Gas and oil giants should pay a windfall tax to tackle the energy crisis

Letters to the editor: our readers share their views. Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

The pockets of the oil companies are deep, having profited from higher wholesale prices (Reuters)

Oil giant BP has reported its highest profit for eight years, days after Shell reported a 14-fold increase in quarterly profits. Gas and oil prices are leading to big increases in energy bills for households. The choice for many, pushed into fuel poverty, will now be between heating and eating.

The pockets of the oil companies are deep, having profited from higher wholesale prices. A one-off windfall tax in the UK on fossil fuel giants to help hard-pressed households cope with record energy bills is urgently required.

Alex Orr

Edinburgh

Much attention is on the oil giants, who already pay a large amount of tax, with much of their dividends going into people’s pension funds.

Should we not be talking about a windfall charge against the large tech/internet companies that make huge sales in the UK and pay little or no UK tax?

Alan Hutchinson

Address supplied

Reactive legislation

The Online Safety Bill is a piece of reactive legislation following many horrendous acts that have occured in the online world. This legislation is too late for the many who have suffered online – suffering which inevitably spilled over into their day to day existence and sadly, for some, ended in death.

Such legislation has started to appear across the world, but it is too late and takes the wrong approach in ensuring our ever-increasing dependency on digital technology is beneficial and not devastating.

Social impact consideration needs to sit alongside technological development so that early warnings occur and, in turn, trigger timely proactive legislation and governance. Will this happen? Only if there is a widespread shift in thinking, driven by new approaches to education and awareness.

Simon Rogerson, Professor Emeritus in Computer Ethics

Buxton

Age verification for online pornography

We feel it’s a hugely positive step that the Online Safety Bill will now enforce pornography sites to verify identities to ensure users are over 18. It is no longer acceptable that anonymity online can allow users, particularly underage children, to freely access this content because they can’t be identified.

However, we must not stop here. There needs to be an easier way for organisations to verify identities that doesn’t compromise privacy, which has become essential in maintaining customer trust in services, loyalty to business and respect for customers.

Customers have a right to access secure services without sacrificing their personally identifiable information (PII). Keeping that kind of valuable PII hidden further increases privacy as it makes it harder for fraudsters to access it.

With this in mind, we hope that both the UK government and Ofcom will consider an intelligent approach to answering the problem of online pornography and digital identity. The solution feels two-fold.

Firstly, it should be about knowing someone’s status, not their identity. By looking at technology such as behavioural biometrics, which considers the behavioural factors of an individual to authenticate them, businesses (including online pornography sites) can help us re-establish trust in digital spaces.

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In addition, the public and private sector must work together to agree on a shared framework to keep organisations accountable. Without this collaboration, businesses like those within the pornography industry will be working from different rulebooks and add further complexity to an already difficult problem.

Ian Welch

Chief operating officer, Callsign

Kirstie Allsopp

I have sympathy for Harriet Williamson (8 February) concerning Kirstie Allsopp’s sweeping generalisations about young people and their innate desire to own their own property. It was tone deaf and not in tune with this demographic and the problems they face in often just meeting the cost of rent and day-to-day expenses.

Privileged people such as Allsopp need to reign it in and actually appreciate the lived rationale of what young people experience in modern day Britain. Her solutions were perhaps doable, but not always consistent with the actual practicalities. It is a dilemma and not one that should be treated with dismissive, throwaway comments.

Well done Harriet for getting your valid points across so rationally and pertinently.

Judith Daniels

Great Yarmouth, Norfolk