I appreciate your concerns and I would like to pay tribute to the NSPCC and other organisations for their work in raising awareness of this very important issue.

The Online Safety Act ensures that the UK is the safest place to be online in the world. As part of this, provisions included in the Act tackle the growing and evolving threat of child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including the transmission of sexually explicit material of children online.

I welcome the fact that the Government strengthened the legislation while it was progressing through Parliament by giving Ofcom extra tools to ensure technology companies take action to prevent, identify and remove harmful CSAE content. As a result, Ofcom will be able to demand that technology companies, such as social media platforms, roll out or develop new technologies to better detect and tackle harmful content on their platforms.

The Act will support innovation and the development of safety technologies across the technology industry and will incentivise companies in building solutions to tackle CSEA which are effective and proportionate.

In conjunction with the legislation, I welcome efforts to improve technology to tackle online child sexual abuse. For example, GCHQ is collaborating with the tech industry to identify and develop solutions to crack down on large scale online child sexual abuse and the government-funded Safety Tech Challenge Fund is demonstrating that is it is possible to detect child sexual abuse material in end-to-end encrypted environments, while respecting user privacy.