A UK Government advertising campaign pushing its levelling up agenda “breached” regulations, a watchdog has found.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the Tory government had broken the rules with articles promoting its levelling up policies as part of a £2.15 million taxpayer-funded marketing drive.
The ruling followed complaints raised by two Labour MPs – Lisa Nandy and Alex Norris, who serve as the shadow levelling up secretary and minister respectively.
Nandy wrote on Twitter: “Spending millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on Tory propaganda is bad enough.
“The fact they broke advertising rules in the process just adds insult to injury.”
Of the £2.15m funding, £590,000 was spent on adverts placed with local news organisations in areas such as Birmingham (shown below), Derby, Cornwall (also below), and Grimsby.
They appeared in the form of articles written by “Millie Reeves”, and had the sub-heading: “The UK Government’s Levelling Up project is about spreading prosperity and opportunity to all parts of the UK.”
Reeves was identified as a “commercial writer” in some cases, but not in others. The ASA said it was not clear this meant the article was an advert.
“We considered readers would see that and understand that, in the absence of prominent ad labelling, the article was a piece of editorial content,” the watchdog said.
There was also a grey tile labelling the article as an “advertorial”, but this appeared in the right hand of the screen and did not move down the page as a reader scrolled.
The ASA ruled that “within the context of the full-page ads … it was not clear that the heading related to the ads and that readers were likely to overlook this text”.
It further told the UK Government that the ads must not appear again in their current form and future campaigns must comply with the ASA’s rules.
Shadow levelling up minister Norris said: “In the middle of the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation, struggling families will not understand why ministers spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on what was effectively Tory propaganda. The fact this campaign broke advertising rules just adds insult to injury.
“With millions of families struggling to make ends meet and our front-line services buckling under the pressure of rising costs, we need a government that will spend taxpayers’ money wisely, play by the rules, and deliver growth for every part of the country.
“Instead we have an economic crisis, made in Downing Street and paid for by working people.”
The articles/adverts have now all been removed from the newspapers’ websites, but are still visible on internet archives.
