‘Underwhelmed’: Ofcom admits online safety impact falling short as full roll-out slips to 2027
Britain’s online safety watchdog has admitted its flagship rules have so far had an “underwhelming” impact on children’s safety, as it revealed the Online Safety Act will not be fully operational until the middle of 2027 and warned the government’s incoming social media ban could stretch its resources.
Ofcom officials faced a grilling from peers on Tuesday over whether the Online Safety Act had actually made children safer, more than a year after its key child protection duties came into force.
Oliver Griffiths, Ofcom’s group director for online safety, conceded the regulator was “less content”, with progress on some of the biggest platforms used by children.
“When you look at our tracking of the stats on this, the overall effect, we’re underwhelmed by so far,” he told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee.
The admission comes after Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza told the same inquiry earlier this month that children believed the landmark legislation had made “absolutely no difference” to their experience online.
Griffiths said Ofcom “shared the frustration”, arguing the regulator was attempting to force cultural change at technology companies that had “acted with impunity for a long time”.
But the watchdog revealed on Tuesday that the Online Safety Act will not be fully operational until the middle of 2027.
The legislation was passed in 2023, but Ofcom said the final duties applying to so-called categorised services, which include additional requirements for the largest platforms, are not expected to be fully in force until around the middle of next year.
That timetable could now face further pressure from the government’s planned ban on social media for under-16s.
“We were fully loaded in terms of the amount of work we had to do before the social media ban was announced,” Griffiths said. “Without extra staff and extra funding, then something will have to give.”
Ofcom has already moved staff onto implementing the ban and submitted a detailed business plan to ministers in July seeking additional resources.
It is now in talks with the government over funding and how its growing workload should be sequenced.
Griffiths said implementing both was “doable as long as it’s resourced and sequenced right”, with Ofcom planning to publish a revised roadmap by the end of the year.
The government announced plans in June to ban under-16s from major social media platforms from next year, alongside tougher restrictions on addictive features for older teenagers.
Ofcom faces scrutiny over tech giants
The regulator pointed to age checks as one area where the Act was beginning to bite.
All of the ten largest pornography services now have age gates, while three quarters of the top 100 have either introduced them or blocked UK users, Ofcom said.
Ofcom has also recorded a 23-fold increase in age checks across a sample of 32 companies, but progress among the major services most heavily used by children has been slower.
Ofcom has secured commitments from X over the speed at which hate and terrorist content is removed, and from Meta and Snap over grooming risks.
Mark Bunting, Ofcom’s director of strategy delivery for online safety, acknowledged there was still “a long way to go”, warning that platforms could introduce protections for children without having sufficiently effective systems for identifying which users were children.
The watchdog is currently investigating TikTok over concerns its age-inference technology may have failed to identify a “significant proportion” of children, potentially leaving them exposed to harmful material.
TikTok previously told Morning Wire it had invested billions in platform safety and was “confident” it met its Online Safety Act obligations.
Ofcom can fine companies that breach the rules up to £18m or 10 per cent of qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is higher, and can ultimately seek court orders blocking persistent offenders from operating in Britain.
Peers also challenged Ofcom over its refusal to give the Children’s Commissioner access to technology companies’ risk assessments.
De Souza previously told the committee she was “pretty furious” that the watchdog had not handed them over.
Griffiths said on Tuesday that Ofcom had not received a “formal request” from the commissioner, despite acknowledging discussions between the organisations had been taking place “for months”.
Ofcom said existing law requires it to seek companies’ consent before sharing the information with a third party.
The hearing is part of a Lords inquiry launched last month into the implementation and enforcement of the Online Safety Act amid concerns it is not working as effectively as intended.
Ofcom itself suggested the legislation may need changing. Bunting warned that the Act’s so-called “safe harbour” can mean companies are deemed compliant when they follow Ofcom’s codes of practice, even if risks identified on their platforms remain inadequately addressed.