A Labour MP campaigning for a national “summer of sex” has publicly endorsed an adult website now facing questions over potential breaches of UK pornography law. Samantha Niblett, the MP for South Derbyshire, has given her support to the platform MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), which a newspaper investigation suggests may be failing to properly block minors from viewing explicit material.
The MP’s endorsement and campaign
Ms Niblett, elected in 2024, has launched a campaign titled ‘Yes Sex Please, We’re British!’ with the aim of making 2026 a “summer of sex” focused on open conversation and improved sex education. She has secured a parliamentary debate on lifelong sex education for early autumn and has proposed hosting an exhibition of sex toys within the Houses of Parliament, an idea she is discussing with parliamentary security.
As part of this campaign, she is working closely with MLNP founder Cindy Gallop. Ms Niblett has said she enjoys the site’s content featuring “real people who are having messy, funny, intimate, sensual sex together,” which she contrasts with “skewed” mainstream pornography. She believes acknowledging human interest in sex as a positive thing is important and has highlighted health benefits associated with sexual activity.
Legal concerns over age verification
This endorsement comes amid serious questions about whether MLNP’s practices comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act 2023. The law mandates that platforms providing pornography must use “highly effective” age assurance measures to prevent under-18s from accessing such content.
The communications regulator, Ofcom, has published strict guidance on these rules. It states that age checks for pornographic sites “should be at the point of entry” and that “no harmful content” should be visible to users before verification is completed. Pornographic material must not be visible prior to or during the age check process. Ofcom has launched an enforcement programme and can impose fines of up to £250,000 or 5% of a company’s turnover, and can seek to have non-compliant websites blocked.
According to an inquiry by the Daily Mail, MLNP may be falling short of these standards. The website allows users to view 12-second preview clips before requiring a paid subscription for full access. The investigation reported that graphic sexual content, including acts of oral sex and full intercourse, was readily visible during this free preview window without being blurred or concealed.
Legal expert Yair Cohen, who specialises in pornography legislation, assessed that “it looks like the website does breach the law if it shows adult content within that 12 seconds before any age verification.”
MLNP describes itself as a sex education site and maintains it adheres to regulations. Founder Cindy Gallop states the site complies with UK age verification requirements through its paywall system, with users creating a free account through which the site performs “age estimation.” She has said, “We can vouch for everything on our website, because every piece of content has been through a stringent human review process.”
However, the Daily Mail inquiry reported that two of its reporters successfully accessed the explicit preview clips after creating fake email accounts with birthdates indicating they were under 16, apparently circumventing the site’s age estimation process.
The site’s defence and broader context
Ms Gallop, an English advertising consultant living in New York, founded MLNP to provide an alternative to mainstream pornography, focusing on “real-world sex.” She has argued that when people do not talk openly about sex, “porn becomes sex education by default.” She is also developing a separate initiative, MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy, aimed at providing age-appropriate sex education.
The regulatory backdrop is part of the government’s aim to make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online.” Under Ofcom’s timeline, services that publish their own pornographic content were required to implement robust age checks from January 2025, while platforms hosting user-generated content must do so by July 2025. The regulator has stated that outdated methods like simple self-declaration of age are no longer acceptable.
Ms Niblett’s campaign, which includes plans to visit organisations to gather information for her parliamentary speech and has involved meetings with the sexual wellness company Lovehoney, proceeds amid these stringent new legal requirements for online adult content.
