Doesn’t matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka indirect tax.
Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add a million cuts to the costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
Edit: addressing the ad revenue stream. Again irrelevant. The ad revenue stream is reduced, some platforms are talking about charging UK users the outcome is the same. Maybe some pull out of the UK or force more ads into the freemium services costing time.
The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you’ve decided they’re similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you’re doing or not.
Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
Absolute bollocks. Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
Of course the privacy impact is huge. privacy just does not matter to the average working voting person trying to put groceries on the table.
MPs wont change the stance here because people want to be protected by anonymity. Frankly they won’t change stance at all. Its a certainty at this point.
But it will increase the cost of business which will be passed on and definitely exploited.
“Wont somebody think of the children”
Plenty of children starving in the UK because Government services cant raise revenue to maintain existing levels of public services.
I look to the UK and see the future of western economies. Boned badly, society highly controlled with a large overall tax burden, years of immigration to keep the budget balaced on paper increasing the impact all to delay the fallout. And yes while this will most likely not register a blip to the CPI, its still yet another cut in the wrong direction.
Absolute bollocks. Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
If your opposition is just based on vibes than it can be ignored based on nothing more than that.
You should practice it.
Levy is a Tax.
Oh, you are talking about an actual fee in the legislation, not the cost of contracting with a company that verifies ages.
The cost though is £70 million. Since you raise the prospect of child poverty, the one policy the government needs to reverse to improve child poverty is the two-child benefit cap, which would cost £2.1bn, so this policy costs 3% of a substantive policy on child poverty.
A high estimate for how many deaths could be prevented by lifting the cap is about 300 per year, that I have seen (it’s not really about the cap itself but is about modelling what would happen if Labour were able to reduce child poverty at the same rate it was in 1997-2010, which would presumably include eliminating the cap). 3% of 300 is 9 deaths. While I don’t support the OSA, I think it is completely plausible that a policy which reduces the amount children are looking at extreme violence and advocation of eating disorders and suicide would prevent in the region of 9 deaths per year. About 150 children die each year by suicide (according to statistics, which will undercount the problem because parents as a rule don’t want their child’s death to be recorded as suicide). And saving 9 lives is to bring this policy in line, cost-wise, with an estimate that relates to a whole programme of government, which will in reality cost far more than £2.1bn.
Cost is not the right lens through which to examine the OSA, no matter what your personal opinion tells you.
It very much is.
Doesn’t matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka indirect tax.
Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add a million cuts to the costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
Edit: addressing the ad revenue stream. Again irrelevant. The ad revenue stream is reduced, some platforms are talking about charging UK users the outcome is the same. Maybe some pull out of the UK or force more ads into the freemium services costing time.
The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you’ve decided they’re similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you’re doing or not.
Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
You should practice it.
Levy is a Tax.
Absolute bollocks. Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
Of course the privacy impact is huge. privacy just does not matter to the average working voting person trying to put groceries on the table.
MPs wont change the stance here because people want to be protected by anonymity. Frankly they won’t change stance at all. Its a certainty at this point.
But it will increase the cost of business which will be passed on and definitely exploited.
“Wont somebody think of the children”
Plenty of children starving in the UK because Government services cant raise revenue to maintain existing levels of public services.
I look to the UK and see the future of western economies. Boned badly, society highly controlled with a large overall tax burden, years of immigration to keep the budget balaced on paper increasing the impact all to delay the fallout. And yes while this will most likely not register a blip to the CPI, its still yet another cut in the wrong direction.
If your opposition is just based on vibes than it can be ignored based on nothing more than that.
Oh, you are talking about an actual fee in the legislation, not the cost of contracting with a company that verifies ages.
The cost though is £70 million. Since you raise the prospect of child poverty, the one policy the government needs to reverse to improve child poverty is the two-child benefit cap, which would cost £2.1bn, so this policy costs 3% of a substantive policy on child poverty.
A high estimate for how many deaths could be prevented by lifting the cap is about 300 per year, that I have seen (it’s not really about the cap itself but is about modelling what would happen if Labour were able to reduce child poverty at the same rate it was in 1997-2010, which would presumably include eliminating the cap). 3% of 300 is 9 deaths. While I don’t support the OSA, I think it is completely plausible that a policy which reduces the amount children are looking at extreme violence and advocation of eating disorders and suicide would prevent in the region of 9 deaths per year. About 150 children die each year by suicide (according to statistics, which will undercount the problem because parents as a rule don’t want their child’s death to be recorded as suicide). And saving 9 lives is to bring this policy in line, cost-wise, with an estimate that relates to a whole programme of government, which will in reality cost far more than £2.1bn.
Cost is not the right lens through which to examine the OSA, no matter what your personal opinion tells you.
Welcome to politics. Have you never seen parliament debate?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-20/why-uk-inflation-is-so-high-and-what-it-means-for-interest-rates
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jun/06/stress-crisis-uk-financial-health-housing-insecurity
Is history at this point