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Firms earn £53bn a year from UK smoking, excess drinking and junk food – study
Firms are earning £52.7bn a year from UK sales of tobacco, junk food and excessive alcohol, and their consumption is contributing to Britain’s rising tide of illness, a report says.
The figures prompted a coalition of health, medical and children’s organisations to demand an urgent crackdown on “the irresponsible behaviour of health-harming industries”.
The government’s failure to properly regulate those industries was damaging public health, adding to the strain on the NHS and causing a £31bn hit to the economy, they said. The manufacturers were making vast profits by bombarding consumers with marketing and deliberately obstructing efforts by the government to restrict their activities, such as seeking to discredit scientific evidence of harm.
The research was undertaken by the Obesity Health Alliance (OHA), Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA) and Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) in conjunction with Landman Economics. For example, they calculated that 28.8% of all food bought by UK households is unhealthy because it breaches government dietary guidelines for fat, salt or sugar (HFSS). Those sales together earn the food industry £34.2bn.
Similarly, they found that 43.4% of all alcohol consumed in the UK is drunk by people exceeding the government’s safe drinking guidelines of 14 units a week and is thus potentially harmful. The alcohol industry makes £11.2bn from this consumption. And all of the tobacco industry’s £7.3bn annual revenue is from sales of products that are known to kill half of the people who use them, they found.
“These findings show that these health-harming industries are making obscene amounts of money from selling us products that are making us ill,” said Hazel Cheeseman, Ash’s deputy chief executive.
The research also found that:
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NHS hospitals admit 2.5 million patients a year for treatment of diseases directly linked to being overweight (1.02 million), drinking (980,000) or smoking (506,000).
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About 459,000 people cannot work because they are too ill to do so as a result of their smoking (289,000), alcohol consumption (99,000) or being morbidly obese, with a body mass index over 40 (70,000).
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People who smoke or drink at harmful levels are more likely to be jobless and earn less than those who do not – a “wage penalty” for their unhealthy lifestyles.
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That wage penalty, together with unemployment and lost productivity due to smoking, drinking and obesity, costs the UK £31bn a year.
The health groups urged ministers to take tough action to give greater priority to public health, given the scale of harm caused by the three multibillion-pound industries’ products. They are calling for the government to crack down on advertising; raise the price of, and age of sale for, harmful products; remove certain products from prominent position in shops, and create mass media campaigns to alert the public to the risks posed by “health-harming products”.
“Tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food are causing significant harm to our society,” said Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, the chair of the AHA and president of the British Medical Association. “The government cannot afford to sit on its hands any longer.
“As funding to public sector services dwindle, the industries peddling these harmful products line their pockets with billions in revenue. It’s time that the government puts the health of our nation before the profits of industry,” he added.
Source: The Guardian, 18 November 2023
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Cigarette groups accused of ‘crying wolf’ over smoking ban plans
Claims from the tobacco industry that a proposed ban on cigarette sales will fuel the black market have been dismissed by the government and health campaigners.
Imperial Brands, the maker of Lambert & Butler cigarettes, said the ban threatened “unintended consequences”. Japan Tobacco International, which makes Benson & Hedges, said it risked “dangerous side-effects” and “opens the door to criminal gangs to sell illegal products”. British American Tobacco, the maker of Lucky Strike, said the “enforcement of existing tobacco control policies is already under-resourced” and that “an additional ban is only going to make it more difficult to police”.
Politicians, including Lord Blunkett, the former Labour home secretary, have pressed ministers about the potential effect that a ban would have on smuggling and the black market.
Neil O’Brien told parliament last month, when he was a health minister, that “no assessment has been made”. Responding to a question from Kevan Jones, a Labour MP concerned about illegal cigarettes, he added: “History shows whenever we introduce new tobacco control legislation and regulations, illicit tobacco has decreased, due to strong enforcement. Consumption of illegal tobacco has gone from 17 billion cigarettes in 2000-01 to three billion cigarettes in 2022-23.”
As part of the government’s clampdown on smoking, it has committed £30 million a year in extra funding to support enforcement agencies such as trading standards, Border Force and HM Revenue & Customs.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, the charity, said the “tobacco industry is crying wolf, as it always does. The black market is an issue of enforcement, not an argument against introducing tougher regulations. Since the government first introduced a comprehensive anti-smuggling strategy in 2000, the volume of the black market in cigarettes has declined by 85 per cent, despite tobacco taxes being ratcheted up year-on-year.”
Source: The Times, 20 November 2023
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Heseltine accuses Tories of fuelling ‘hate politics’ over plot to strip jobless of free prescriptions
Senior Tories have condemned plans to strip the right to free prescriptions from benefits claimants who don’t look for work, warning that the government risks descending into the politics of “hate”.
Former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine said ministers should not “use the health service as a sanction”.
Doctors’ leaders also hit out, accusing the government of holding people’s health “to ransom”.
The furious reaction erupted after the government announced a new crackdown that will see those who “coast” on benefits and refuse to take a job lose access to free prescriptions and dental treatment among other things.
Tory grandee Lord Heseltine said he was “all for persuading people to go back to work”, but that the “last thing anyone should do is attack people on health grounds”.
Dr Latifa Patel of the British Medical Association said the government should not hold “people’s health to ransom, especially when their poor health may be the very reason they are unable to work in the first place”.
“Removing people’s access to the medication that they need would not only be cruel, risking real harm, but also counterintuitive,” she said, as unwell people would pile further pressure and expense onto an already overstretched NHS.
The measures are expected to affect tens of thousands of people out of more than a million universal credit claimants. They will kick in if someone is judged to have been “disengaged” for six months.
As well as losing the right to free prescriptions, they would also lose access to cheaper mobile phone packages, help from energy suppliers, funeral costs and travel discount schemes.
Tase Oputu, the chair of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in England, said the society was “deeply concerned” about the inequalities that already exist in relation to prescription charges and access to medicine. No one should be faced with a financial barrier to getting the medicines they need, regardless of their employment status,” she said. “Being unable to afford your medicines leads to poor health, lost productivity, and costly and avoidable hospital admissions.”
Source: The Independent, 18 November 2023
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Revealed: obesity jab maker discussed targeting benefit claimants with UK government
Obesity jab maker Novo Nordisk suggested to senior government officials that they could “profile” benefit claimants so that those most likely to return to work could be targeted with its weight-loss injections.
Internal documents obtained by the Observer reveal that Pinder Sahota, corporate vice-president of Novo Nordisk UK, told the then health secretary Steve Barclay, England’s chief medical officer and Treasury officials that “data from the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] could help profile those who are most likely to return to the labour market”.
During the meeting, attendees discussed the potential socioeconomic benefits of making weight-loss injections available in a community-based pilot scheme alongside “wraparound support”, such as back-to-work counselling.
It is not clear whether Novo Nordisk’s suggestion of targeting interventions at certain benefit claimants was taken forward by the government. The Department of Health said this weekend that it had no plans to use DWP data to profile benefit claimants. However, getting people back to work is understood to have been a key goal of its plans to widen access to weight-loss jabs.
Prof Simon Capewell, a public health policy expert and emeritus professor at Liverpool University, said the comments by Novo Nordisk executives were “shocking and “absolutely unethical”. He added: “They suggest targeting people in the interests of the state, for economic reasons, rather than prioritising the person’s own interests and health.”
Source: The Guardian, 18 November 2023
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