A single system for rating violent video games should replace the existing hybrid model, a government report has recommended.

The current method involves combining a rating from the British Board of Film Classification with a voluntary rating system developed by the video-game industry. That had the potential to confuse parents, a House of Commons committee said.

While either system would be "workable in principle", the "widespread recognition" of the BBFC's classsifications - 18, 15, and 12 and above - offered "significant advantages" over the alternative system, which has been embraced across Europe, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee .said

The committee's recommendation was one of several in a report which considered harmful content on the internet and in video games.

The report also recommended that video-sharing websites such as YouTube do more to filter out violent content, accusing them of taking a lax approach.

At present, the BBFC rates all video games which contain violent content according to film classifications. In 2007, 101 out of the 1,231 games that were released in the UK attracted some kind of rating - including 29 that were deemed suitable only for those aged 18 or over.

Games may also be assessed according to the industry's own code - known as Pan-European Game Information (PEGI) - and carry a "pictogram" which gives a further illustration of the game's content.

There are seven pictograms, pointing out content that contains: violence, sex/nudity, drugs, bad language, gambling, material that is "scary for young children", or which may encourage discrimination.

In a report in March commissioned by the Prime Minister, the child psychologist Dr Tanya Byron recommended that the two systems be blended to create a single code, but the House of Commons committee concluded that Dr Byron's recommendations "would not provide significantly greater clarity for consumers."

"We believe that ideally, a single classification system should be adopted," the committee said, lending its support to the BBFC's code.

The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, which represents video-game publishers in the UK, criticised the report, saying that the European system was better than the BBFC's because it was "based on international standards" and was better placed to cope with "the explosion of gaming content that is becoming available online everyday."

The committee also concluded that websites such as YouTube should be forced to police their content, and that leaving individual companies to introduce their own measures to protect users had resulted in "an unsatisfactory, piecemeal approach which lacks consistency and transparency."

A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, said that the site had strict rules for what content was allowed, and that anyone who spotted inappropriate content was able to bring it to the attention of a reviewing team, which dealt with such alerts promptly.

But the committee was unconvinced, citing the instance of a video showing a woman apparently being raped, which was viewed 600 times before it was taken down from the site. "The system failed, and it is difficult to know whether or not this was an isolated incident," the committee said.

It went on: "We found the arguments put forward by Google against their staff undertaking any kind of proactive screening to be unconvincing. Even if review of every bit of content is not practical, that is not an argument to undertsake none at all."

A Google spokesman said that given the amount of content uploaded to the site - about 10 hours of video every minute - a system which made it easy for users to report inappropriate content was the most effective way to ensure that "the tiny minority of videos that break the rules come down quickly."

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• Bridging the gap between mind and machine
• Wrath of the Lich King - five star review
• Ancient Rome lives again on Google Earth