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The United Kingdom’s broadcasting regulator Ofcom will investigate complaints of climate change denial on television and radio for the first time since 2017.
Ofcom received more than 15,000 emails complaining about the TalkTV channel broadcasting fake climate news. Reversing its stand not to investigate, Ofcom announced two formal investigations into TalkTV for broadcasting climate misinformation.
When Stop Funding Hate complained to the media regulator about TalkTV’s claims that “CO2 is not a threat to the planet” and that plans to tackle climate change are “driven by pseudoscience”, Ofcom decided not to investigate.
Ofcom said that “after careful assessment, we concluded that the programmes did not raise potentially substantive issues under the Code which warranted investigation.”
Following the publication of their decision, Good Law Project (GLP) wrote to Ofcom in January 2026 asking why the complaints were rejected, when people had emailed the regulator demanding action on fake climate news.
The letter to Ofcom said that according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s Public Attitudes Tracker and an investigation by The Guardian, 1,221 complaints about climate misinformation were made to Ofcom between 2020 and 2025. Each of those complaints were rejected, Ofcom having only investigated two broadcasts on climate change since 2007, once in 2007 and once in 2017.
Now Ofcom has announced it has “exceptionally” decided to withdraw its previous decisions not to investigate TalkTv and will open two investigations.
Ofcom said they carried out new assessments into two programmes (Ian Collins, November 17, 2025, and Drivetime with Alex Phillips, November 27, 2025) in accordance with Ofcom’s Procedures for investigating breaches of content standards for television and radio. After careful assessment, Ofcom concluded that both the programmes raise potentially substantive issues warranting investigation under the Code.
Ian Collins’s show on November 17, 2025, was the subject of two complaints. The Good Law Project said that guest Chris Morrison was “misrepresenting facts and citing false evidence” to back up his claim that climate science “doesn’t add up to a row of beans”.
Ofcom also received a complaint about a Drivetime with Alex Phillips episode, in which guest Brendan O’Neill said that Labour’s energy policies were “suicidal”, “driven by pseudoscience in many cases” and “a kind of cultish behaviour”.
It also launched a probe into a complaint over comments made about Labour Party’s energy and net zero policies on the programme Morning Glory with Jeremy Kyle in December 2025.
The three probes are the first the media regulator has launched into alleged climate-sceptic comments on television and radio since 2017.
The Good Law Project hopes that TalkTV would not get away with “broadcasting lies to fuel their agenda. We’ll be watching closely, to make sure that Ofcom doesn’t let TalkTV off the hook again.”