Proposed amendments to a UK children’s welfare bill would force adults to submit personal or biometric data to access everyday online services, legal experts warn, while doing little to stop determined children from reaching restricted content.
The amendments, tabled by opposition peers in the House of Lords to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, would ban children under 16 from social media and from using virtual private networks. But their broad drafting catches far more than the platforms they target, according to digital rights and legal specialists familiar with the legislation.
The social media ban defines the affected services as “user-to-user services” — a category wide enough to include Wikipedia, WhatsApp, shared family calendars, and online forums. The VPN ban creates a separate problem: age-verification tools are already easily defeated, so the provision adds friction for adults without reliably blocking children.
A bill pulling in multiple directions
Digital rights expert Heather Burns describes the bill as a “monster”, with online safety provisions inserted into legislation originally introduced by the Department for Education to improve schooling and support children in care. Parliamentary debates have lurched between online safety policy and school milk, she says. “They’ve basically piled outstanding grievances about the Online Safety Act into this bill.”
The UK Online Safety Act came into force in July 2025, requiring websites to block children from pornography and government-designated harmful content. Its existing age-verification measures have proved straightforward to circumvent — facial recognition systems can be fooled using screenshots of video game characters, and VPNs allow users to appear as if they are browsing from a country where no age checks apply. A reported 77 percent drop in UK visits to the most-visited pornography site since the Act’s passage may reflect users rerouting rather than abstaining.
Neil Brown, a lawyer at decoded.legal, calls the new amendments “dreadful” and questions the underlying premise. “I am absolutely unconvinced that banning children from social media is in any way the right way of solving it,” he says. He argues no one has clearly defined what problem the legislation is meant to address. “The massive gap in all this is, can someone please set out clearly and concisely what is the problem that they are trying to solve?”
Adults caught in the net
Forcing adults through mandatory age checks to reach lawful content creates its own risks. Brown warns that the process could expose browsing habits to the government, to hackers, or to the public if data is ever leaked.
James Baker, a spokesperson for the Open Rights Group, says the amendments would grant the secretary of state for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology the power to add sites and services to a regulated list at will — meaning adults could be required to hand over personal or biometric data to third-party providers simply to access lawful content.
Brown doubts the amendments will pass. The Labour government has already indicated it intends to consult separately on both a VPN ban for children and restrictions on social media access. Australia has enacted a ban on social media for those under 16, and the European Union is considering comparable measures, giving UK lawmakers an expanding body of international experience to weigh before acting.
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