Marlborough’s Tory MP Claire Perry has welcomed as “great news” a vital breakthrough in her battle to prevent children being able to watch hard core pornography and other damaging websites on their computers.
TalkTalk, one of the major internet providers, has stepped out of line and decided to offer all its four million subscribers a blanket opt-out for pornography sites.
This will provide parents protection for computers owned or used by their children, as well as games consoles or e-readers able to access the internet through broadband connections.
And it predicts that one million of its subscribers will be able to so by next March, the Sunday Times reveals today in an exclusive report.
And in an exclusive interview with Marlborough News Online, Claire Perry declared: “This is an absolute breakthrough. We are really making positive progress for a change. It’s very good news, great news and I am delighted.”
“TalkTalk have taken the issue seriously from the start and announced last May that they would offer an opt-out service to all new customers.”
“Now they are expanding on that product while BT claimed it was something impossible to introduce. This is a subject that affects everybody and something all parents talk about, it is a product that meets parents needs.”
TalkTalk’s breakaway decision will now put pressure on other internet providers to accept the demands of a cross-party parliamentary inquiry chaired by Marlborough’s MP, which has called for urgent action to introduce opt-out filters parents can install.
And Mrs Perry’s campaign is seen too by political commentators as one of the few vote-catching policies millions of parents totally support following the government’s continual round of austerity measures.
TalkTalk’s filter, HomeSafe, blocks sites categorised as unsuitable for children under 18, and that includes pornography, gambling, drugs, dating, weapons plus suicide and self-harm sites.
“Our competitors are being dreadfully slow to wake up to the fact that society as a whole cares strongly about this,” Dido Harding, chief executive of TalkTalk, told the Sunday Times following the fact that 41 per cent of children aged seven to 10 have internet access in their bedrooms.
In an editorial headed TalkTalks Shames Its Rivals Over Porn, the Sunday Times accuses the government too of being inconsistent despite the build up of objections during Mrs Perry’s 18 month parliamentary inquiry, David Cameron only offering last week to meet with internet providers to discuss possible action.
“The government is moving at a snail’s pace,” the leader declares. “The internet companies, it seems, are hopeless at blocking pornography but good at blocking government action.
“And, as the foot-dragging goes on, thousands more children are suffering a sad and possibly damaging loss of innocence.”
