Question: What's the remit of the Advertising Standards Authority?

Lord Borrie: We adjudicate on complaints that are made about all non-broadcast advertisements - press ads, posters, direct mail and, of course, cinema advertisements. Not quite so frequent, but increasing steadily, are the number of cases we are looking at involving ads in paid for space on the Internet - a relatively new field within our remit.

Question: You've got your annual report coming out. What are the key points?

Lord Borrie: This year is our fortieth anniversary - the Authority was first formed in 1962. So in our new Annual Report we're looking back at how advertising and public expectations of advertising have changed over the last decades, as well as looking forward to some of the challenges we're likely to face in the future. But the essence of the report deals with 2001, dealing with statistics showing the increase in both the number of complaints received and the number of ads complained about. We're also pleased to be able to report that we're now resolving complaints in a shorter period of time.

Question: Have complaints gone up in 2001?

Lord Borrie: Yes, the number of ads complained about has gone up by 17.6 per cent, compared with 2000, and in particular we've seen a large rise in complaints about internet advertising: this has increased by 50 per cent. And, as always, the report lists the top ten most complained about ads of the year.

Question: Which ones were they?

Lord Borrie: Number one, with 211 complaints, was a direct mailing for slimming tablets from Health Laboratories of North America. This had a handwritten message at the top, with the recipient's initials and the words 'Try it, it works'. This deception - implying that the mailing was from a friend or relative - caused particular distress, and was a flagrant breach of the code. That was one of the most worrying ads that we upheld complaints about last year.

Another ad, a poster by Paddy Power, led to a high number of complaints on the grounds that it was ageist and offensive. The ad shows betting odds superimposed on two elderly women crossing the road, one of whom has a zimmer frame, and it implies that there's a bet on who is going to be knocked down first. That sort of approach may be meant humorously, but it can also be regarded quite seriously as very offensive.

All the top ten ads are listed on our website, as are all our adjudications each week. Of course, just because ads receive enough complaints to rank in our top ten, doesn't mean we uphold the complaints in every case.

Question: Do you think ads have become increasingly sexist?

Lord Borrie: I wouldn't say increasingly so. These days a lot of ads portray relations between the sexes in a way that would almost certainly have been found objectionable forty years ago.

For example, one of the ads mentioned in our annual report that we did not uphold complaints about (in contrast with those I've mentioned already) was a poster for queercompany.com which drew 100 complaints because it showed two women kissing. We concluded this poster was not likely to cause serious or widespread offence or harm children so we came to a 'not justified decision'. But clearly among the public there are different views about this and the fact that we found we should not uphold the complaint doesn't mean that some people won't find it offensive.

Question: You said that this was the authority's fortieth anniversary. How would you say advertising has changed over the last forty years?

Lord Borrie: There's been a lot of changes that are highlighted in a review that we're publishing alongside the report - but there's other areas that haven't changed. For example, we still have to come down hard against misleading claims - perhaps certain features of an advertisement going to the edge or over-claiming for goods which can't be backed up. The need for substantiation, brought in as the main requirement in 1962, is still there today. One of the main concerns that we have is that not all advertisers have clear substantiation ready to supply to us if we challenge them that what they say is correct.

Question: Are there any industry areas in particular where these sort of misleading claims are a specific problem. A lot of people talk about the financial sector having had a history of misleading advertising?

Lord Borrie: The majority of complaints to the ASA are about misleading advertising - across all sectors. Over the last forty years, of course, financial advertising has become much more important, because there are more people in the population making investments or taking out pensions and insurance policies and the need for accurate information is crucial for consumers to make choices in a complex marketplace. There is also a great deal more competition which in itself is a good thing, but which sometimes leads advertisers to go to the limit in claims for their own products.

Question: There seem to be more and more very bitter adverts where companies criticise their rivals?

Lord Borrie: That's true. About nine per cent of complaints to the ASA are made not by ordinary members of the public, but by competitors. So we may receive complaints from Sainsbury's about Tesco or Tesco about Safeway, or one airline against another, or one vacuum cleaner manufacturer against another about claims being made in advertising. Often these complaints come from major firms who are operating in a very competitive field where advertising focuses heavily on price.

Question: Would you like to see this competitive advertising toned down a little?

Lord Borrie: In one sense, yes, but I am torn rather because naturally effective competition between firms is very good for consumers. It encourages new developments, new innovations and lower prices, but as the Advertising Standards Authority Chairman I'm also concerned with the other side of the coin, that it sometimes leads the advertisers to exaggerate the excellence of their particular product.

Question: Are you also concerned by a number of adverts that have cropped up recently - they're described as ambulance chasing adverts from the legal profession - 'If you've had an accident claim here'?

Lord Borrie: In 1962, just to hark back forty years again, solicitors weren't allowed to advertise. Now, that was a bad thing because it meant that solicitors who had things to offer the public, such as expertise in divorce law or personal injury law or whatever, weren't able to inform the public. I wouldn't wish to go back to that, but inevitably there are some 'ambulance chasing', as you put it, type ads. In fact, a number of these are currently in front of the ASA with complaints that they are making claims which may be exaggerated or misleading, or which may for some reason be offensive or otherwise break the Codes by unduly alarming people.

Question: What effect has the Internet had on advertising?

Lord Borrie: There was a splurge, as it were, of Internet shopping advertising for a while and although that's calmed down now, other new technologies are coming to the fore. Last year we upheld a complaint about a text message for the first time - it was sent by a computer games company and said 'please report to your local army recruitment centre immediately for your second tour of duty'. Now if you get a text message like that, where it's not clear who the sender is, you might be unduly alarmed and we felt we had to condemn that rather frightening ad. But of course there's a lot of new media advertising that is perfectly legitimate and not misleading or offensive. But it is a new field and one that is within our remit.

Question: Some people say it's so fast moving and so vast that it's difficult to regulate. Do you find that an issue?

Lord Borrie: Potentially it could be because of the speed at which ads change, but we do have some experience of being able to act urgently on a fast track basis. We certainly do this with posters - our recent adjudication against the ad for the Ali G film meant that we ruled within a week of the posters first appearing and they were removed straight away. So we can act very speedily and we've got procedures in place to enable the part-time members of our council to adjudicate by telephone if that is required urgently, whether it's a poster or whether it's something on the internet.

Question: The OFCOM bill is due to be presented to Parliament soon. What would you like to see in this bill?

Lord Borrie: We feel the government's white paper on communications gave us a very good write-up as both efficient and consumer-friendly. And it's not intended in the Communications Bill, as I understand it, to replace our system at all. Indeed what I might look for with interest is that our self-regulatory approach might be extended across all the media, if this is what the industry wants.

I said earlier we were excluded from radio and television advertising - they've got their own system through the Radio Authority and ITC. Now those bodies are going to be subsumed into the new body called OFCOM - The Office of Communications - and it may be that 'co-regulatory' arrangements may allow OFCOM to hive complaints about advertising on radio and television off to a self-regulatory body.