UK eyes sweeping powers to regulate tech without parliamentary scrutiny 

LONDON — Keir Starmer wants the public to know he’s going to move fast and fix things. 

Speaking to an audience of young people last month, the U.K. prime minister said that unlike the previous Conservative government, which took eight years to pass the country’s Online Safety Act, Labour will legislate fast enough to keep up with the breakneck speed of technological change and its associated harms. 

“We’ve taken the powers to make sure we can act within months, not years,” he said.  

His words came after the government decried Elon Musk’s X for allowing deepfaked nude images to flood its platform. “The action we took on Grok sent a clear message that no platform gets a free pass,” Starmer said. 

Labour showcased its bold new approach last week, tabling two legislative amendments that seek to grant ministers sweeping powers to change the U.K.’s online safety regime without needing to pass primary legislation through Parliament — meaning MPs and peers would have next to no opportunity for scrutiny. 

While Labour argues this is necessary to deal with the onslaught of online harms brought about by technology — particularly AI — digital rights activists and civil liberties campaigners fear executive overreach, and say Labour is confusing fast action for good policy, especially as it mulls the possibility of a social media ban for under-16s. 

Government hands itself new powers

The first amendment, to the Crime and Policing Bill, would empower any senior government minister to amend the Online Safety Act near unilaterally for the purposes of “minimizing or mitigating the risks of harm to individuals” presented by illegal AI-generated content.  

The second amendment, to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, looks to go even further, giving ministers the ability to alter any piece of primary legislation to restrict children’s access to “certain internet services.”  

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has said it wants to act “at pace” in response to the findings of its consultation, the “key focus” of which is whether to ban social media for under-16s, a policy idea which has picked up momentum in multiple countries since Australia introduced a ban at the end of last year. 

Amendments like those tabled this week are commonly referred to as Henry VIII clauses, which allow ministers to largely bypass Parliament. They are not entirely new: successive governments since the 1980s have increasingly relied on statutory instruments for lawmaking, according to the Institute for Government.  

But such clauses bring problems that could last long after Starmer’s premiership. The government may have good intentions when it comes to online safety, but the measures proposed are “storing up trouble for years to come at a very worrying moment where anti-democratic parties [around the world] are gaining traction,” Anna Cardaso, policy and campaigns officer at civil liberties organisation Liberty told POLITICO. 

“When you create a law, you have to think about what a future government could do with those powers. A future government might not be motivated purely by reducing harms to children, or might have a very different view of what counts as harm,” agreed James Baker, advocacy manager at digital rights organisation Open Rights Group.  

Baker pointed to steps taken by the Trump administration in the U.S. to target websites hosting LGBTQ+ content and reproductive health advice.  

There are also questions to be asked about proportionality under the Human Rights Act, he argued, not least because the evidence base on how children are affected by social media is muddy at best — a DSIT-commissioned study published in January found little high-quality evidence of a correlation between time spent on social media and poorer reported mental health, for example.  

Although the government hopes its use of Henry VIII powers will speed things up, the move is vulnerable to challenge in the courts — not only from human rights campaigners concerned about the impact on privacy and freedom of expression, but also from tech companies navigating any new regulations.  

“The inevitable consequence of such broad regulatory discretion is an explosion in litigation,” Oliver Carroll, legal director at law firm Bird & Bird, said.  

‘Fire-fighting’

The government has backed away from plans to introduce primary legislation dedicated to artificial intelligence, with ministers instead looking to regulate AI at the point of use on a sector-by-sector basis.  

Primary legislation on AI would have allowed parliamentarians and other stakeholders to “debate and hammer out the fundamental principles and a framework of regulation,” Liberty’s Anna Carsado said. “But instead, they’ve dodged the hard thing, and they’re just firefighting emergency by emergency by statutory instrument.”  

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill amendment gets its first outing in the House of Commons today, where it stands a good chance of surviving thanks to Labour’s 158-seat majority. Both amendments will also have to pass the House of Lords, where they could meet more resistance. 

DSIT did not respond when contacted by POLITICO for comment.