London-style junk food advert bans rolled out across UK under Labour, suggests shadow minister

A TfL-style junk food advertising ban would be rolled out across the UK under a Labour government in a bid to help tackle child obesity, a frontbencher suggested on Thursday.

Shadow health minister Preet Gill highlighted Mayor Sadiq Khan outlawing ads for high-in-sugar food and drinks on London’s transport network as a policy that could be launched nationally.

She said a Labour government would ban paid-for online advertising of calorific foods aimed at children, and look at using council-owned billboards and buses to spread healthy eating messages.

“We have seen that in London junk food [advertising] is banned on transport, Ms Gill told the Food, Diet and Obesity Committee on Thursday.

“I’m just thinking about the West Midlands conurbation, there is a lot of opportunity to get a lot of this messaging there. In terms of screens and buses. Local authorities own a certain number of screens, they put the messaging out when it was the Covid pandemic.

“So banning it [advertising] nationally and ...giving a lot more thought in terms of what are the opportunities locally that we could be utilising and doing much more working in partnership with our local government colleagues.

“The advertising will just go to other places and we have got to be mindful of that and how can we lessen the impact of that, especially near schools.

“There are lots of big challenges.”

A ban on junk food advertising across London's entire public transport network came into force in 2019.

Adverts for foods and drinks high in fat, salt and sugar are not allowed to be displayed on the Underground, Overground, buses or bus shelters.

Comedian Ed Gamble was earlier this year forced to remove a photo of a hot dog from his London show Tube posters when it was deemed to fall foul of healthy eating rules.

When posters for his five night residency at Hackney Empire were sent to TfL for display he was told they did not comply with the network’s anti-junk food policy and the banger would need to be “removed or obscured”.

The Off Menu podcast host was pictured with a greasy, sauce-covered sausage on billboards for his show Hot Diggity Dog, but swapped the image for a cucumber to get it approved by TfL chiefs.

An academics study, published in 2022, claimed 100,000 obesity cases had been prevented due to London’s junk food advertising ban.

But critics questioned the findings, with the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank branding it “one of the worst pieces of junk science” ever seen.