Kemi Badenoch has called on Keir Starmer to “just get on” with a ban on social media for under-16s, saying delay is a dereliction of duty that is harming children’s mental health.
After the government said it would consult on a social media ban for under-16s by the summer, the Conservative party leader urged the prime minister to act more quickly, “however difficult to implement” it would be.
Badenoch’s comments will add to pressure on the government as peers prepare to vote on an amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill on Wednesday that would enact a ban within a year of it passing. The government is understood to want to wait to assess the evidence from Australia’s ban, which came into force in December.
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?”
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.
“By restricting social media use for children, we aren’t just protecting children. We can also give more freedoms to adults online,” she said. “We will no longer need to contort digital spaces to be universally ‘child-friendly’, or impose blanket restrictions on speech and content because children might see it. If we stop treating children like adults, we can stop treating adults like children, too.”
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.”
