The government is moving forward with new laws to prevent children from accessing or sharing nude images online, after technology companies didn’t move “far enough or fast enough” with their plans to tackle sexual harm online.
The new measures would put legal requirements on technology companies to install stronger safeguards on all their devices to help stop grooming, exploitation and abuse before children are exposed to harm. The new legislation will be a world-first, the government said, “putting the UK as the global leader on online safety and will mean the UK has the strongest online child safety laws in the world”.
The new laws will be based on the principles that it must be impossible for anyone under the age of 18 to take, view or send nude images, meaning images must be blocked across all device features, including the camera and third-party apps.
Parents and carers should not have to take active steps to prevent children from consuming nude content, with nudity detection filters switched on by default. The only way for any user to take, view or send nude images should be for an adult to verify their age through a robust age-assurance process.
In a statement announcing the plans, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said: “I know parents are worried about their children being safe when they have a phone. The truth is that too often, they aren’t.
“In June we asked the biggest technology companies in the world to do one simple thing: make it impossible for a child to take, send or see a naked picture. They have moved. But not far enough or fast enough. So we will hold them to account and will not hesitate to change the law.
“The protection will be built into the device and switched on by default. It will be for the companies to prove a user is an adult, not for a child to keep themselves out of harm’s way. No country has required that before. Britain will be the first, and we will have the strongest child safety laws in the world.”
The announcement follows former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement in June that the UK will ban children under the age of 16 from accessing social media accounts.
Yesterday (9th September), culture secretary Lisa Nandy MP told Parliament the primary legislation is being introduced due to the scale of the crisis of children “facing unacceptable levels of sexual harm online”.
She told MPs: “First, the government is today committing to introducing primary legislation to require major tech platforms to build in device-level protections for children.
“This will be introduced to parliament as soon as we can – recognising the urgency of this issue whilst ensuring we work with colleagues across the House to get it right. We want to see movement on this quickly.
“If platforms in scope of this draft legislation develop and implement technical solutions while our work is ongoing, we will of course reassess whether legislation is necessary.”
She continued: “But alongside these measures on devices, the government will also require apps – that children use – to prevent them from accessing or sharing nudity as soon as possible.
“We will explore what legislation is needed to implement this commitment, with a view to moving as quickly as possible.
“This will ensure that the whole ecosystem changes, tackling the means by which children are most often abused or groomed in the online world.”
Government proposals to prevent nude images being taken and shared by children were originally proposed as part of the government’s violence against women and girls’ strategy, first shared in December 2025.
In June this year the government challenged the tech industry – on a three-month timeline – to set out roadmaps for how the companies would strengthen device-level protections for children, with a view to preventing children from taking, sharing or viewing nude images on phones and tablets.
Since then, officials from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and the Home Office have overseen a work programme with Apple and Google, working with senior leaders and engineers to explore new ways of preventing child sexual abuse and strengthening protections for children online.
Nandy told MPs: “We will give tech companies the chance to lead, but not allow them to lag. The message we are sending to tech companies is clear – planning must now become implementation, and progress must translate into protections that make a real difference in children’s lives.”
Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation reported that more child sexual extortion-related reports had been recorded in six months than in the whole of 2025. The charity’s Report Remove service received just 19 sextortion reports in 2022. By 2025, that figure had risen to 394, highlighting the rapidly escalating threat facing young people online.
In 2024, the charity reported 91% of online child sexual abuse reports contained self-generated content from children themselves.
