Online safety campaigners reveal Starmer frustrations after Phillips exit

Internet safety and children’s rights campaigners say they have been frustrated for months by Keir Starmer’s lack of leadership on blocking child abuse images on children’s phones, speaking out after Jess Phillips resigned from the government saying she was tired of seeing “opportunities for progress stalled and delayed”.

The influential Labour politician was one of four ministers who quit on Tuesday and joined more than 80 MPs to have called for the prime minister to go.

In a coruscating letter she focused on a lack of urgency and boldness in tackling child abuse images, accusing Starmer of failing to take action to block children being able to take or send naked pictures.

“Over a year ago I presented solutions, long worked on by brilliant civil servants, that would end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves,” she said.

“We could stop this abuse. It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten. This is the definition of incremental change. Nothing bold about it. The announcement was meant to be in March.”

Hannah Swirsky, head of policy and public affairs at Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), said campaigners had been pushing for the government to force tech companies to block the ability to send and receive naked images on devices belonging to children. “This technology exists, it can be implemented and it would be a big step in stopping the proliferation of child sexual abuse images because it would stop a significant number of them being produced at source,” she said.

Campaigners had hoped and expected that there would be a promise in the government’s violence against women and girls strategy, which was published in December, that the government would promise to legislate to force tech companies to make the image blocker a default feature on children’s phones, if they did not take action voluntarily. Instead, the strategy promised to “join forces with tech companies so we can work together to make [blocking images] a reality and better protect young people from grooming, extortion, bullying, harassment and sexual abuse.”

In 2024, 91% of the reports of child sexual abuse images received by the IWF that were found to be criminal contained “self-generated” imagery, according to the charity’s research. Police recorded 7,263 sexual communication with a child offences in the last year, almost double since the offence came into force in 2017-18.