Crackdown on teenagers’ social media use to come ‘very quickly’ after consultation ends tonight, says Starmer – UK politics live

As we reported in our overnight story on the potential social media ban for children under the age of 16, the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges has said that action is definitely needed.

The academy has published its submission to the government’s consultation online, and it is powerful. Here is an extract from the foreword by Jeanette Dickson, the chair of the academy.

There can be few issues which have united clinicians so resoundingly in recent years as the impact that unfettered exposure to tech and devices is currently having on children and young people’s health. It ranks alongside smoking and wearing seatbelts in cars as a unifying force for the medical profession.

And while there are those that may argue about a correlation rather than direct evidence of causation as some did in the sixties and seventies with smoking and seatbelts, there is, I think, an overwhelming consensus that excessive screen time can harm children and young people and we need to call this out unflinchingly rather than passively wait for someone else to prove causation.

Describing a meeting the academy held last year to discuss the issue, she says:

By any measure, it was an extraordinary meeting not just because of the moving personal testimony of the many clinicians attending, but because it gave participants a glimpse of the cross-specialty reach and sheer scale of the problem. Then, as now, it seemed not a single branch of medicine was immune from the issue. From the GP dealing with a dramatic rise in adolescents seeking help for their anxiety or body image issues, to emergency department doctors dealing with teenagers being rushed in with loss of vision or hearing — symptoms of non-fatal strangulation. Paediatricians, psychiatrists, pptometrists, obstetricians and gynaecologists, as this submission shows, all reported seeing some form of health harm to a child or young person daily.

The report does not make specific recommendations about a ban. It says that it is for the government to decide what must be done. But it says clinicians need more guidance on how to deal with the problems caused by children using social media, and it includes compelling evidence of the scale of the problem.

This chart shows that four out of 10 GPs say that they see young people with medical problems linked to screen use multiple times a week.

And here is an extract from the report’s conclusion.

From the family of four sat in a pizza restaurant not speaking to each other because they are ‘on their phones’ to the toddler screaming in the GP’s surgery as its worried parent tries to prise it away from its iPad in readiness for a physical examination, to an anxious teenager simply too scared to go to school — the signs of an entire generation’s inability to cope without being permanently hooked up to a digital world are part of our everyday experience.

Yet successive governments have so far chosen to do nothing, the UK is behind other countries in tackling the issue, but not excessively so …

In the last five years alone, around ten so-called nominative laws have been enacted mostly to protect children [like Natasha’s law on allergies, or Charlie’s law on alternative treatments, or Martyn’s law on venue safety] … All measures that were arguably long overdue.

On this issue though, successive governments have made an art form of inaction, carefully filing ‘meaningful’ reform in the ‘too difficult’ box.

And as the medical profession, we have been here before. We said the same things about seatbelts. We said the same things about smoking. In both cases, the causal mechanism was hiding in plain sight — and the population paid the price while we didn’t pursue the argument robustly.

The difference now is that the harm being done to children online is not hypothetical, not statistical, and not waiting for proof offered by peer-reviewed studies of certain causation. It is immediate, it is documented, and it is happening at scale.