The Bureaucratic Politics of Local Advertising Regulation in England.

The well-established impact of advertising on consumption and behavioural norms positions advertising regulation as a salient tool for health and climate policy. With the exception of tobacco, national legislation on advertising of products harmful to health and the environment is limited. To address this gap, municipalities are increasingly restricting advertising for health-harming products and, more recently, high-carbon products and services. In the UK, local authorities have powers to set rules for advertising space they own. Following the 2018 ban on high fat, sugar, and/or salt (HFSS) product advertising across the Transport for London estate by the Greater London Authority, at least 25 English local councils have adopted similar restrictions. Interest in limiting high-carbon advertising has also grown, with at least six English councils adopting such measures. Local councils do, however, face severe financial pressures, and concerns about advertising revenue losses pose internal challenges, exacerbated by external opposition from advertisers and outdoor advertising companies. This article uses a bureaucratic politics perspective to illuminate the crucial role local civil servants play both in enabling and obstructing the progression of advertising restrictions in England. To do so, we utilise a primary dataset of interviews with nine local government actors from six local authorities and two advocates with cross-cutting local experience, as well as a secondary dataset of nine interviews with local officers, drawn from a broader study of local action on commercial drivers of ill health. This is complemented by an analysis of local government documentation relating to outdoor advertising and advertising policy. We argue that teams of local officers, in most cases those with a focus on public health, can be instrumental not only in the development and adoption, but also the initiation of advertising restrictions. On the other hand, obstruction by other actors within the local bureaucracy – either actively or through inaction – can represent a notable barrier to policy progression. While this can be understood as a manifestation of tensions between councils’ revenue generation imperatives and their health or environmental objectives, we further argue that the proximity between council teams in charge of revenue generation and outdoor media providers, cultivated through processes surrounding the commercialisation of public infrastructure, affords these companies structural power which can be mobilised in ways that delay or block policy progress. Lastly, we discuss strategic efforts by local officers to insulate early stages of policy development in response to anticipated obstacles such as internal opposition, political challenges, or interference from vested interests.