The House of Lords has voted decisively for a ban on social media for under-16s in a move that puts pressure on Keir Starmer to bring in Australian-style restrictions.
Peers voted by 261 to 150 in favour of a Tory-led amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which was not backed by the government.
The defeat for the government means the House of Commons will have to consider the amendment, with pressure from dozens of Labour MPs as well as the Tories for a full ban.
The government is already considering a ban as part of a consultation due to report by the summer, so the Lords amendment is unlikely to pass in the Commons.
Starmer is understood to want to wait to assess the evidence from Australia’s ban, which came into force in December.
However, Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, on Wednesday called on Starmer to “just get on” with a ban, saying delay is a dereliction of duty that is harming children’s mental health.
She urged the prime minister to act more quickly, “however difficult to implement” it would be.
Writing in the Guardian, Badenoch said the UK was producing a generation of children who struggled to concentrate and had higher levels of anxiety because of exposure to social media.
Badenoch said limits on alcohol, the age of consent and safeguarding in schools were there to protect children while their brains were developing, but the government had “suspended that logic entirely” when it came to social media. “We will not be bought off with vague promises of a ‘national conversation’ about whether we should get children off these adult platforms,” she said.
“The prime minister must set out how he will act and by when. The crossbench peer Baroness Kidron, who supports Conservative peer Lord Nash’s amendment in the House of Lords, is right to say Starmer’s approach ‘is not leading; it is not governing’. He is ‘doing nothing – slowly’, which is ‘the very epitome of party before country’.
Let’s just get on with it.”
She added: “Putting our children’s mental health first is the right thing to do. How much longer will we have to wait until the government agrees?”
After the Lords vote passed, John Nash, a former schools minister and Tory peer, said: “Tonight, peers put our children’s future first. This vote begins the process of stopping the catastrophic harm that social media is inflicting on a generation.
“Medical professionals, intelligence officers, police officers, teachers and hundreds of thousands of parents clearly demanded action, and the Lords have listened.”
The Conservatives made no moves towards banning social media during their time in government, though the Online Safety Act placed more obligations on internet and social media providers to protect children from harmful content.
However, Badenoch said the consensus had shifted, with campaigners, clinicians, parents and experts now aligned against allowing under-16s access to social media. She also argued some internet restrictions for adults could be lifted if children were more protected from social media.
She said her party believed in freedom but that the ability to make good choices was not yet fully formed in children, who did not have the necessary impulse control, emotional regulation and ability to assess risks.
On Sunday, the Guardian revealed that more than 60 Labour MPs have written to Starmer urging him to back a social media ban for under-16s, including select committee chairs, former frontbenchers and MPs from the right and left of the party.
In the letter, which was organised by Fred Thomas, the Labour MP for Plymouth Moor View, the MPs say: “Across our constituencies, we hear the same message: children are anxious, unhappy, and unable to focus on learning. They are not building the social skills needed to thrive, nor having the experiences that will prepare them for adulthood.”
On Wednesday another letter from campaigners urged parliament to back a ban, with signatories including the actors Hugh Grant and Sophie Winkleman and Esther Ghey, the mother of Brianna Ghey, who was murdered by two teenagers in Warrington, Cheshire, in 2023. It said national polling by the charity Parentkind had found 93% of parents thought social media was harmful to children and young people.
It said: “No other amendment to the bill on this topic has the same cross-party support or would deliver promptly the change needed to get children off social media.”
