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What first 100 days of Labour might look like: budget, building and bills
Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues intend to hit the ground running after the general election with a raft of new legislation and a detailed look at the state of public finances
Starmer will head to Buckingham Palace on Friday where King Charles will ask him to form a government. He sat next to Charles’s private secretary, Clive Alderton, at a palace banquet last week and has been extensively briefed on the rituals between an incoming prime minister and the monarch.
Starmer’s cabinet will be told to get to work immediately, with the King’s Speech due on July 17. MPs will return to the Commons on July 9 and sit until July 31 before breaking for a shortened summer recess. MPs will return on September 2. Starmer had hoped to truncate the customary six weeks by more than a fortnight but relented after grumbling from exhausted Labour MPs and officials.
In No 11, Reeves’s team will begin preparations for a budget in mid-September. Wes Streeting, the incoming health secretary, is likely to make his first call to the junior doctors’ leaders to begin talks on how to end their long-running pay dispute.
In the first week, Starmer and his top team will finally be able to lift the bonnet and examine the true state of public finances and services. The civil service and Gray have each drawn up a list of urgent issues in need of attention, known as “black swans”, with one of the most pressing being Britain’s overstretched court system and prisons.
The King’s Speech will include a new fiscal responsibility bill, putting Reeves’s fiscal rules into law and making it a legal requirement for the Office for Budget Responsibility to provide forecasts to accompany budgets.
There will be two health bills: one will resurrect Sunak’s smoking ban legislation for under-15s, while the second will reform the UK’s current mental health legislation to tackle the growing number of people being sectioned, and to improve care for people with learning disabilities and autism who are often inappropriately detained in hospitals.
When MPs return from summer recess, difficult choices will have to be made with strained public finances. Departmental budgets will reach a “cliff edge” by December, with the next spending review likely to be delivered by the end of autumn.
Source: The Times, 30 June 2024
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Revealed: tobacco firms lobbied against smoking ban
According to the Guardian, Rishi Sunak abandoned his “legacy” policy to ban smoking for future generations amid a backlash from the tobacco industry in the form of legal threats, lobbying and a charm offensive aimed at Conservative MPs.
The UK had been on course to become the first country to ban smoking for future generations, via the tobacco and vaping bill, which Downing Street hoped would help define Sunak’s place in British political history.
An investigation by the Guardian and the Examination, a non-profit newsroom that investigates global health threats, has uncovered how the UK’s largest cigarette companies fought against the policy, which would have raised the smoking age by one year every year.
After months of fierce opposition from the industry – and intervention from MPs and thinktanks with ties to tobacco firms – the proposal was excluded from the “wash-up” process, when outgoing governments choose which policies to fast-track and which to drop.
Documents and freedom of information requests reveal how four of the world’s largest tobacco firms – the UK’s Imperial Brands and British American Tobacco (BAT), Japan Tobacco International (JTI) and US-headquartered Philip Morris International (PMI) – put ministers on notice of a legal backlash.
The legal threats came after the industry opposed the legislation in its submissions to the consultation, despite claiming publicly that they wanted to phase out cigarettes.
The government also came under pressure from rightwing thinktanks funded by the tobacco industry during the consultation process.
In total, there were 307 responses in which the respondent disclosed ties to the tobacco industry, including from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and Adam Smith Institute. Both have received funding from JTI, while the IEA has also received money from Imperial and BAT.
Source: The Guardian, 29 June 2024
Editorial note: The title of the article has been changed from “Revealed: how Sunak dropped smoking ban amid lobbying from tobacco firms” to “Revealed: tobacco firms lobbied against smoking ban”. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill was unable to be passed into law before the general election as it had not progressed far enough through the legislative process.
See also: the i - Big Tobacco ‘actively undermining’ our smoking ban plans, health minister warns | Tobacco Tactics - Tobacco Industry Interference with Endgame Policies
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Tobacco giant accused of ‘manipulating science’ to attract non-smokers
The tobacco company Philip Morris International has been accused of “manipulating science for profit” through funding research and advocacy work with scientists.
Campaigners say that leaked documents from PMI and its Japanese affiliate also reveal plans to target politicians, doctors and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics as part of the multinational’s marketing strategy to attract non-smokers to its heated tobacco product, IQOS.
Japan is a launch market for IQOS, and Stopping Tobacco Organisations and Products (Stop), a tobacco industry watchdog, said it suspected PMI would apply the blueprint elsewhere.
