Youth Power in Peterborough

We are Danielle Daboh and Aryan Nahata from Peterborough Youth Council — a city-wide youth voice group, made up of young people aged 11 to 19, that campaigns on issues important to young people assisting the City Council to ensure these voices have a say on decision-making. We’re excited to share our campaign journey with you, which began with learning about food inequality and led to us successfully advocating for an impactful policy in our city.

An Introduction To A Fairer Food System With Bite Back

Our journey began with Bite Back, a youth-led movement for a fairer food system. They showed us how food inequality impacts children’s health, and we quickly discovered that affordable nutritious options are vital for a young person’s development. However, in Peterborough, that’s not the case - we are bombarded with junk food advertising that typically entices young people with its low prices and bright colours.

These advertisements heavily impact the options young people have when it comes to food. We are constantly exposed to unhealthier options that are pushed into the spotlight, and are left to search out healthier options ourselves. This unfairness drove us to passionately campaign for more nutritious food advertisements so all young people are able to access food that is good for them.

We spent time gathering evidence of these adverts— researching our city's advertising policies and gathering data on policies in other areas. In November 2022, we pitched our campaign to Bite Back, and we received funding for the project. As a team, we were delighted and excited to progress with the campaign.

The Next Step: Engaging Local Young People

After our presentation, we did heavy research into the existing policies in Peterborough City Council's contracts with advertising firms. This was made easier by using a Freedom of Information Request — under The Freedom of Information Act, everyone has the right to see all recorded information held by a public authority. This is a great way of finding out important information about your local council! We discovered that some of the advertising units across the city were owned by the council, and others by private companies. The next step in our mission was to convince the council to stop the junk food ads on their own advertising boards, before we then target the larger private corporations.

We didn't just want to make a policy change. We wanted to inspire others. So, we took our campaign to social media, in the hope of engaging young people. We created infographics, posters, and slides explaining our goals and inspirations, such as Transport for London, which has banned junk food ads on the tubes and buses in London. A video we made discussing the campaign reached over 600 young people.

A Big Task: Presenting In Peterborough Town Hall

We created a petition in May 2023 to ‘End Junk Food Advertisements’ in Peterborough. We received 68 signatures in 25 days, which resulted in us being invited to present it to an Adults and Health Scrutiny Committee meeting at the Town Hall.

This was a nerve-wracking experience, particularly for me (Aryan Nahata), as it was the first time I ever spoke to a group of councillors. I was asked about the potential financial repercussions to a healthy advertising policy. Upon hearing this I was delighted, as this is one of the topics that I had personally researched and knew in that moment the preparation we’d done was successful. As a result of this meeting, it was decided that the public health team would work with the Youth Council to create a potential policy to be implemented for Peterborough.

This led us to do research into some of the other organisations which have a similar policy in place, such as TfL and our eventual collaboration with Sustain. Sustain is a charity that works with councils to help them create healthy advertising policies, so they had a lot of experience which we could use when we were creating our own policy to ensure long-term success.

The Final Step To Success: Meeting The Council

This led us to our final step, the cabinet meeting on Monday 17th June 2024. This is a meeting of all the most senior members of the Council, who ultimately decide whether or not new policies go ahead. Before attending this meeting, we were uncertain about what awaited us. However, to our surprise, after hearing our point of view, a vote was conducted, and we had support throughout the Cabinet. Upon hearing this great news, we were all ecstatic as our two years of hard work had finally provided us with some concrete success!

In August we were interviewed by the Peterborough City Council Comms team—we shared our journey and what we hope happens in the future. We had a wide range of coverage to celebrate our success such as Peterborough Matters, The Telegraph and Sustain.

Using our Collective Voices for Change

Reflecting on this journey we now have clearly seen that when we use our voices we can advocate for change. With Bite Back’s help we have learned about food inequality and its effects. So, we hope that when young people walk through the city, we will be presented with more affordable and nutritious options. We want advertising companies to reflect and be mindful of their adverts and how they affect their audience's health. We hope we can empower other young people to be more conscious and curious about the policies in their cities.