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Transport for London (TfL) has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) following a ruling that claims it made about reductions in vehicle pollution in the capital were misleading.
TfL ran an advert in the Evening Standard which claimed that the new Ultra Low Emissions Zone which will launch in central London in 2020 "will encourage the use of newer, cleaner vehicles to reduce vehicle pollution by half".
The advert received a complaint from not-for-profit organisation Clear Air in London because they understood that TfL's claim was based solely on computer modelled projections of reductions in NOX exhaust emissions only and excluded other major polluting elements like CO2.
TfL said that the modelled projections it used to make the claim are a recognised standard approach for assessing the impact of future proposals of that nature, and added that it believed the projections had been produced "in a robust way" using established methodologies and bespoke modelling of how drivers would respond to the scheme.
The ASA said that while it accepted there would be "some inherent uncertainty" when attempting to assess the impact of a proposal such as the ULEZ, the claim that vehicle pollution would be reduced by half was likely to be interpreted by consumers as relating to all types of vehicle pollution, unless it was made clear that it related only to NOX.
The ASA said: "We considered, for example, that consumers would expect carbon dioxide (CO2) to be included in the figure. We noted that the reduction in pollution figures related to reductions within the zone only. We understood that CO2 was predicted by TfL to be reduced by 15% in the zone, and that reducing CO2 emissions from road transport was one of the stated objectives of the ULEZ...
".Because the claim related only to NO2 and NOx vehicle emissions, and excluded, for example, the figures for CO2, and total PM10 and PM2.5 emissions, we concluded that the claim was misleading."
The ASA told TfL to ensure that it made clear in future that claims about reductions in vehicle pollution referred to specific types of pollution rather than vehicle pollution as a whole.
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