The U.K. government says it will ban junk food adverts online and on television before 9 p.m. in a bid to tackle obesity.
Public health minister Andrew Gwynne told members of parliament on Thursday the new rules would come into play from October next year.
They’re designed to prevent children from seeing commercials and other ads for foods high in fat, salt and sugar.
“These restrictions will help protect children from being exposed to advertising of less healthy food and drinks, which evidence shows influences their dietary preferences from a young age,” Gwynne said.
Childhood obesity is a major public health problem in the U.K. More than a fifth of U.K. kids aged 4 to 5 were overweight in 2022 to 2023, official figures show. That proportion grew to around 37% for children aged 10 to 11.
Gwynne’s announcement as the government published a damning report into the state of the country’s public health system, the National Health Service, by surgeon Lord Ara Darzi.
Darzi said the NHS was in “serious trouble” as it tries to care for an increasingly sick population with already vastly overstretched resources.
The NHS has seen waiting times for urgent, emergency and elective care soar since the pandemic. Darzi said a decade of austerity and a lack of investment in the health service left the country vulnerable heading into COVID-19. Meanwhile, rising inequalities have widened the health gap between the richest and poorest.
Public health strategies that can prevent people getting sick in the first place are seen as key to helping the country cope with a mounting burden of illness that’s expected to rise as its growing population ages.
“The country wants to see our broken NHS fixed,” Gwynne told parliamentarians Thursday. “This requires a prevention revolution, tackling the drivers of preventable illness and reducing demand on health services. One of these pressures is the childhood obesity crisis, setting up children for an unhealthy life and generating yet greater pressures on the NHS.”
Some local areas are taking further steps to prevent children seeing junk food ads. Last week, Liverpool councillors announced they would consider banning the promotions from publicly-owned spaces like billboards.
Other areas like the city of York have already made similar moves. Back in 2019, London’s transport network banned junk food ads. But they can still be found in many other public spaces across the city.
The junk food ad ban was originally proposed by the U.K.’s previous Conservative-led government. It is one of at least two high profile public health policies the country’s new Labour government has promised to continue.
Officials have also promised to introduce a first-of-its-kind smoking ban, which would make it illegal to sell cigarettes and other tobacco products to anyone born before in or after 2009.
The law, which was first proposed by former prime minister Rishi Sunak, would not criminalize the act of smoking itself.
It mirrored legislation enacted in 2022 by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government in New Zealand. But an incoming National-led coalition government scrapped the rules last year before they could come into force.
