as a child to potentially be discoverable for the rest of their lives. These functionalities should never be available to under-16s, and it should be a criminal offence to enable or facilitate that happening.

Look at these harms as if they were offline

We prevent anyone from driving under 17, not because all 16-year-olds are dangerous behind the wheel but because it is our responsibility to reduce the likelihood of children and young people coming to harm by being given too great a responsibility for their own and others’ safety. We must replicate this approach and remove the level of personal responsibility we’re putting on our children online.

There are lots of other functionalities that have been raised with me that seem to be destroying childhood and turbocharging the normal challenges of adolescence. We need to decide on the suitability of generative AI, short-form scrolling and viewing unregulated influencer content. Mass group chat, broadcast and mass sharing functions are causing very real damage.

Look at these harms as if they were offline. Imagine a new state-of-the-art community centre opens round the corner from your house. Everyone in the area goes; you see old friends and make new ones; they offer lots of free activities for young people; your children love it, as do all their friends.

But then you find out one of the sports coaches is bullying some of the children and showing others horrible gruesome images. Another member of staff is popping into sessions and spouting hate against women, and your child has started repeating it. Another is telling your child to try diet pills, stop eating or try a life-threateningly dangerous challenge. Then you find out your child is sneaking out at night to hang out at the community centre with adults asking them for pictures. Your child’s behaviour has changed, and they only want to go to the community centre.

When you complain, you get an automatic response from a robot. Then you find out nobody knows the staff members’ real names or anything about them. You discover the community centre is owned by overseas billionaires who take no responsibility for what happens there, and nobody is legally responsible for what children are told at the centre.

With no other choice, you go to the police, thinking surely they can step in. But they say the staff were using fake names, live in other countries and even the international addresses they’ve provided turn out to be fake, so there’s nothing they can do. So, you decide to stop your children going there.

But it’s not that simple. Your children get bullied for not going, left out of their social circles and, besides, people tell you it’s safe, it’s been great for your business, and they have some useful adult and child education sessions.

After a bit of research, you find out this is happening in almost every community centre like this across the country. At this stage, you and your other friends with children go to MPs and say they’ve all got the same issues; that their children’s mental health is severely deteriorating and child development in early years is suffering too. You say it’s happening all over the country, all over the world, and some children have been groomed. Some have even taken their own lives.

At that point, you’d expect your government to take action to make the community centre safe for children or shut it down.

It is critical that, following the consultation, the action taken by this government must work to make the internet safe for children. It must be uniform, robust and enforceable.

We have reached crisis point. Inpatient numbers at children’s mental health units have risen dramatically since 2012. Our school readiness figures are poor and the Young People’s Survey for England found this generation to be the most connected but the loneliest on record. The minister for violence against women and girls recently said 91 per cent of all child sexual abuse images are made by children themselves. That is horrifying. Parents and children need our help.

Platforms and big tech will (and already do) protest any friction to their services, just as the mill owners, the car manufactures, the tobacco companies, alcohol producers and all age-restricted industries have done before them. But ultimately, just as their predecessors did, these companies will have no choice but to act in a way that protects children and creates the internet that our children deserve.

Internet safety is a modern problem, but the solution is over 200 years old: Periculum privatum utilitas publica. The Stockton and Darlington Railway had it right – the greatest private innovations must be used for public good. Join us and win the fight to protect our children and deliver that public good, for the benefit of all.

Lola McEvoy is Labour MP for Darlington