The U.K. prime minister, Rishi Sunak, wants to raise the legal age for consuming cigarettes, gradually increasing it one year at a time until the next generation is no longer legally allowed to purchase the products, reports Bloomberg.
According to Sunak, the move would make it so that “a 14-year-old today would never legally be sold a cigarette.” Sunak spoke on the age increase at a Conservative Party conference in Manchester Wednesday, where plans to restrict availability of vapes and look at packaging and flavors of vapor products were also discussed.
Simon Clark, director of smokers’ rights group Forest, responded to the move, saying, “These are desperate measures by a desperate prime minister.
“Raising the age of sale of tobacco is creeping prohibition, but it won’t stop young people smoking because prohibition doesn’t work. Anyone who wants to smoke will buy tobacco abroad or from illicit sources.
“This is the opposite of leveling up; it’s dumbing down. Future generations of adults who are considered old enough to vote, pay taxes, drive a car and drink alcohol are going to be treated like children and denied the right to buy a product that can be purchased legally by people a year older than them.
“This is now a conservative government in name only because the prime minister has just taken a wrecking ball to the principles of choice and personal responsibility,” Clark said.
U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is considering a ban on cigarettes that would effectively ban the next generation from purchasing cigarettes, according to the Guardian.
Sunak has reportedly been looking into measures similar to those put in place in New Zealand, involving steadily increasing the legal smoking age, resulting in those born on or after Jan. 1, 2009, never being able to buy tobacco products.
“At a time when people and businesses are crying out for stability, Rishi Sunak has poured fuel on the Tories’ economic bin fire in a desperate bid to keep Liz Truss and her fellow arsonists happy,” said Keir Starmer, Labour leader, referring to Sunak’s recent backtracking on his net-zero policy and confusion over his education policies.
“Britain has a once-in-a-generation chance to reverse 13 years of decline and get ahead—to bring down people’s bills, create quality jobs and free us from the grip of Putin and over-reliance on China. Rishi Sunak’s weakness now stands between the country and proper national renewal,” Starmer said.
“Smoking is a deadly habit—it kills tens of thousands of people each year and places a huge burden on the NHS and the economy,” said a government spokesperson about the New Zealand-style smoking ban policy. “We want to encourage more people to quit and meet our ambition to be smoke-free by 2030, which is why we have already taken steps to reduce smoking rates. This includes providing 1 million smokers in England with free vape kits via our world-first ‘swap to stop’ scheme, launching a voucher scheme to incentivize pregnant women to quit and consulting on mandatory cigarette pack inserts.”
“Prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to future generations of adults won’t stop people smoking,” said Simon Clark, director of the smokers’ group Forest. “It will simply drive the sale of cigarettes underground and into the hands of criminal gangs.
“Treating adults like children by denying them the right to buy cigarettes legally would take the nanny state to another level.
“Smoking rates have been falling for decades,” Clark said. “The idea that any government would prioritize tackling smoking at a time when the country faces far more important challenges at home and abroad is frankly obscene.
“If it’s true that the prime minister wants to introduce some of the world’s toughest anti-smoking measures, denying millions of adults the freedom to choose, it will be a Conservative government in name only.”
Superdrug will stop selling disposable vape products in its U.K. and Ireland stores following environmental concern over the products, reports the Guardian.
The retailer noted that it would have its stock completely cleared out by the end of the year.
“The rate that consumers are using single-use vapes and discarding them is worrying and alarming for the environment,” said Lucy Morton-Channon, Superdrug’s head of environment, social and governance. “The lasting effects that single-use vapes are having on the environment needs to be addressed, and I am pleased that we’ve decided to remove them from all stores.”
Superdrug also cited risk of fire from improper vape disposal as a reason for discontinuing sales.
Councils in England and Wales are urging the U.K. government to ban sales of single-use vapor devices by 2024, citing environmental and health concerns, reports Reuters.
The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents councils in England and Wales, argued that a ban needs to be implemented quickly to prevent disposables from flooding the U.K. market as other markets close. The European Union has proposed a ban in 2026, and France is implementing a ban in December 2023.
“Disposable vapes are fundamentally flawed in their design and inherently unsustainable products, meaning an outright ban will prove more effective than attempts to recycle more vapes,” said David Fothergill, chairman of the LGA’s community well-being board, referring to disposable vapes’ inability to be easily recycled due to the batteries not being a separate unit.
“Disposables have been around for well over a decade and provide a low-priced accessible product that helps smokers to quit smoking tobacco,” said John Dunne, director-general of the U.K. Vaping Industry Association, defending disposable vapes. He said the industry is working to limit environmental impact, and he warned that a ban would lead to a larger black market.
