Source: Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) published on this website Wednesday 30 April 2025 by Jill Powell

The DBS Barring Referral Service is the online route that individuals or organisations who want to make a barring referral can use to submit their referral.

To improve this service, DBS is launching a new ‘Save and Return’ feature enabling users to save their progress when making referrals and return to complete them at a more convenient time.

How does the ‘Save and Return’ feature work?

In order to save a referral and return to it later, users will need a GOV.UK One Login account. GOV.UK One Login is a safe and secure GOV.UK service that is trusted by users of a variety of government services.

If you don’t have a One Login, you will be directed to create one so you can make use of the new feature and securely save the progress of your barring referral.

What are the benefits of the ‘Save and Return’ feature?

The new ‘Save and Return’ feature addresses a key challenge that users were facing, which was that they had to complete referrals in a single session or risk losing their work.

DBS found that a high percentage of users were not returning to submit a referral after it had been abandoned due to time out or other factors, so being able to save progress will help to address this problem, and help ensure that all necessary referrals are reaching DBS.

The new feature allows users more time to complete their referrals, as they can securely save their work and return to it later, which will help users of the Barring Referral Service manage their workloads and make completing a barring referral easier and more convenient.

It is still possible for users to complete their referrals in one session if they wish, but the option to save and return later will add greater flexibility for all.  

DBS hopes the feature will also have a positive impact on the quality of referrals received, as users now have the option to save their progress and consult with colleagues or gather further information, meaning a more detailed referral can be submitted without time pressure.

The new ‘Save and Return’ feature is being launched on 1st May, so users will be able to save their referral progress as they go along from this date. 

How do I make a referral online?

If you need to make a barring referral online to DBS, you can do so on the Barring Referral Service GOV.UK page.

Source: Ofcom published on this site Monday 28 April 2025 by Jill Powell

• Ofcom finalises child safety measures for sites and apps to introduce from July
• Tech firms must act to prevent children from seeing harmful content
• Changes will mean safer social feeds, strong age checks and more help and control for children online

Children in the UK will have safer online lives, under transformational new protections finalised by Ofcom .

Ofcom are laying down more than 40 practical measures for tech firms to meet their duties under the Online Safety Act. These will apply to sites and apps used by UK children in areas such as social media, search and gaming. This follows consultation and research involving tens of thousands of children, parents, companies and experts.

The steps include preventing minors from encountering the most harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography. Online services must also act to protect children from misogynistic, violent, hateful or abusive material, online bullying and dangerous challenges.

Dame Melanie Dawes, Ofcom Chief Executive, said:

 “These changes are a reset for children online. They will mean safer social media feeds with less harmful and dangerous content, protections from being contacted by strangers and effective age checks on adult content. Ofcom has been tasked with bringing about a safer generation of children online, and if companies fail to act they will face enforcement.”

Gen Safer: what we expect

In designing the Codes of Practice finalised on 24 April 2025, Ofcom researchers heard from over 27,000 children and 13,000 parents, alongside consultation feedback from industry, civil society, charities and child safety experts. We also conducted a series of consultation workshops and interviews with children from across the UK to hear their views on our proposals in a safe environment.

Taking these views into account, Ofcom Codes demand a ‘safety-first’ approach in how tech firms design and operate their services in the UK. The measures include:

• Safer feeds. Personalised recommendations are children’s main pathway to encountering harmful content online. Any provider that operates a recommender system and poses a medium or high risk of harmful content must configure their algorithms to filter out harmful content from children’s feeds.
• Effective age checks. The riskiest services must use highly effective age assurance to identify which users are children. This means they can protect them from harmful material, while preserving adults’ rights to access legal content. That may involve preventing children from accessing the entire site or app, or only some parts or kinds of content. If services have minimum age requirements but are not using strong age checks, they must assume younger children are on their service and ensure they have an age-appropriate experience.
• Fast action. All sites and apps must have processes in place to review, assess and quickly tackle harmful content when they become aware of it.
• More choice and support for children. Sites and apps are required to give children more control over their online experience. This includes allowing them to indicate what content they don’t like, to accept or decline group chat invitations, to block and mute accounts and to disable comments on their own posts. There must be supportive information for children who may have encountered, or have searched for harmful content.
• Easier reporting and complaints. Children will find it straightforward to report content or complain, and providers should respond with appropriate action. Terms of service must be clear so children can understand them.
• Strong governance. All services must have a named person accountable for children’s safety, and a senior body should annually review the management of risk to children.

These measures build on the rules Ofcom have already put in place to protect users, including children, from illegal online harms – including grooming. They also complement specific requirements for porn sites  to prevent children from encountering online pornography.

