Writing profiles of powerful people “you’ve never heard of” is like catnip to journalists. The Secretive Publishing Mogul Who Can Make and Break Literary Careers; The Ten People Who Actually Run New York City and so on.
It turns out CSW isn’t immune to the format either. When ex-permanent secretary and regular CSW columnist Una O’Brien emailed to suggest we interview someone called Maeve Walsh, we were intrigued.
Walsh may not be a household name, O’Brien said, but her influence on one of the key policies of the last decade – and her tireless, behind-the-scenes efforts to ensure that policy’s passage into legislation – cannot be understated.
Indeed, the Online Safety Act 2023, which puts a range of new duties on social media companies and search engines, might not have become law at all if it weren’t for Walsh. A former civil servant who has worked in the Cabinet Office, as well as the health and culture departments, Walsh’s ability to build coalitions and resolve disagreements played a pivotal role in keeping disparate interests onside as the beleaguered bill made its lengthy journey through parliament (see box below), and earnt her appreciative name-checks in the Lords during its final stages.
Although Walsh has not worked in government since 2017, she is a fascinating example of how an ex-senior civil servant can deploy their skills to assist the policy and legislative process. For her own part, Walsh refers to herself as “a civil servant in the wild”.
Maeve Walsh
Rather surprisingly, her professional life actually began with a PhD in contemporary Irish theatre. CSW is keen to understand her journey from pondering the dramaturgy of the Emerald Isle to bashing stakeholder heads together in the battle to prevent online harms. Is there a through-line, or did each move take her that bit further from where she started out?
Walsh explains that alongside her PhD, she worked as a journalist and part-time theatre reviewer on the arts desk of The Independent – a job that led to a role in the Government Communication Service and then a variety of other government departments. “I think the through-line can be traced back to that newspaper job,” she says. “The common theme has been an interest in research, in information and communication, and in trying to best distil often quite complex arguments into forms that are accessible.”
Walsh became involved in the online safety bill in 2018 through a former civil service colleague, William Perrin. He was a trustee at the wellbeing charity Carnegie UK, where he was exploring how to apply the breakthrough idea by Essex University’s Professor Lorna Woods of using a statutory “duty of care” – drawn from health and safety legislation – to regulate tech platforms.
Even though Walsh teamed up with Perrin and Woods after their work had already begun, Perrin credits her role in inspiring their initial discussions on online safety. “William often says he started thinking about all this after he came along to a meeting that I’d convened in a previous role at a charity,” Walsh says. “We had a number of children’s charities in the room, and we were talking about internet safety and trust and data and so forth. And the general consensus was that it wasn’t possible to regulate the internet.”
Perrin and Woods’s initial plans were “to just write a few blogs and put some bits of thought leadership out there on what a statutory duty of care approach would look like,” Walsh says. But given there were stirrings of new policy development on online safety in government, the pair decided to boost their advocacy efforts, and, in autumn 2018, asked Walsh to work with them. And so – after taking a role as an associate with Carnegie herself – Walsh began doing “civil service-type work” to try to influence parliamentary thinking.
This work – including “putting thousands of words into multiple parliamentary inquiries” and maintaining regular contact with Whitehall officials – had a significant impact, contributing to the regulatory proposals at the heart of a 2019 government white paper on online safety. Feeling a responsibility to help Whitehall policymakers as they tried to develop the legislation, Walsh’s role alongside Woods’s and Perrin’s ongoing policy development evolved. Her new focus became building an informal network of “fellow traveller” organisations, all of whom were campaigning for better online safety. This included children’s charities like the NSPCC, but also organisations geared towards tackling abuse, extremism, disinformation and fraud – in essence, anyone who could see how the duty of care approach might deliver their own specific objectives in mitigating online harms.
Almost all of the meetings were virtual, not least because the network’s work intensified after the onset of the pandemic as political debate around the legislation grew. “Large virtual meetings had become quite commonplace, but it was also just a time-efficient way for people to keep in touch: an hour or so every couple of weeks just to jump on a call,” Walsh says. The meetings became a focal point for organisations to share research findings or Westminster intel, identify opportunities for collaboration or seek support for campaigns. Spin-off coalitions formed, focusing on fraud and scams and on violence against women and girls, to take forward specific advocacy campaigns based on the analysis provided by the Carnegie UK team.
