Maria Miller MP

Maria Miller MP (Conservative) for Basingstoke. Member, Children, Schools and Families Committee. She has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics. Before becoming an MP she worked as a marketing consultant and worked primarily in advertising and public relations. Member of the Westminster eForum.

Political interests: housing, education, media.

Made culture secretary in September 2012.

Digital Economy Bill

To the best of ORG's knowledge, this MP has not yet been spoken to about the Digital Economy Bill.

Surgeries

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Children's Digital Rights

Maria Miller said on discovering that the ContactPoint database database will be open to one million people told The Register 12th November 2008

"An independent review by Deloitte in February said that urgent changes needed to be made to ContactPoint before the government could implement it. Now more problems are emerging with ContactPoint and still the government thinks it is acceptable to introduce it."
"They have grossly underestimated the number of people who will have access to children’s data and now more children will be put at risk. ContactPoint should be scrapped."

Shadow Children’s Minister Maria Miller responding to the Children's minister Kevin Brennan MP announcement that there would be a five-month delay to the £224m system, ContactPoint.

"The government should also use this opportunity to see whether it really is necessary to have a database for every single child in the country, accessible to 330,000 people, given the significant amount of concern that this could overload the system and lead to a dumbing down of information."
"We have always supported, as an alternative, a slimmed-down tightly controlled database which focuses on those genuinely vulnerable children."

Adult content filters

In a Sunday Times article argued that restriction of inappropriate content by children should be the responsibility of parents.[1][2]

Early Day Motions

Signed Early Day Motion 179 Software in Schools 21 November 2006

That this House congratulates the Open University and other schools, colleges and universities for utilising free and open source software to deliver cost-effective educational benefit not just for their own institutions but also the wider community; and expresses concern that Becta and the Department for Education and Skills, through the use of outdated purchasing frameworks, are effectively denying schools the option of benefiting from both free and open source software and the value and experience small and medium ICT companies could bring to the schools market.

Signed Early Day Motion 61 Epilepsy and screen-based electronic games 6 November 2007

That this House recognises that photosensitive epileptic seizures can be triggered by screen-based electronic games; notes with concern that there is no legal duty on computer game publishers to test their products before publication to make sure they do not trigger a seizure; further notes with concern that there is no legal requirement for computer game publishers to offer warnings that their products could trigger a seizure; and calls upon the Government to consider making it a legal requirement for computer game publishers to test their products before publication and to remove scenes that could potentially trigger a photosensitive epileptic seizure.

Links

News

2007-11-27 - BBC - Child database system postponed
Summary: Ministers are postponing a new database on every child in England, pending a security review and changes to the system including its access controls. Children's minister Kevin Brennan told MPs there would be a five-month delay to the £224m system, ContactPoint. ... Shadow Children’s Minister Maria Miller said: "The government should also use this opportunity to see whether it really is necessary to have a database for every single child in the country, accessible to 330,000 people, given the significant amount of concern that this could overload the system and lead to a dumbing down of information." "We have always supported, as an alternative, a slimmed-down tightly controlled database which focuses on those genuinely vulnerable children."

Reference