The UK government announced this week that social media companies will be barred from reaching children under sixteen, with an evening curfew keeping the platforms away from sixteen and seventeen-year-olds. Most of the reporting has called this a ban on children. That is not what has been proposed.
What has been proposed puts every obligation on the companies. The platforms are the ones required to keep away from under-sixteens, the ones penalised if they fail, the ones the law is aimed at from beginning to end. Nothing in it restricts, fines or polices a single child or parent. At no point are we criminalising children. The right way to describe what was announced is what it actually is. A ban on the companies accessing our children, not on the children themselves.
There is also nothing unusual about regulating a harmful or addictive product to protect children. We do it routinely with alcohol, tobacco, gambling and pharmaceuticals. Age restrictions on the buyer. Sales offences on the retailer. Restrictions on how the product itself is designed, packaged, marketed and sold. Pre-market safety duties on the maker. We layer the regulation because no single instrument does the job on its own, and no government has lost any sleep about it. What is unusual is the slowness with which we have applied the same instinct to the social media companies. The under-sixteens announcement is, in that sense, a normal piece of public health legislation, treating an addictive consumer product the way we treat the others. The strange thing is not that the move has been made now. It is that it took this long.
On its own terms, welcome
As the parent of a ten-year-old, I support it, and I support it as a step in the right direction. It takes the pressure off me, and, more importantly, it takes the pressure off my son Keir. The peer pressure argument every parent ends up losing to, that everyone else is on it, that they will be the one left out, is the one this announcement defuses. Some children will find ways around it. They always do. That is true of every age restriction we have ever passed, and was never an argument against any of them. The point is the default, and the default the government has just set is the right one. Nine in ten parents who responded to the public consultation backed the move, and so do I. Australia has already legislated for the same restriction. The UK is right to follow.
A ban does not, on its own, give a child anything back
It is also only a beginning, and this is the part the reporting has skipped over almost entirely. A ban takes something away without putting anything in its place. The hours a child once spent on a phone do not vanish because the phone has, and nothing in this week's announcement gives that child a street quiet enough to play in, or brings back the playground that closed down the road some years ago and was never replaced.
The state of British provision for children's play tells the story. Almost eight hundred playgrounds have closed in the UK since 2013, according to research compiled by the Association of Play Industries. In England specifically, local authorities have closed three hundred and forty-seven of them since 2014. Spending on play facilities fell by forty-four per cent between 2017/18 and 2020/21. Fields in Trust finds that a third of British children do not have access to any nearby playground at all. None of this has been mentioned in any of the coverage of this week's announcement.
The model already exists
Since 2010, every Welsh local authority has been under a statutory Play Sufficiency Duty to assess whether children in their area have enough places and opportunities to play, and to secure them if they do not. Wales was the first country in the world to put play into law in this way. Scotland has since followed, with a play sufficiency duty embedded in the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 2019, and regulations in force since May 2023. England has not. There is no policy reason it could not.
A serious response to the under-sixteens question would extend a meaningful duty into England, attach money to it across all four UK nations, and treat the planning of streets and neighbourhoods as part of children's policy rather than as a separate transport or development question. It would re-open the youth clubs, libraries and play schemes that have been quietly closed for fifteen years. It would invest in the playworkers, librarians and youth workers who make those spaces work. It would do the work the ban does not, which is to give children somewhere to be.
The bigger thesis
This is what links the social media ban, the playground closures, the lost youth clubs, the absence of play sufficiency in England, the planning of streets that do not welcome children, the parents left to police screen time on their own. Each is treated as its own small policy problem, with its own minister-of-the-week and its own ribbon to cut. None is treated as part of one connected question, which is whether the country is hospitable to childhood at all.
That is the case I have made elsewhere for a Ministry for Childhood at cabinet level, with real budgets and real authority. Most countries treat childhood as a sub-clause of something else. The education ministry has schools. The health ministry has paediatric services. The culture or sport ministry might have play, if play makes the cut. None of it adds up to cabinet-level responsibility for the seventeen years of childhood that every citizen passes through.
The under-sixteens announcement makes the case for that joined-up frame, not against it. An access ban will not, on its own, give us back the childhood that has been quietly eroded around it. Nor has any other piecemeal childhood policy of the past twenty years. Childhood is one thing. Treating it as a thousand things is what produces legislation that is always too little and always too late.
Two objections
The first is that an access ban will simply drive children underground, onto encrypted apps, fringe platforms, or behind VPNs, where there are fewer safeguards still. It is a real objection. It is also, in the end, an argument against every age restriction on every product. The mainstream platforms are not a safer harbour. The grooming, the self-harm content, the eating-disorder communities and the engineered overuse already reach children on TikTok and Instagram, in plain sight, every day. "They will find somewhere worse" is not an argument for leaving the current harm in place. It is an argument for going after the somewhere worse too. Most children, most of the time, follow the path of least resistance. Friction matters. A policy does not need to be airtight to be worth doing.
The second objection is more serious. That an access ban leaves the platforms exactly as they are. Some have argued that the deeper question is whether platforms that fail children's safety standards should be permitted to operate at all. Comply or do not operate. They are right. If the law is aimed at the companies, the more durable version goes further than excluding under-sixteens. It tackles the design itself. The addictive feeds, the stranger-contact features, the recommendation systems that surface harm to a fourteen-year-old in three swipes. None of that is fixed by an age gate, and all of it is still there for the sixteen-year-old who walks through it the day after their birthday.
The architecture for that deeper work already exists. The Online Safety Act 2023 requires platforms likely to be accessed by children to assess and reduce the risks their design poses to those children, and gives Ofcom powers to fine non-compliant companies up to ten per cent of global turnover. Those powers have not yet been used to anything like their full extent. The under-sixteens announcement is not a substitute for that work. It is a step in the right direction, and a prompt to get on with the rest.
Australia's experience, six months in, speaks to both objections. Within two weeks of that country's ban taking effect, age-restricted platforms had removed 4.7 million under-sixteen accounts. The mass migration to fringe services that the critics predicted has not, on anything like that scale, followed. At the same time, more than half of under-sixteen users have so far stayed put on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, because the platforms have been slow to deploy age checks to existing accounts. The Australian regulator has just opened formal investigations into five of them. The lesson is the same on both counts. The duty has to be enforced, and enforced visibly, or it does not bite. The same will be true here.
The easy part
So, by all means, keep the companies away from our children. This week's announcement does that, more or less, and the Prime Minister deserves credit for being willing to act where successive governments have not. But the announcement was always going to be the easy part. The harder part is what comes next. Whether anyone is prepared to do the slower, less visible work of giving children somewhere to play, somewhere to read, somewhere to walk safely, somewhere to be bored with their friends. Whether the planning of our streets and neighbourhoods carries a real duty to provide for the children who live on them. Whether the Online Safety Act is enforced with the seriousness its drafters intended. Whether parents get support, not just a new rule to police.
Protect play, protect childhood. The platforms have been told to stay away from our children. The next question is what we put back, and whether we are finally willing to treat childhood as one thing.