A tortuous passage
The progress of the bill through the UK parliament was long and complex – a result of both the bill’s content and the political context. Here is a summary of key events:
2017 Under Theresa May’s premiership, the government publishes the internet safety strategy green paper, proposing measures to protect children online.
2018 Culture secretary Matt Hancock responds to the green paper, signalling an intent to regulate online platforms for the first time.
2019 New culture secretary Jeremy Wright publishes the online harms white paper, outlining a detailed regulatory framework.
2019-2020 A period of significant political and societal upheaval begins as Boris Johnson replaces May as PM and the onset of the pandemic and other challenges deflect from the policy focus in Whitehall. Meanwhile, ideological splits emerge within the Conservative government about how – or whether it is even right – to regulate the internet in the way proposed by the bill.
2021-2022 Pre-legislative scrutiny of the bill occurs in the second half of 2021, to refine it before its Commons stages, but another Conservative leadership contest in 2022 stops it in its tracks before its Commons passage is completed. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both promise to revisit the bill’s content after fellow leadership contender Kemi Badenoch describes it as “legislating for hurt feelings”.
2022 In the autumn, under Rishi Sunak’s premiership, a large chunk of the bill relating to adult online harms is removed. These provisions had aimed to address toxic and hateful online environments for adults – particularly those from minoritised groups – and hold platforms to account for the measures they were taking.
2023 The revised bill, focusing on child protection, progresses to the House of Lords, where it receives cross-party support. Significant concessions include requiring Ofcom to produce guidance on online violence against women and girls.
End of 2023 The bill receives royal assent, granting Ofcom powers to implement it.
As the bill slowly made its way through parliament, Woods, Perrin and Walsh continued to publish detailed analyses of the government’s proposals, as well as their own policy and regulatory suggestions to fill gaps in the regime – many of which were picked up by other more campaign-focused organisations. The trio increasingly found themselves working on a cross-party basis with MPs and peers to provide advice on amendments or briefing for debates.
These online meetings have carried on even since the act passed last October. Along with Woods, Walsh has continued to facilitate gatherings for the same campaigners, charities and civil society organisations in her new guise as director of the Online Safety Act Network, which helps campaigners navigate the implementation phase of the legislation. After all, “many of these groups had fought long and hard for the provisions that were in the bill, and lots of the concessions that the government made too,” she says. “So they had a huge interest in ensuring that Ofcom picked up the act’s implementation in a way that ensured that it was as effective as possible and delivered the outcomes that they had campaigned for.”
And, while Walsh still engages with government officials and parliamentarians, most of her work is now focused on Ofcom. “We’ve built up a very collaborative and constructive relationship with Ofcom and the teams there – both in our own right and also on behalf of some of the organisations we work with,” she says.
Walsh explains how she and others in the network who have been around since the early stages of the policy and legislative process feel an obligation to provide a “kind of continuity” via their shared memory and collective history. “Myself and Lorna can pretty much name you the Hansard column where something was said in a debate. It’s niche, but it can be quite important.”
Talking of Hansard, if you search its transcripts for that closing debate in the Lords – just before the bill became an act last autumn – you not only find peers thanking Walsh, Woods and Perrin for their sterling work, but also ample evidence of how collaborative the effort was in the upper chamber to get it passed. However, you also find remarks like this, from the Conservative peer Lord Moylan: “I am very sad to say that I think that, at first contact with reality, a large part of this is going to collapse, and with it a lot of good will be lost.”
“Many of these groups fought long and hard for the provisions that were in the bill… so they had a huge interest in ensuring that Ofcom picked up the act’s implementation in a way that ensured that it was as effective as possible”
What did Walsh think when she heard that comment – and what kind of personality is needed to work on Sisyphean tasks like regulating the internet? Does one need to be terrier-like, and simultaneously an eternal optimist? “Obviously there was opposition to the act,” she says. “And there were a number of people in the Lords, Lord Moylan included, who were very much against it, per se. There were then a number of peers who would probably be more in the middle ground, wanting it to have gone further in some areas, or thinking that actually some of the issues weren’t practical enough. But the general consensus in the Lords, certainly when it was passed, was that this was a very good first step.”
