You can read about the significant progress of our campaign and donate here. We’ve done all of this on a shoestring and by relying on unpaid volunteers. However, the reality is that ahead of the Elections Bill next year we really need your help to achieve our campaign goal of making electoral advertising regulation a reality.
Please donate to our campaign if you feel as passionately as we do about the need for electoral ad regulation.
2025 has been a landmark year for Reform Political Advertising.
Across elections, events, and parliamentary engagement, one thing has become unmistakably clearer than ever before: the rules governing election advertising in the UK are no longer fit for purpose. As election outcomes grow tighter and campaigning becomes increasingly digital and AI driven, unregulated and misleading political advertising is no longer a niche issue – it is a systemic threat to trust in democracy itself.
With a new Elections Bill expected early next year, the UK faces a once-in-a-generation opportunity to update election rules that have remained largely unchanged for decades. If this moment is missed, it may not come again for a very long time.
We’ve summarised our campaign’s progress this year below. We’ve included links to a few of our blogs in case you would like to read more about any of the areas mentioned.
Taking the campaign international
In the run-up to the UK local and mayoral elections and ahead of the Australian federal election on 3 May, we held our first international event, Stop the Lies: How to Restore Trust in Politics, in partnership with Compassion in Politics.
At a time when misinformation and disinformation are eroding trust worldwide, the event brought together politicians from the UK and Australia to explore how electoral advertising regulation could help rebuild confidence in democracy.
Speakers included Australian independent MP Zali Steggall, who has put two Bills forward in the Australian parliament to prohibit misleading and deceptive election advertising, alongside former UK Labour MP Ian Lucas, Liberal Democrat MP Dr Roz Savage, Welsh politician Adam Price MS, Jennifer Nadel of Compassion in Politics, and Alex Tait from Reform Political Advertising.
The discussion underlined a clear message: democracies that fail to regulate election advertising are leaving their electoral systems exposed. You can watch the full event and explore the key themes in more detail here.
What the 2025 local elections revealed
This year we published our fifth review of misleading ads in UK elections: covering the local council and mayoral elections in May. The findings were again deeply concerning. In a fragmented political landscape where the vote share is fragmenting away from the traditional dominance of Labour and the Conservatives towards Reform, the Liberal Democrats, and the Green Party, election outcomes are increasingly decided by razor-thin margins.
Consider just a few recent election results:
- Reform beat Labour in the Runcorn by-election by just six votes, a margin of 0.02 percent.
- Labour held off Reform in the Doncaster mayoral election by 698 votes, around one percent.
- In North Tyneside, Labour scraped through by 444 votes, a margin of 0.8 percent.
- In the West of England mayoral contest, Labour edged Reform by 5,945 votes, or 2.9 percent.
When outcomes are decided by hundreds or even single-digit votes, the impact of misleading or deceptive advertising can be decisive.
You can read our review of misleading ads over the election period here.
A warning sign from North Tyneside
One of the most striking examples uncovered by our ad monitoring project came from North Tyneside. The Conservative mayoral candidate launched a Facebook page called “North Tyneside Matters”, designed to resemble a local news outlet. In reality, it functioned as campaign propaganda.
It is impossible to draw a straight line between a single Facebook ad and a voter’s decision. But anyone with experience in advertising understands the power of messaging, particularly when it masquerades as independent journalism. In a race decided by less than one percent, this kind of deception has the potential to change outcomes.
More broadly, it corrodes trust. When voters cannot tell who is behind the messages they see, confidence in the democratic process itself is undermined. We explored this particular example further in this blog.
Bringing the debate to Parliament
A key moment this year was our House of Commons event, Preventing Disinformation and Misinformation in Campaigning. Chaired by Lord David Puttnam, the cross-party panel included MPs Justin Madders (Labour), George Freeman (Conservatives) and Ellie Chowns (Green Party), alongside former Labour MP Ian Lucas and Reform Political Advertising co-founder Alex Tait.
The discussion made clear that the concern about unregulated election advertising cuts across party lines. You can listen to the full event via Spotify, Apple Podcasts or via Youtube.
The growing threat of AI and deception
Alongside misleading claims, the rapid development of AI has introduced new risks. Deepfakes and synthetic content make it easier than ever to impersonate candidates or fabricate statements at scale. Without legal safeguards, election campaigns are vulnerable to a level of deception that existing rules were never designed to address.
George Freeman MP gave a compelling case study at our House of Commons event of his own experience of waking up one morning to news that a deepfake video of him falsely stating that he had defected to Reform had gone viral. Following his speech we wrote about why AI-driven deception poses a serious threat to democratic integrity, and why the law must catch up, in this blog.
A real opportunity in the Elections Bill
We were encouraged by the government’s policy paper, Restoring trust in our democracy: Our strategy for modern and secure elections, particularly proposals to strengthen transparency and enforcement of imprint rules, and support for a new code of conduct for campaigning.
In November we published our recommendations for the forthcoming Elections Bill.
Working closely with Full Fact and other civil society organisations, we have aligned our recommendations in four core proposals that are straightforward and practical. The cross-party House of Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee also made similar recommendations back in 2020 (excluding the newer development of AI of course).
Our recommendations are:
- Imprints should clearly state the political party responsible for an advert.
- A transparent, searchable database of all election adverts should be created.
- It should be illegal to create or distribute digital content that falsely purports to be a political candidate.
- Misleading election advertising should be subject to content regulation.
Read fuller context behind our recommendations in this blog.
From words to action
Labour campaigned in the General Election on a promise to rebuild trust in politics through “action, not words”.
The upcoming Elections Bill is the moment to deliver on that promise. If the government is serious about democratic integrity, it must act now to implement long-overdue reforms.
Because next time, the margins may be even smaller, and the disinformation even more corrosive.