Amanda Pierce
Philip Morris Limited (PM UK), a subsidiary of Philip Morris International, said today that the former Burson-Marsteller CEO and McDonald’s PR chief Amanda Pierce had been appointed as its new head of communications.
‘In the newly created post, Amanda will lead on driving the overall communications strategies for Philip Morris Ltd to support the company’s ambition to create a smoke-free future,’ PM UK said in a press note. ‘Central to this is the company’s shift towards smoke free products like e-cigarettes and heated tobacco that will ultimately allow the business to stop selling cigarettes.
‘She will spearhead the company’s corporate public relations program in the UK and Ireland, as well as overseeing external communications, stakeholder engagement, corporate social responsibility, campaigns and employee engagement.’
PM UK said that Pierce was highly regarded in the PR industry and joined PMI with a first-class background in corporate communications and transformational change.
‘During her 16-year tenure at McDonald’s, she played a key role in designing and overseeing the delivery of a change strategy that reversed declining sales within the business and began restoring its reputation in the face of external criticism towards the firm. This work saw McDonald’s trust scores rise by 10 points over a two-year period…
‘In 2008, Amanda joined global communications agency Burson-Marsteller, going onto serve as its UK CEO, a role in which she advised some of the world’s leading companies including Shell, DeBeers, Kimberly-Clark, Danone, and GSK.’
The U.K.’s new anti-tobacco measures may not achieve their stated objectives.
By Giles Roca
Giles Roca is the director general of the U.K. Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association.
May 20 saw a series of major changes to the U.K. tobacco market, the most noticeable being the full introduction of standardized or plain packaging. This was accompanied by a suite of other measures, including a ban on all small packs (which previously made up around 75 percent of the U.K. market); a ban on flavored tobacco; new pictorial health warnings; and various restrictions on e-cigarette size, tank size, nicotine liquid strength, etc. On the same day, the government introduced a minimum excise tax.
All of these measures were introduced directly or, in the case of plain packaging, indirectly under the revised EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD2) that was transposed into U.K. law by David Cameron’s government in May 2016. While TPD2 does not mandate plain packaging, it allows member states to adopt it as a tobacco control measure.
To understand the impact of these measures, the Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association (TMA) undertook three waves of consumer polling of 1,000 smokers. The results should worry all of those involved in law enforcement, those in the U.K. treasury who depend on the annual £12.5 billion ($16.22 billion) in tobacco taxation and of course those legitimate independent retailers for whom tobacco often makes up 30 percent of sales.
Deprived of the ability to purchase smaller and therefore more affordable packs of tobacco, smokers are not, as those in the health lobby claim, simply quitting, but they are moving into buying from the black market or from abroad, thereby avoiding U.K. duty and benefitting the criminal gangs involved in tobacco smuggling. Over the past six months there was a 15 percent increase in smokers buying packs of 20 cigarettes from illicit sources and abroad. Smokers buying larger packs of hand-rolling tobacco from such sources and abroad almost doubled with a 91.7 percent increase. There was a 32 percent increase in smokers buying online from social media and websites advertising cheap illegal tobacco, and there was a 22 percent increase in smokers buying any tobacco product from abroad, thereby avoiding U.K. duty.
Despite how some like to portray it, the tobacco industry does not believe its products should go unregulated. It is clear about the risks involved, and that is why the industry is at the forefront of developing reduced-risk alternatives. However, it is opposed to measures that are proved to not work, where there is no evidence of their effectiveness or where they are more about totem interventions championed by largely taxpayer-funded health lobbyists.
Indeed, on some of these recently introduced measures, the health lobby itself cannot agree on their merits. “People buy smaller pack sizes, such as 10s, when they are attempting to reduce their tobacco consumption and quit,” said Martin Dockrell, then head of policy at the U.K. anti-tobacco lobby group Action on Smoking and Health, in 2008. “If you wanted people to lose weight, you wouldn’t take away fun-sized chocolate bars and only sell jumbos. I’m with the retailers on this one.” Dockrell is now head of tobacco control at Public Health England, the lead agency tasked with promoting good health.
Plain packaging will simply make it easier to produce counterfeit packaging, while there is no evidence that it has been effective in reducing youth access to cigarettes either in Australia, where it was introduced in 2012, or in France, which introduced it at the start of this year and has seen overall sales actually increase.
Meanwhile, the restrictions on e-cigarettes will have the perverse effect of deterring those who wish to move off combustible tobacco by reducing the experience available in electronic form. It is notable that the recent U.K. smoking prevalence figures, published in June, show a steeper decline since 2013 thanks to emergence of harm reduction technology such as e-cigarettes. This stands in direct contrast to the tranche of tobacco control measures implemented in the U.K. by successive governments over the past decade, which have had minimal effect on smoking rates and negative consequences such as making the problem of black market tobacco even worse.