Not that the bill is perfect “by any means”, Walsh says. It is overcomplicated in places and too long, and “it certainly could have been a more manageable legislative beast”. At the risk of introducing another classical allusion so soon after Sisyphus, would she say the bill is something of a multi-headed hydra?
“Possibly…” she laughs. “But the heart of it is quite simple: it asks regulated companies to take responsibility for the way their services, systems and processes operate. It asks them to risk-assess, and to mitigate the risks of any harms that they identify. So I think that that fundamental underpinning is still a very strong place to start.”
Walsh’s approach to online safety as a parent
“Our daughter is 13 and our son is 11. I’d say we probably don’t do it any better than lots of parents. My kids know what I do. They’ve heard about it enough, and they roll their eyes enough when I mention online safety. But I think, as a result, they also respect the fact that if I say, ‘You can’t do that’, or ‘I’d rather you didn’t have that particular app’, it’s coming from a place of concern for their safety and wellbeing, rather than just me being a mum who’s saying no.
“They have certainly been subjected to more restrictions than lots of their peers, and got access to various bits of tech later than some of their friends. But I don’t subscribe to the view that they shouldn’t have any access to devices at all. So much of the things that they enjoy in life – whether it’s films or streaming TV or games, or whatever else – are on devices. My daughter’s homework is increasingly managed by the school through her device.
“The idea that we can take the devices off them and somehow flick a switch and we’ll be back in the pre-smartphone world isn’t realistic at all. So I’m just doing my best to navigate it, and trying to allow the good while also trying to avoid the bad – or at least avoid it for as long as possible until they’re older and more resilient.
“Like a lot of people, my own screen time isn’t ideal. I get all my news on my phone; all my admin is on my phone; I’m easily distracted by WhatsApp messages. So it’s very difficult for parents to lead by example, telling your kids not to do something that you’re actually doing yourself. I’ve got huge admiration for families who can do that, and who do shared digital detoxes and so on. But that’s not really us. I think it’s much more about having those conversations and being open and honest and hoping that if something does go wrong, my kids feel that they can come and talk to me about it.”
Without wanting to drag her into party politics, there is the obvious fact that the Labour Party doesn’t traditionally get as frightened about state intervention as the Conservatives – nor does it have such a strong civil liberties wing. Is Walsh therefore hopeful that this legislation will get a sympathetic hearing with a Labour government? She is optimistic, she says – not least because there are commitments in the Labour manifesto to look at the act’s foundations and see where it needs to go further. She also notes that, while in opposition, Labour placed a lot of emphasis on prevention and support for victims, particularly women and girls, and the victims of abuse, radicalisation and extremism. “So I think from that perspective, and also looking at some of their more cross-cutting policy objectives, the online dimension to it all is going to be really important. I think there will be things in the act that either will be reopened or added on.”
However, she also says that Labour should be more assertive in regulating AI. Of course there is always a rush for innovation and, at the moment, a particularly pressing need for economic growth. But without regulatory frameworks and a focus on safety by design, she warns, the battle against online emerging harms is quickly lost – with women, girls and ethnic minorities most at risk. So while there is reason to be hopeful about what she terms “old-style” online safety, it will be crucial to balance emerging technologies with regulatory safeguards that are built in from the very start.
And will she herself be there for the foreseeable future, helping to keep the major players honest? After all, who else is going to cite the relevant passage of Hansard and provide some much-needed corporate memory? “As long as somebody’s going to fund me to do it,” Walsh replies with a smile. “I do think there is work to be done for the long haul here. And there are certainly lots of organisations who are also in it for the long haul. So I’d say yes, it would be nice to be able to see it through until wherever the endpoint is.”
Maeve Walsh may not be a household name, but households around the country – particularly those with children – may unwittingly come to thank her in years to come if and when the online world becomes a safer place to be.