Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to open this important debate this afternoon, and I move the motion in the name of Paul Davies on the order paper today, recognising the multitude of risks that children face using the internet, noting the importance of taking action to ensure children’s safety online, and calling upon the Welsh Government to respond to concerns from the NSPCC and other organisations, so that we can get things right in terms of having this as a priority going forward.

Now, before I get into my speech, I just want to say that we will be supporting both of the amendments today that have been tabled by Plaid Cymru. We think that they do complement our motion, and they recognise the need for a joined-up approach here, by all Governments across the United Kingdom and, in fact, around the world, in order to address some of the very real issues.

The cyber-attack incidents that took place over the weekend showed, in very stark terms, I think, just how reliant we have become, as a society, on the internet and digital technology. There is no doubt in my mind that, very often, we’re over-reliant on these things. And of course, we particularly bring these things into focus when something goes wrong, and, as we have seen, they can go spectacularly wrong. But as policy makers and lawmakers here in the Senedd today, many of us are old enough to remember a time without personal computers, without smartphones; some may be able to remember the very first tablets—and I’m not talking about the ones that Moses brought down from the top of Sinai—but chalk tablets, even, in the classroom to be used as learning aids. If you talk about those things to a young person now, they’re just bewildered by the fact that there was an absence of technology in times before. Because the reality is that they are so used to, and so familiar with the technology that is all around us—in school and in the home—that when I talk about the fact that I was a youngster and my mum and dad bought me for Christmas a ZX Spectrum and it was the bees knees, and it used to take half an hour to load a programme, with a little cassette tape, they’re absolutely astonished. So, we’ve got a new generation who are more familiar with technology, very often, than those who are teaching them in our schools and their parents at home. In fact, we’re very often more illiterate than they are when it comes to technology.

Now, of course, the fact that we have all this technology presents huge opportunities for the future—opportunities in education, in employment, in social networking—all on this huge, big global scale. But as much as technology is a blessing, it also can be a curse. We’ve seen that having this wealth of information, particularly over the internet, doesn’t come risk free, and it can expose people—vulnerable people and children—to some very real harms. Pornography, gambling, inappropriate sharing of personalised sexual information and content, fraud, cyber bullying, online grooming, blackmail, exploitation and radicalisation are all things that the internet has brought into people’s homes and onto people’s laps. And they’re real threats. They’re threats to the physical and mental health and well-being of young people here in Wales today. That’s why we’ve got to ensure that online safety is a top priority for us now and in terms of how we go forward.

To be fair to the Welsh Government, I think it’s already done some very good work on this front. They’ve already taken some measures to protect students in Welsh schools and to raise e-safety standards in those places of learning. I know, for example, that the South West Grid for Learning has been working in partnership with the Welsh Government since 2014 on these e-safety issues. I also know that around 78 per cent of schools in Wales, so far, have used the 360 Degree Safe Cymru self-review tool, which evaluates how safe their online practices actually are. Of course, they’re also providing opportunities through Safer Internet Day campaigns as well to raise the profile and the importance of these issues.

I’m very pleased also to see the Welsh Government strongly supporting Operation Net Safe, which is a programme in conjunction with the police and the Lucy Faithfull Foundation that aims to stop the creation, viewing and sharing of indecent images of children online. I’m very pleased to see the recent report of the Internet Watch Foundation—and I should have declared the fact that I’m actually an internet watch champion on behalf of that association at the start of my speech—but I was very pleased to see that the UK now hosts less than 0.1 per cent of child sexual abuse images worldwide. That’s because of this zero tolerance approach that has been taken by the UK Government and by all of the devolved administrations on that particular issue. It’s great that we’re making that progress, but we’ve got to do more. The only way we can do that is by having more of a cross-sectoral approach within the Government and without the Government, but with the leadership of the Government to bring individuals together. We need the education sector working together with parents, with industry, with experts in civil society and, of course, with children themselves in order to educate our young people about how best they can protect themselves, so that we can develop the tools that we all need to respond to a constantly evolving internet and the threats and harms that can be associated with it.

Clearly, the obvious starting place to teach and empower children and young people on internet safety is by entrenching some key measures and principles into our education system where digital literacy is actually taught, and we have a great opportunity with the new curriculum that is being shaped in Wales to embed these things more permanently, if you like, within that new curriculum. But it requires, in my view, a more comprehensive strategy as well going forward in order to nail this thing—a strategy that can be regularly under review. We know that NSPCC Cymru have been calling for measures to be introduced by the Welsh Government to protect children online, including the publication of a comprehensive online safety action plan that is underpinned by an advisory group that can ensure that Wales is really at the forefront of keeping children safe online in the UK and around the world. The Welsh Government hasn’t yet responded to that particular recommendation from the NSPCC, and I hope very much that the Cabinet Secretary in her response to the debate today will be able to tell us whether that is something that the Welsh Government is prepared to take up, so that we can embed this plan into our schools, into our public sector and across Government, so that we can have this standardised approach.

I am concerned, I have to say, that whilst there has been some progress, we’ve still got 22 per cent of Welsh schools who have not yet evaluated, using that self-evaluation tool, the safety of their online practice. I think that the inspectorate, Estyn, for example, does have a role in making sure that that is one of the things that features highly on the radar of schools in terms of protecting those children. We’ve got some very good child protection policies across Wales, lots of paperwork about child protection, but very often the one thing that is missing from all of those bits of paper is this issue of internet safety.

There’s also been some very good work, as I said earlier on, over the border in England. The UK Government has been leading on this, really, worldwide in terms of internet safety. They adopted an all-sector approach from the outset. In 2013, the then Prime Minister worked with the internet industry to get the service providers to offer internet filters to parents so that they could select what their children can and cannot view online. In 2014, the House of Commons culture and media select committee did a report into online safety and it set out some of the challenges and made some clear recommendations that the UK Government has been taking forward. Of course, internet safety has been a compulsory part of the curriculum in England now since 2014, and some key work has been done, particularly to stop the spectre of bullying and cyberbullying that has been taking place online and has been so costly, and devastatingly costly, to some young people who, as a result of that bullying, unfortunately have taken their own lives.

In 2015, we found that schools in England are now required to filter all inappropriate online content and to teach pupils about being safe. I know that that filtering takes place in our schools as well, which can only be a good thing. But of course, pupils aren’t just accessing inappropriate internet content on their computers in the school. They’re also taking mobile phones into school. They’re taking their own tablets into school, and of course that also has inherent risks. So, we’ve got a lot more that we need to do in order to get this situation right, and I think that, as a country, Wales needs to be leading, we need to be on the front foot, and we need to be working with the other administrations across the UK if we’re ever to deal with this problem.

Just one practical thing before I pass the baton on to the next speaker in the debate, and that is this: there are family-friendly internet policies that have been adopted by some businesses in Britain, but not all of those businesses have taken the opportunity to have family-friendly internet on their premises. There are many hotel groups, restaurants and parts of the public sector that haven’t got family-friendly filters in place on their internet servers, and it’s essential, I think, that we get these things in place if we’re ever going to have the proper protections in place for our children going forward.

So, I encourage people to accept the motion in the spirit in which it’s put forward today, in a non-partisan way, and to work with us in order to shape the future so that we can keep our young people safe. Thank you.