British under-16s could be banned from social media within months

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall is reported to be mulling over a restriction based on a similar ban implemented by Australia last year.

Ministers are keeping tabs on the performance of the policy amid plans to follow suit within months, according to the I newspaper.

Despite there being no formal timetable for a ban, officials are reportedly keen to make a decision within months rather than years.

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Critics of a ban suggest that the policy will force children onto riskier unregulated sites, potentially exposing them to harmful content even earlier.

The Molly Rose Foundation and the NSPCC have also warned that the policy would create a cliff-edge for children being unprepared for social media at 16.

Following Australia's lead has become increasingly popular across British politics in recent months.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch announced this weekend that a Conservative government would introduce a ban for under-16s.

On Monday, Nigel Farage left the door open to a similar move.

Farage told a press conference in Westminster: “I 100 per cent support the ban on smart phones in schools.

“When it comes to banning things, I am not very keen generally on banning things. My answer would be, let’s see where Australia is in six months’ time, let’s see whether this actually works.

“We have laws of course about when you can start drinking, do those laws actually stop people drinking under 18, I am not sure they do.

“I would say, let’s see the Australian experiment, let’s see how it works and let’s make our minds up.”

Health Secretary Wes Streeting last week suggested he was also sympathetic to the UK following Australia.

The Health Secretary told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley that he was “following that debate really closely”, adding“One of the advantages of Australia doing this is that we can see how it works.

“I think the drivers behind Australia’s decision are things we’re worried about here in the UK, whether that’s cyberbullying, whether, that’s things like body image and eating disorders and mental ill health, whether that’s the risk of grooming, the risk of people also being groomed into terrorism and serious organised crime, so the dark side of the internet.

“The challenge we’re having is we don’t want to be a generation of adults who are saying to young people, stop the world, we want to get off because this is the way the world is moving and I want young people to be confident about using technology.

“But the analogy I would use is: when I was growing up, the adults of the time wanted us to be able to use a hammer and nails and a saw, and that’s why we did woodwork.

“What they didn’t do was say, here you are kids in nursery, here’s a box of tools, here’s some hammer and nails, off you go, you need to learn to use this, and we’ll come back in half an hour and see how you’ve got on.”

The minister also said: “We’re allowing a lot of unsupervised use of this technology, and often young people are ahead of adults in terms of circumventing tools, protections.

“So I’m thinking about this very much through a health and wellbeing lens and the impact it’s having on the health and well-being of children and young people, let alone their concentration, their learning.

“I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel like my concentration span suffers because of doomscrolling and the way in which information is served up in increasingly short bite-size chunks and I worry about what that means for the development and the cognitive development of a generation of children and young people.”