EU demands health warnings for car adverts

The European Union is planning new rules that would see all car adverts clearly displaying the vehicle’s environmental credentials.

In the same way that some food packets now have coloured labels to show what ingredients it contains, car advertisements would be obliged to display warnings to show the respective vehicle’s CO2 emissions and fuel consumption.

The legislation is based on a report that was published at the end of 2007 by Chris Davies, MEP, which called for 20 per cent of all car ad space to be dedicated to environmental warnings.

Angela Mills-Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, has criticised the proposal. She said, “If, as we believe, prescriptive legislation leads to less car advertising in the press, the regulators will not meet their objectives of promoting a certain type of information to consumers, yet the media will suffer unjustifiably by losing vital advertising revenues.”

A draft proposal for the new legislation needs to go before the College of Commissioners in the autumn before it can be passed through parliament and decreed EU law.