An online porn age verification system that has been demanded in the government's proposed Digital Economy Bill—and waved through largely unchallenged by MPs—needs more detail to allow for proper parliamentary scrutiny, vexed peers have warned.

On Tuesday, a House of Lords committee said that it was concerned about the controversial age checking plan, which will force UK ISPs to block porn sites that fail to verify that their users are 18 or over.

It said that the decision to leave the guidance and guidelines "to be published by the as yet-to-be-designated regulator" would have an "adverse affect" on parliament's ability to pore over the proposed legislation during the committee stage of the bill in the upper chamber. The committee added:

Our concern is exacerbated by the fact that, as the bill currently stands, the guidance and guidelines will come into effect without any parliamentary scrutiny at all. The House may wish to consider whether it would be appropriate for a greater degree of detail to be included on the face of the bill.

Significant policy choices are likely to be required to help determine how to ensure websites are complying with age verification checks, the panel of peers noted. It flagged up recent comments from the UK's data watchdog, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who told MPs on the public bill committee that a balance needs to be found "between verifying the age of individuals and minimising the collection and retention of personal data." During the same evidence session, the regulator added that she had:

significant concerns about any age verification that requires the collection and retention of documents such as a copy of passports, driving licences, or other documents (of those above the age threshold) which are vulnerable to misuse and/or attractive to disreputable third parties.

A number of clauses within the planned law for age checking on porn sites have got the House of Lords committee in a pickle because, peers say, they fail to allow for adequate parliamentary scrutiny. The mysterious age-verification regulator will, for example, be granted powers to levy discretionary fines against sites found not to comply with the legislation, after consulting its own guidelines. Even though those guidelines, as it stands, won't be perused in parliament.

The committee said:

We question whether the House can effectively scrutinise the bill when its scrutiny is impeded by the absence from the face of the bill of any detail about the operation of the proposed age-verification regime. Nor is it the case that there will be subsequent opportunities for parliamentary scrutiny of delegated legislation on this matter, since the details of the regime will be set out in due course not by ministers (or others) exercising regulation-making powers. Rather, the relevant arrangements will be set out by the yet-to-be-designated age-verification regulator in guidance that it will be required to publish.

The government has argued that the guidelines—non-compliance of which will have a direct affect on ISPs having to block porn sites—should remain malleable to "reflect changes over time in technology and in commercial models."

The side-effect being that parliament doesn't get the opportunity to eyeball the rules if and when they become law. No wonder, then, that peers have their knickers in a twist.