Government urged to act over children's 'easy' access to online porn The report is the latest sign of concern in Westminster over the sexualisation of children offline and online. Last year Reg Bailey, the childhood tsar adviser on, reported that children were under pressure to grow up too quickly. David Cameron responded that "we should look to put the brakes on an unthinking drift towards ever greater commercialisation and sexualisation." This was followed in February by the launch at Downing Street of the "active choice" initiative. The major broadband providers all agreed to give parent's more control over access to adult content, but today's report said the voluntary scheme is failing in its current form. In a recommendation that will alarm the internet industry, the MPs called for a formal consultation on mandatory "opt-in" filtering, which would mean access to pornographic websites would be blocked by default. Mobile operators have already installed such systems voluntarily, on the grounds that a smartphone or tablet is more likely to be used without adult supervision. Research conducted for the inquiry found that six in 10 adults would support "opt-in" filters on home broadband lines. Women were particularly keen, with 77 per cent saying they would use such a service, compared to only 37 per cent of men. "Our Inquiry found that many children are easily accessing internet pornography as well as other websites showing extreme violence or promoting self-harm and anorexia," said Mrs Perry, a former banker and policy adviser to George Osborne, who launched the Inquiry in August with the backing of the Communications Minister Ed Vaizey. "This is hugely worrying," she said. The internet industry has long resisted calls for compulsory filtering, arguing it would encourage parents to become complacent and amount to state censorship. "Technology is not a substitute for parenting or a quick fix for social problems," said Nick Pickles of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch. Can Mrs Perry even come up with a definition of what is adult content? This kind of proposal is a sad sign of yet another politician who doesn't understand how the internet works and believes it is for bureaucrats to decide what we can and cannot see online. Trefor Davis, co-founder of the business broadband provider Timico, said that the report would go down badly with the industry coming on the heels of revived plans to force it keep detailed records of subscribers" emails and Facebook activity. "Blocking is very easy to get around for technologically-literate kids and there is a big privacy issue here," he said. The government is already planning to massively extend surveillance online. This seems like part of the same mindset. But the inquiry rejected what it said was "ideological" opposition to compulsory opt-in filters and said that the main problems would be designing an age-verification page and systems to allow different members of a household access to different levels of content. "It's time that Britain's Internet Service Providers, who make more than £3bn a year from selling internet access services, took on more of the responsibility to keep children safe," said Mrs Perry. The Government needs to send a strong message that this is what we all expect. Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, wlecomed the report and said it was "vital we do all we can to protect children from inappropriate material online." "Across Government we are looking at many of the issues [the Inquiry panel] raise, such as the progress in implementing active choice and whether legal powers might be necessary as a backstop to voluntary measures that the ISPs adopt," he added. We are very clear that more must be done to protection children from harmful content. It expected that the Government will introduce proposals in reponse to the report in the forthcoming Communications Green Paper.