The council of Genevan suburb Vernier has voted to remove three quarters of the town’s 172 billboards, including those on private land. Those remaining will be used solely for culture and sport ads.
(Translation of photo above: “Seriously harms the climate”)
“We want to battle unnecessary consumption with this measure,” said Vernier town councilor Mathias Buschbeck, as reported in Bloomberg. Noting that billboards are most often used by large corporations, not local businesses, he added: “We didn’t recognize any public interest in having billboards.”
In March 2023, Geneva came close to removing billboards and digital screens from the city’s streets, but the measure was narrowly defeated in a public referendum 52% to 48%. In Vernier, things were the other way around and the opponents of Vernier council’s billboard motion tried to defeat it with a popular vote, but failed to get enough support.
Opponents then tried to block the measure in the Swiss Supreme Court. However, this too failed when the Court ruled that the ban would not impede free competition but would instead give citizens the “opportunity to opt out of unwanted advertising.”
With the Vernier result setting a Swiss precedent, it is likely that capital city Bern will try to follow suit, with left-wing politicians in the city having already suggested they will try. Green politicians in Zurich, meanwhile, want to ban digital screens, which one local politician called a “pointless waste of energy.”
Vernier isn’t the first municipality to ban outdoor ads. Grenoble in France and Sao Paulo in Brazil have done the same. So too have the US states of Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska.
What’s different in Switzerland is for politicians to directly connect outdoor ads with the climate crisis, noting that we can’t achieve climate goals whilst endlessly promoting ever greater levels of consumption.
Could this happen in the UK?
At present, local councils in the UK have very limited powers to control outdoor advertising. Thanks to an outdated planning system, applications for new ads can only be refused for two reasons: road safety and amenity. Taking down an existing advert is even harder, and likely to involve a long and expensive court process that few councils could afford.
This is why we are calling for reform to the planning system that would expand the reasons councils can refuse new ads, enabling them to align advertising policy with their Local Plan. For instance, in their 2021 Local Plan, Lambeth Council stated that “in order to enhance the environment, proposals for the renewal of advertisement consents for existing large panel advertisements will generally be resisted.”
We also want councils to have powers to remove existing billboards where the community wants that to happen, thus ensuring local voices are prioritised over corporate profits.
Find out more at our Resources for Councils page.
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