I thank my hon. Friend Miriam Cates for making one of the most superb speeches that I have heard in my time in this House.

In the 1940s, advertising men told us that more doctors smoked Camel cigarettes than any other type of cigarette, and as the evidence about smoking piled up they started to say that things were complicated and that it was not obvious what was going on with smoking and cancer. That is a reminder of the ruthlessness that people can deploy when there is lots of money to be made.

When I was Public Health Minister at the Department of Health and Social Care, I was keen that we started to treat this issue as a major emerging public health problem. I am proud that smoking is going down but—oh boy—the problems caused by smartphones and social media are going up and up. The trends, including the explosive growth of children’s mental health problems and self-harm in the real world, roughly since the 2010s, can be seen all over the world at the same time. The evidence is compelling, and increasingly the causal evidence is also there, so it is clear that it is time to act.

There are many channels through which smartphones and social media cause problems. It is not just about the time taken up, the lack of sleep, the increased ADHD and the lack of concentration they cause; it is about the more subtle things as well. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian communications theorist, said that the medium is the message, and he meant that about TV. As well as what people were watching, it mattered that people just sat there passively. Smartphones isolate us, and for young people they provide an infinite scroll through the edited highlights of other people’s lives.

There was a famous social science experiment in which people were given bowls of tomato soup and told to eat as much as they wanted. What they were not told was that the bowls of tomato soup were filling up from the bottom. People would drink extraordinary amounts of tomato soup—literally gallons of the stuff; gut-busting amounts. That is a metaphor for what the infinite scroll and the world of social media have done for us.

Young people now effectively live like politicians: they are living a second life in the minds of other people and constantly thinking about their image. They are trying to post what they are doing rather than living in the moment, with disastrous consequences. Smartphones and social media are not the only things driving these problems—adverse childhood experiences are a big part of why people have severe mental health problems, and the increased over-cossetting of children in the real world is another part of the story—but it is clear now that smartphones and social media are a big part of the story.

We have a problem, and it is a collective action problem. Parents do not want to give their kids tablets and other social media devices as early as they do, but they feel the peer pressure to do so. A study by Sapiens Labs shows incredibly clearly that the earlier a parent gives their kids these things, the worse they will do. Kids do not want these things either. A 2018 report by the Science and Technology Committee found, after we had talked to a lot of young people, that they would like to have a smartphone-free childhood. I am not surprised that in recent weeks we have seen literally tens of thousands of parents joining groups that try to get smartphones out of our schools.

I have a question that I really want to hear the Minister address directly. We were promised a consultation on these issues and it should be out now; when is it coming? I really want a date. Secondly, when can we implement a proper ban on phones in schools? Policy Exchange research has already been mentioned that shows that only one in 10 schools have implemented a proper ban, whereby they take phones away from children at the start of the day so that they are not constantly distracted by their phones, are not thinking about the next text, are not slipping phones out in class, and have a blissful moment when they are living in the real world, free from smartphones and social media.

This should be a beachhead for us to start to change the norm. We should start with schools but work outwards to address the effects of the increasing exposure of children to smartphones and social media, so will the Minister please undertake to look seriously at funding and insisting on a proper smartphone ban in all our schools? In that way, we can give our children something that we all enjoyed: a childhood in the real world, not trapped on a screen.