UK to ban junk food ads for children

In the UK, the watershed time for broadcasting “material unsafe for children” is 9pm. After October 2025, included in that definition will be adverts for junk food.

Online adverts will also be restricted from promoting products high in fat, salt and sugar.

Andrew Gwynne, the UK public health minister, has confirmed that junk food adverts will be added to the list of prohibited content pre-watershed alongside adverts for things like gambling, alcohol and condoms.

It’s all part of a public health drive to improve the general health of the country and reduce pressure on the National Health Service (NHS), the UK’s free-at-point-of-use healthcare system that faces severe economic challenges.

Gwynne explained that this is a measure that tackles the pressure from preventable illnesses. “One of these pressures is the childhood obesity crisis, setting up children for an unhealthy life and generating yet greater pressures on the NHS,” he wrote in a statement to Parliament.

Over one in five English children are overweight or living with obesity before they start primary school (5 years old). This rises to over a third by the time English children leave primary school (11 years old).

These figures are relatively consistent with the WHO European Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative (COSI) between 2018 and 2020 that found that across 33 European countries, 29% of children aged 7-9 years were overweight.

The newly-elected Labour government’s commitment to banning pre-watershed advertising of junk food is a continuation of the previous Conservative government’s plan from Prime Minister Boris Johnson. However, his successor’s successor Rishi Sunak delayed the plan a month before implementation in 2023 to 2025.

House of Lords independent peer Lord Ara Darzi released a 142-page report the same day the policy was announced on the grim situation the NHS is in.

After a 2018 promise to grow the NHS by 3.4% per year was broken, the health service has seen a real-terms growth in funding of 1%, representing a “starvation of investment” as England has spent almost £37 billion (€43.7 billion) less than its peers since 2010.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has also said that there will be “no more money without reform” for the NHS, putting out a 10-year plan that aims to cut the service’s reliance on expensive agency staff as waiting lists grow.

Starmer’s government has first thrown itself at preventative measures. The junk food TV advert ban follows suggestions that the government will also ban smoking in outdoor spaces, including pub gardens and al fresco restaurants, in an effort to cut down on smoking-related illnesses.

A similar rule has been proposed in Norway. The Nordic country’s food manufacturers and suppliers have voluntarily restricted such marketing to children under 13 since 2013, but the new plan would make it mandatory, as Euronews reported earlier this week.

Junk food including candy, ice creams and sodas would be banned from advertising to children under 18, with “nutritional thresholds” brought in to adjudicate the unhealthiest foods being put on offer.

Across the EU, the industry has largely been allowed to self-regulate and not advertise junk food that doesn’t meet a nutritional standard to under 13s. “We are seeing the limits of self-regulation,” Emma Calvert, BEUC’s senior food policy officer, told Euronews Health, as companies exploit the policy “leeway”.