Draft guidance on environmental claims

The purpose of the guidance is to help those businesses to understand and comply with their existing obligations under consumer protection law.

In addition to the draft guidance and consultation document, the CMA is publishing a literature review, which summarises the many surveys, articles and research reports that we have considered while developing the draft guidance.

The CMA invites interested parties to respond to the questions posed in the consultation document no later than 5pm on Friday 16 July 2021.

The CMA plans to publish the final version of its consumer protection law guidance in August / September 2021. Alongside this, the CMA will also issue a short guide for consumers to help them to understand the sort of questions they should be asking themselves when deciding whether or not they should trust environmental claims being made by businesses.

We are seeking only anonymised responses to our surveys. We do not need to know the identities of consumers or businesses for this work and would generally prefer you not to supply these.

However, we have given respondents to the survey for other interested parties the option of providing us with their contact details, so that we can contact them for further information to help us with this work.

If we receive any information relating to individuals from which they can be identified, we will be processing personal data. When processing personal data, we comply with data protection law. We will be processing under Article 6.1 (e) of the GDPR and section 8 of the Data Protection Act 2018 – processing necessary for the exercise of our statutory functions.

We will not be sharing the personal data with any third party and will only keep it until the end of the project. For more information about how the CMA processes personal data for its work and your rights in relation to that data, including your right to complain, please see our Privacy Notice.