It was never going to be easy. As the US radio commentator Jim Hightower once said, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. With the health lobby road train charging up from one direction with horns blaring, and the food lobby juggernauts thundering down from the other, screeching sirens and appeals for witnesses was an inevitable outcome.
Regulatory dilemmas don’t usually provoke strong reactions. The arcane details of markets may be critical to national economic performance, they may change the way we all run our lives, but they’re not exactly topics likely to divide the saloon bar. The regulation of food and drink TV advertising to children is different. Everyone cares, everyone has an opinion — and many people disagree, often vehemently.
The questions are easily identified. Is it reasonable to blame anyone other than parents for their children’s expanding waistlines? Is it reasonable to expect parents to enforce healthy-eating rules against a gaudy electronic backdrop that undermines what they say? Is it reasonable to ban the advertising of products that can be bought legally by any child and which, if eaten as part of a balanced diet, do them little if any harm?
Answers come harder. Over the last three years our researchers heard from more than 2,000 children, parents and teachers. We also looked at the family eating habits of more than 11,000 people, and more than 1,000 people and organisations responded to our public consultation.
The evidence: children’s food preferences are shaped by TV adverts — which must come as a relief to brand managers everywhere. That influence, while limited when compared with the role of parents and other factors, is real and cannot be ignored. However, it can also be overstated. Other influences are much more important, and much harder to change.
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So to the new measures we have announced. There should be limits on children’s exposure to adverts for food and drink products high in fat, salt and sugar. However, those restrictions should be proportionate and carefully targeted at programmes that appeal to children. Doing less would not be right — parents want fewer distractions in their efforts to make their kids eat more healthily. But doing more, such as banning all such adverts before the 9pm watershed, would also be wrong. Parents, like all adults, are free to make up their own minds about whether to eat burgers or crisps.
For health and consumer groups, nothing less than a total ban before 9pm will do, even though adult viewers outnumber children nine to one through the evening schedules. Hardly a targeted response, then. Such a ban would also reduce broadcaster revenues by a sum greater than the entire commercial TV industry’s combined expenditure on all children’s programming and national news coverage. The consequences would cut a swath through quality British-made programmes on our TV screens.
On the other side, advertisers also seem to have some challenging perspectives. Some prefer to focus on diet rather than individual foodstuffs — as if the two can easily be decoupled in households where children themselves increasingly dictate what they eat. Others demonstrate a curious reluctance to acknowledge that spending £400 million a year trying to influence eating habits may actually have an effect on the diets of young people.
So with our announcement, battle commenced. Horror and disgust were dispensed in equal and opposite measure by either side. Health lobbyists concluded we had betrayed children, while advertisers were shocked. For the former this was a despicable decision that lacked courage; for the latter it was scientifically flawed and the outcome of political pressure. We have been accused of complicity in the early death of a generation of children, and in the early death of British children’s television. At its starkest, this has felt at times like a ludicrously binary choice. Which would be better: a short life in front of the best TV programmes in the world or a long life spent looking in vain for something decent to watch?
Of course there are no easy answers. Government anticipated that three years ago, when Ofcom’s work first began. Sadly — perhaps unavoidably — many of those reactions were delivered through the prism of individual organisations’ narrow lobbying goals.
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Lobbyists, after all, do not seek to balance competing concerns. However, Parliament does; painstakingly, over the two and a half years of debate — and 600 pages of statute — that formed the Communications Act 2003.
What appears to have been forgotten, if not wilfully ignored, as each rival camp takes aim at the other is that there are two different dimensions of the public interest that we must, by law, bring to bear and then reconcile, one against the other. The law says that Ofcom must act to protect children; but we must also act to ensure children and adults benefit from high-quality programmes from a range of broadcasters.
The tension between the two duties is best illustrated by the superficial rhetoric of one health lobbyist who accused us of putting profits before children’s health. Nonsense. We have to balance the need to make progress in dealing with childhood obesity against the need to sustain high-quality original British children’s programming.
What goes into children’s stomachs matters — but so does what goes into their minds; and efforts to shrink the former should not dull the latter. Both our statutory duties play a vital role in shaping society. It helps nobody — least of all children — for one side to disregard the validity of the concerns of the other, nor indeed to ignore the facts of what Parliament has asked the regulator to do.
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The author is chief executive of Ofcom