What happens next

Providers of services likely to be accessed by UK children now have until 24 July to finalise and record their assessment of the risk their service poses to children, which Ofcom may request. They should then implement safety measures to mitigate those risks. From 25 July 2025, they should apply the safety measures set out in our Codes to mitigate those risks.

If companies fail to comply with their new duties, Ofcom has the power to impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK.

Today’s Codes of Practice are the basis for a new era of child safety regulation online. We will build on them with further consultations, in the coming months, on additional measures to protect users from illegal material and harms to children.

Source: BBC News published on this website Tuesday 29 April 2025 by Jill Powell

The report into the review was published on the 28 April 2025 and has been undertaken on the BBC’s behalf by Change Associates in response to the guilty pleas of Hugh Edwards into inappropriate behaviour at work.

This follows the earlier Respect at Work Review 2013 following the Jimmy Savile scandal.

In the Introduction of the 2025 report it states:

“The creative industries are not alone in being under the microscope when it comes to scandals involving people behaving inappropriately. The attention this generates may be because of the newsworthiness of the people involved as they are on our screens or radios daily. Or it may be because of the pressures involved in being ‘live’, where exacting production standards apply. We do know that in the past, egos, reputations and the perceived quality of output were considered more important than behaviours and standards of leadership and management. We also know that the BBC operates under intense scrutiny, from itself as much as others, and subjects itself to forensic and public examination. Since our involvement in the Respect at Work review in 2013, we have been told many times that things are changing for the better in the industry. This is against a backdrop of higher behavioural expectations in society. It is also, though, because of activity undertaken within organisations to handle issues more effectively. So, how has this impacted the BBC’s culture?”

To read the full report

To read the BBC’s responses to the report

Source: Home Office published on this website Friday 25 April 2025 by Jill Powell

Even tougher action to hold tech platforms to account for failing to protect children from harmful knife crime content online, the government has announced.

As part of the Plan for Change, tougher sanctions will be brought in to combat the unacceptable content circulating online that advertises deadly and illegal knives and other offensive weapons to young people – or which glorifies or incites violence.  

The government has already announced a significant fine of up to £10,000 for individual tech bosses whose platforms fail to remove this content within 48 hours following a police warning. Following significant consultation with the Coalition to Tackle Knife Crime, the government is going even further with an additional fine of up to £60,000 to be paid by the company. This means tech platforms and their executives could collectively face up to £70,000 in fines for every post relating to knife crime they fail to remove. 

A greater range of online platforms will be liable under these new laws to also include online search engines as well as social media platforms and marketplaces, to capture all online providers which might currently be failing to remove content. 

The move bolsters further measures set out yesterday by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and Ofcom, to protect children from a broad spectrum of harmful online content including pornography, suicide and self-harm under the Online Safety Act.  The laws will be some of the most comprehensive online safety protections in the world and mean platforms must protect children from content including suicide, self-harm, and pornography by taking steps such as introducing age checks like photo ID matching or facial age estimation and filtering out harmful content from algorithms.   

Crime and Policing Minister, Dame Diana Johnson said:  

“The kind of content that young people scroll through every day online is sickening and I will not accept any notion that restricting access to this harmful material is too difficult. Our children need more from us. That is why we are now going further than ever to hold to account the tech companies who are not doing enough to safeguard young people from content which incites violence, particularly in young boys. Curbing the impact of this kind of content will be key for our mission to halve knife crime, but more widely our Plan for Change across government to do more protect young people from damaging and dangerous content.”

As previously announced, the Home Office will introduce a new system to be carried out by a new policing unit backed by £1.75 million of funding to tackle the sale of knives online. This will have a national capability and be run by the National Police Chiefs’ Council. They will be responsible for issuing Content Removal Notices which inform the tech platform of illegal content, giving them a 48 hour window in which they must remove it.  

Failure to comply will now result in a Civil Penalty Notice rather than taking the company to civil court, which include the respective fines for both executives and the wider company. This will mean sanctions can be inflicted much more quickly and is the same penalty that an employer may receive for employing an illegal worker to reflect the vital importance of removing harmful knife related content.     

These sanctions are part of a range of measures being introduced by this government in its mission to halve knife crime in a decade. These include: 

• banning zombie-style knives and ninja swords, with a nationwide surrender scheme launching in July 
• introducing stronger 2-step verification for online retailers selling knives online and banning delivery of weapons to alternative addresses that don’t match the buyer 
• requirement for online retailers to report any bulk or suspicious-looking purchases of knives to the police 
• launching a consultation in spring on the introduction of a licensing scheme for retailers who wish to sell knives
• increasing prison sentences for selling weapons to under 18s from 6 months to 2 years
• introducing a new offence for possessing a weapon with intent for violence with a prison sentence of up to 4 years

The sanctions for tech platforms will be introduced via an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill which was tabled on 24 April for committee stage.