The TMA will continue to closely monitor the impact of these measures and is currently conducting a survey of 12,000 smokers across the U.K. that will give unprecedented insight into the impact that they are having. It will make its data fully available for all interested parties to see.
So what lessons can we draw from this? Clearly, don’t believe the hype that some of those in the health lobby both generate and want you to believe. Measures are advocated with scant evidence while their adoption into law has more to do with keeping such groups quiet—a damaging way to make public policy.
We also know that what happens in tobacco will happen sooner or later in other sectors, regardless of any evidence on the effectiveness of the measures—just look at the growing calls for plain packaged food and alcohol both in the U.K. and around the world. We also know what happens in the U.K. will happen sooner or later in other places, particularly following the decision of the U.K. government to provide £15 million to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to push forward with implementing a U.K. model of tobacco control in other countries.
Given that many of these measures originated in Europe, we will be calling on the government to look again at them as the U.K. leaves the European Union so that we have an approach based not on legislative totems but on hard facts, evidence and education.
Giles Roca is the director general of the U.K. Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association.
A high court judge has ruled that the U.K public-places smoking ban must be enforced in state prisons despite the possibility of unrest this could provoke in jails throughout England and Wales. According to Justice Singh, the justice secretary misunderstood an exemption made in 2006 to health legislation that banned smoking in workplaces and enclosed public spaces. Although the government had argued that state prisons were exempt from smoke-free legislation because of their status as Crown premises, Justice Singh ruled that prison communal areas are subject to the laws, therefore the smoking ban must be extended to such locations.
The exemption in the 2006 Health Act indicated that smoking is allowed in enclosed public places where a person resides permanently or temporarily, which includes prisons, hotels and long-term care facilities. However, the exemption also states that these places should provide designated smoking rooms to avoid subjecting other residents and staff members to secondhand smoke. According to The Guardian, more than 80 percent of prisoners smoke, and the justice ministry fought for the exemption when the health legislation went through parliament—partly in response to warnings by prison governors and unions who said banning smoking in prisons could trigger turmoil among prisoners who use tobacco as currency as well as a legal stimulant.
To continue providing prisoners with access to nicotine—but also to protect nonsmoking prisoners and staff members from the dangers of secondhand smoke—three U.K. prisons now offer e-cigarettes, which are generally believed to be less harmful than their combustible counterparts. Prisoners are currently permitted to smoke combustible cigarettes in their prison cells—as long as the smoker is over the age of 18 and the door is closed—as well as in outside exercise yards, but they cannot use these products in communal spaces.
Justice Singh has postponed the implementation of the ban and granted the justice secretary time to appeal against the ruling.
Expectant mothers in the U.K. will be asked to take breath tests to show whether or not they have been smoking during their pregnancies, according to a number of media stories.
About 20 percent of women are estimated to smoke while pregnant, which is said to lead to low birth weights and to cause complications in pregnancy and labor.
Under NHS (National Health Service) guidance, pregnant women will be asked to take a test for carbon monoxide during antenatal appoints and given help to quit if levels are too high.
U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron has scrapped plans to force all cigarettes to be sold in plain packs, according to a story published today in The Sun.
Health ministers had been considering the move for a year. Proponents had insisted making packages bland would put smokers off — and stop kids from picking up the habit.
Cameron initially backed the plan, but has been persuaded it would damage the packaging industry. There were also concerns it could cost £3 billion in lost tax revenue and tie up the Commons in bitter arguments.
Cameron has now ordered the proposed law to be pulled from next week’s Queen’s Speech.
A Whitehall source said: “Plain packaging may or may not be a good idea, but it’s nothing to do with the government’s key purpose. The PM is determined to strip down everything we do so we can concentrate all our efforts on voters’ essentials. That means growth, immigration and welfare reform.”
Officials in Australia, the first to enforce uniform packaging, have admitted there was still no evidence that they cut smoking.
U.K. taxpayers could face a £5 billion ($7.67 billion) bill if ministers insist cigarettes are sold in plain packages.
The money would be awarded by courts to tobacco companies in recognition of the fact that the government had destroyed their brand equity, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, as reported on the This is Money website.
Legal challenges under the Human Rights Act or EU law could claim that requiring plain packages meant the industry had been unfairly deprived of its trademark rights, says a report by the think-tank.
The Australian government, which has introduced plain packaging, is being sued by companies for the loss of their brands.
The think-tank’s chief executive, Douglas McWilliams, said the use of plain packaging would lead to cheaper cigarettes as smokers became less aware of costlier brands and new entrants were spared the expense of marketing.
This would mean less money for the treasury with “a reduction in tobacco’s aggregate annual contribution to the Exchequer of between £219 million and £348 million.”