A paper from researchers at the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath said that Philip Morris Japan (PMJ), funded a Kyoto University study into smoking cessation via a third-party research organisation.
The researchers said they could find no public record of PMJ’s involvement, although a PMI spokesperson said its involvement had been attributed when the results were presented at a scientific conference in Greece in 2021.
PMJ paid about £20,000 a month to FTI-Innovations, a life sciences consultancy run by a Tokyo University professor, for tasks such as promoting PMI’s science and products at academic events. In one internal email, a PMJ employee claimed they had been told “to keep it a secret”.
The paper, published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, is based on 24 leaked company documents, dated from between 2012 and 2020.
“These activities resemble known strategies to influence the conduct, publication and reach of science, and conceal scientific activities,” the researchers said.
Dr Sophie Braznell, one of its authors, said: “The manipulation of science for profit harms us all, especially policymakers and consumers trying to make potentially life-changing decisions. It slows down and undermines public health policies, while encouraging the widespread use of harmful products.”
Braznell said the leaked documents undermined claims made by PMI to conduct “transparent science”, and called for reforms to the funding and governance of tobacco research “to protect science from vested corporate interests”.
Aiming for a presence at the Tokyo Olympics “echoes a known industry tactic of advertising addictive, harmful tobacco products at sports events – associating these products with health, misleading consumers, and reaching children and young people”.
Jorge Alday, director at Stop, said the findings were at odds with PMI’s statements suggesting IQOS was only targeted at adult smokers.
“PMI’s intentions with IQOS seem to extend far beyond what they’ve stated,” he said. “This revelation adds weight to the mounting evidence questioning the credibility of PMI’s claims about their intentions and their products.
“Disturbingly, it hints at a broader pattern of deceptive tactics, potentially laying the groundwork for a new chapter in the tobacco epidemic,” he said.
Source: The Guardian, 28 June 2024
See also: Nicotine and Tobacco Research - “Keep it a secret”: leaked documents suggest Philip Morris International, and its Japanese affiliate, continue to exploit science for profit
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Streeting: We’ll raise the share of funding for primary and community care within five years
The proportion of NHS funding spent on community and primary care would increase by the end of a first Labour term in government, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has told HSJ.
Mr Streeting also addressed a range of key operational measures, including stating that staff delivering Labour’s promised 40,000 new elective care appointments a week should be paid “time and a half”.
The Labour shadow health and social care secretary argued “so many of the answers” to long elective and accident and emergency waits “lie outside of hospitals in primary care community services, [as well as] in mental health and in social care”.
He added that the “strong message I’ve had from hospital chief executives, [is that] ‘The worst thing you could do is just give us more money, because actually, we’ll just keep on pouring [it] into a black hole.
The best thing you could do for us is to solve the problems that are outside of our control and outside of our institutions in [the] primary community, and mental [health sectors].’”
HSJ then asked Mr Streeting if he would commit to a greater proportion of NHS funding being spent on out-of-hospital care at the end of the first term of a Labour government.
“A hundred per cent,” Mr Streeting replied, adding it is “absolutely essential”. He said that “money talks”, and he was committed to shifting “the gravity” of NHS funding to improve patient outcomes, improve efficiency and make careers in primary and community care more attractive.
The commitment will require a new Labour government to tough choices given it has signalled it will not be in a position to significantly increase NHS funding for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, to date, Labour have committed to just three specific NHS funding pledges, none of which concern primary or community care. They are to fund 40,000 extra hospital appointments, increase the capacity of NHS dentistry, and employ an additional 8,500 mental health staff. The party’s manifesto says “we must over time shift resources to primary care and community services” but with no specifics or time commitment.
Mr Streeting said he was not “naive” enough to think the NHS could succeed without increased funding. But he added that the service first needed to win back the confidence of the Treasury that any extra funding would be spent well.
He claimed the “trust” between the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care and NHSE was at “rock bottom”, and added that he had “some sympathy” with His Majesty’s Treasury’s “cynicism” about the service’s ability to spend new funding efficiently.
Mr Streeting said he was prepared to stay as health secretary for “the long term” to address this and other challenges, and that – while acknowledging it would be up to Sir Keir Starmer to decide – he would “love” to stay as health secretary for the entirety of the forthcoming parliament.
Source: HSJ, 1 July 2024
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