http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jun/10/public-health-group-calls-for-levy-on-tobacco-firms-to-help-fight-smoking
Health organisations say tobacco industry should pay levy to help smokers quit and prevent young people picking up a habit that costs UK at least £12bn a year
Passive smoking causes more than 150,000 cases of illness in children every year, the Royal College of Physicians has found. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA
Sarah Boseley
Wednesday 10 June 2015 00.01 BST
The government should impose a new levy on tobacco companies to help pay for the harm they cause, according to 120 public health organisations launching a proposed new strategy against smoking.
By 2035, the proportion of the population who smoke should be brought down from 18.5% to just 5%, says the group, which is led by Action on Smoking and Health (Ash), Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation.
They hope their proposed five-year strategy document, Smoking Still Kills, will be taken up by government in the same way that their previous reports have informed government policy. In 2008, they published Beyond Smoking Kills, named after the Labour government’s 1998 white paper, Smoking Kills, which proposed many measures that later became law, such as the ban on tobacco displays in shops.
Smoking costs the NHS at least £2bn a year and a further £10.8bn in wider costs to society, including social-care costs of more than £1bn, says the document. With the public health budget now set to lose £200m a year, the group says that the tobacco industry should pay an annual levy to offset those costs and assist with the effort of stopping young people picking up the habit as well as helping smokers to quit.
The tobacco companies, which last year made over £1bn in profit, are responsible for the premature deaths of 80,000 people in England each year, and should be forced to pay for the harm they cause.
Peter Kellner, chair of the report’s editorial board and president of YouGov, said: “The NHS is facing an acute funding shortage and any serious strategy to address this must tackle the causes of preventable ill health.
“The tobacco companies, which last year made over £1bn in profit, are responsible for the premature deaths of 80,000 people in England each year, and should be forced to pay for the harm they cause,” he said.
“Investing in evidence-based measures that reduce smoking is highly cost effective; for example stop smoking services have been shown to be one of the most cost-effective ways to improve people’s health. Placing a levy on tobacco companies to fund such work is a win-win – saving both money and lives.”
The report says that smoking is entrenched more than ever in disadvantaged households and calls on the government to address the health inequalities that result. In England more than 1.2 million children and 3 million adults live below the poverty line in households with smokers. The strategy would require tobacco companies to publish their sales figures broken down to local levels.
The current Tobacco Control Plan for England runs until the end of this year. Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Ash, said they had been working on the document for more than a year and they were hopeful that it would be favourably received by the government.
“This is an area on which there is lots of consensus,” said Arnott, pointing to the exchange on Twitter between the shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, and the health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, over plain packaging. Burnham congratulated Hunt in setting a timetable for introduction and Hunt responded welcoming “a rare moment of consensus! Let’s hope both our children can grow up in a smoke-free generation”.
In last year’s autumn statement, the chancellor, George Osborne, said he would consult on a tobacco industry levy. That concluded in February, but Osborne said in March that the government would “continue the consultation on whether to introduce a tobacco levy through informal consultation with stakeholders”.
Arnott said that anti-smoking efforts must not slacken, or the decline in smoking rates would stop. When the Tobacco-Free Living initiative of Michael Bloomberg, the New York mayor, ended in 2010, smoking rates in the city began to rise again.
Prof Jane Dacre, president of the Royal College of Physicians, points out that smoking is still the UK’s biggest killer. “As the RCP’s reports show, we still need strong policies to help the disadvantaged groups in society most affected by smoking – such as people with mental illness and lower-income families,” she said. “In particular, our children need protection – passive smoking causes over 150,000 cases of illness in children every year.
“The new government has an opportunity to make a real difference by accepting and implementing the recommendations of Smoking Still Kills, which has overwhelming support from health and medical organisations, and local authorities.”
