Speeches by Hinds.

“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 …”

“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?”

“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?”

“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…”

“But we survived. How did we grow up into these adults?”

“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 …”

“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 …”

“I realise I am stretching our Chair’s patience a little bit, as this is only one follow-up question, but can I ask one more?”

“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 …”

“I think that the phones in the bedroom stuff is mostly about older children. If I have understood correctly what we are going to get in April, it is also coming right down to the earliest years. There are questions around early brain development and more children presenting in year R with attention difficulty and so on…”

“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…”

“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.”

“I want to go back to metrics and KPIs in a moment, but can I ask about the digital-first approach first? We say that there is a digital-first approach, but many things can be digital: a DAB radio station, a video on demand platform, somebody else’s video on demand platform, Facebook, YouTube and news aggregators. Most …”

“In orders of magnitude, those numbers are the same.”

“It is worth saying those figures out loud again, if you don’t mind. Could you tell us again the trust figure, in the Chinese state broadcaster—”

“And the trust figure in Russia Today?”

“I do not want to cut you short, Tim, but I am conscious that we are short of time. Reach is one measure. People might say that the better measure is share, and specifically share not just overall in the world but among young people. In a lot of the countries that we are talking about, young people are the majority of p…”

“I have one last question. I suspect that the value of the World Service to this country and to freedom and peace around the world is huge. How do you prove it? Do you feel you have compelling metrics that can demonstrate it not just to the FCDO but more broadly to the western alliance? We are in a new geopolitical phas…”