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 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.
We are encouraged by the direction of the government’s policy paper Restoring trust in our democracy: Our strategy for modern and secure elections, in particular:
- Sections 117-124: strengthening transparency and streamlining enforcement of imprint rules.
- Section 83: the government’s support for a new code of conduct for campaigning.
However, we believe it misses a rare opportunity to incorporate measures that, according to research conducted over a significant period of time, would be welcomed by the overwhelming majority of voters (see the Opinium and YouGov research below) and by many politicians from both sides of the House.
In October we held a cross-party event in the House of Commons, Preventing Disinformation and Misinformation in Campaigning. Participants agreed that, after almost nothing having been done over the last few decades to update the rules for our elections, the Bill is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to get modernising the rules to protect democracy right.
Reform Political Advertising’s event in the House of Commons “preventing disinformation and misinformation in campaigning” held with the APPG for Fair Elections.
We have worked closely with Full Fact and other stakeholders in civil society to align our specific recommendations for the above two areas in the policy paper below. The cross-party House of Lords Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee in 2020 also made all of the recommendations below (excluding the third, covering the recent development of deepfakes).
Strengthening transparency and streamlining enforcement of imprint rules
- Imprints should state clearly the political party responsible
We have campaigned for this change over the last few years and are pleased to see this in the government’s policy paper. Voters should be able to instantly identify which political party is responsible for an advert. YouGov research has shown 81% of the public think it is important that “…it is clear which political party is responsible for an advert?’”
Our proposal:
Strengthen imprint rules to require that all digital and printed election material prominently displays the name of the political party commissioning or promoting the advert.
However, while this is a very welcome proposal to ensure clarity about who is behind campaign material, it needs to be implemented alongside rules for election advertising content (recommendation 4).
For example, in the 2021 London mayoral elections, letters were sent to voters purporting to be from City Hall and TfL (but were Conservative election ads). While transparency about who is speaking is essential, it is only half the issue. The far greater threat to our democracy, in our view, is what is being said. This example from Shaun Bailey’s campaign illustrates the point well. An imprint at the bottom of the leaflet containing the political party will not make its provenance clear to the majority of voters who see the advert.
2. A transparent, searchable database of all election adverts
Currently, voters, journalists, academics and regulators have no comprehensive view of who is being targeted with what claims. Major platforms maintain their own inconsistent archives, with gaps and limited accessibility. RPA was the first to put forward the concept of an independent database of election ads in 2018 to the DCMS Fake News and Disinformation Inquiry. It was included in the recommendations of the inquiry as per our proposal below.
Due to recent EU regulation, we are now seeing this vision come to life across Europe. From March 2026, the EU will launch a centralised repository for political ads, with metadata, targeting information, API access and authentication protocols. It’s a significant step forward in solving the problem of “dark advertising” (ads that are only seen by the audience they are targeted to, and not open to scrutiny). This tactic came into the spotlight during the Brexit referendum and continues to challenge transparency in online campaigning.
Our proposal:
“Political advertising items should be publicly accessible in a searchable repository – who is paying for the ads, which organisations are sponsoring the ads, who is being targeted by the ads – so that members of the public can understand the behaviour of individual advertisers. It should be run independently of the advertising industry and of political parties.”
3. Make it illegal to create or distribute digital content that falsely purports to be a political candidate
AI-generated deepfakes enable realistic impersonations of political candidates, including fabricated audio or video of them saying things they never said. As we outlined in our article in LabourList, AI deception is a threat to democracy – it’s time the law caught up, these tools can distort elections, confuse voters and undermine trust in democratic processes. Conservative MP George Freeman spoke at our recent House of Commons event about his own experience of this issue, and we believe he will be supporting the recommendation. This targeted measure focuses only on intentional voter deception – not creativity, criticism or humour.
Our proposal:
It should be illegal to create or distribute digital content that falsely purports to be a political candidate (or claims to be speaking for them), with the intent to deceive voters. Alongside that, there should be a clear exemption for parody, satire or artistic expression.
The government’s support for a new code of conduct for campaigning
4. Introduce content regulation for misleading election advertising
Elections are increasingly fought on wafer-thin margins due to the fragmentation of vote share, so the influence of disinformation can be decisive. Unregulated, misleading election advertising is very likely having a disproportionate impact on these tight results. Let’s look at just a few of these tight contests:
- Runcorn by-election – Reform beat Labour by 6 votes (0.02% vote share)
- Doncaster mayoral election – Labour held off Reform by 698 votes (1% vote share)
- North Tyneside mayoral election – Labour scraped by with a margin of 444 votes (0.8% vote share)
- West of England mayoral election – Labour edged Reform by 5,945 votes (2.9% vote share)
In contests this close, advertising matters. And not just any advertising – but the kind that is deliberately designed to mislead, and some of which hides party affiliations. You can read a good case study of attempts to distort democracy from the North Tyneside mayoral election here.
RPA tested appetite for an election advertising code at the 2024 mayoral elections.
Six London mayoral candidates signed up, including the Green, Liberal Democrat and Labour candidate Sadiq Khan. They agreed to observe the RPA pledge that their advertising would be accurate, and rapidly corrected if not.
Other notable supporters were The Green Party of England and Wales, Plaid Cymru, Alliance, Andy Burnham, Tracy Brabin and Neil Kinnock.
You can read the code here.
RPA has also twice trialled an election advertising review panel to demonstrate how content regulation could work practically in a busy election period, including at the last General Election.
Research over several years has shown overwhelming support for the regulation of misleading ads. For example, our 2024 Opinium research found that 76% of the UK public would “support it being a requirement in the UK that factual claims in election adverts must be accurate”. Only 4% would oppose such a measure.
Examples of international precedents:
- New Zealand – long-established election ad regulation supported by all major parties.
- Australia – two states (Australian Capital Territory and South Australia) already have electoral ad regulation. MP Zali Stegall has also introduced two bills nationally to prohibit misleading political ads.
The unanimous recommendation by the cross-party Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee in 2020 should be implemented, which we’ve included verbatim below.
Our proposal:
“The relevant experts in the ASA, the Electoral Commission, Ofcom and the UK Statistics Authority should co-operate through a regulatory committee on political advertising. Political parties should work with these regulators to develop a code of practice for political advertising, along with appropriate sanctions, that restricts fundamentally inaccurate advertising during a parliamentary or mayoral election, or referendum. This regulatory committee should adjudicate breaches of this code.”
Voters deserve a political advertising environment that is transparent, truthful and fit for the modern information landscape. The Elections Bill offers a vital opportunity to bring the UK in line with public expectations, international best practice and the standards already applied to commercial advertisers.
We urge MPs from all parties to support these practical reforms to help safeguard trust in our democracy.
About Reform Political Advertising
Reform Political Advertising is a not-for-profit, politically neutral organisation run by unpaid volunteers campaigning for accuracy and transparency in election advertising.
It was founded by Alex Tait and Benedict Pringle in 2018, who have significant experience working in the marketing and advertising industry. It is chaired by Lord David Puttnam, who chaired the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee in 2020.
You can find out more about the campaign on our website: reformpoliticaladvertising.org.
