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** 4 October 2021
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** UK
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** British Army to go smokefree by 2022 (#1)
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** Oxfordshire trading standards seize illegal super-strength vapes following Mail investigation (#2)
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** Tories order biggest shake-up of NHS leadership in England for 40 years (#3)
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** Councils face £8bn funding shortfall, warns LGA (#4)
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** International
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** Belgium charges cigarette makers for exchanging information on prices (#5)
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** Lidl announces it has stopped selling cigarettes in the Netherlands (#6)
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** UK
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The British Army has launched a new smokefree policy prohibiting the use of all tobacco products within the perimeter and near to the entrances of Ministry of Defence (MoD) sites. Launched through the new Defence Smoke-Free Working Environment directive, the policy aims to support the Government’s ambition to reduce the percentage of UK adults who smoke from 15.5% to 12% or less.

The policy has been launched to coincide with Stoptober, a stop smoking campaign that runs in October. The policy has been designed not to punish MoD staff who smoke but to encourage MoD smokers to quit and to prevent non-smoking military personnel from starting smoking. For this reason, the MoD is signposting smokers to support.

The new smokefree policy covers the whole force and includes anyone on a military site at any hour of any day including contractors and other non-MoD personnel. It does not however cover single living accommodation. The policy still allows vaping in designated areas of military sites. As well as supporting quits and preventing new smokers, the policy aims to educate personnel and staff on the benefits of quitting and to protect people on MoD sites from the harms of secondhand smoke.

Source: Army.mod.uk, 1 October 2021
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Trading standards officers in Oxfordshire have seized illegal e-cigarettes which deliver more than double the legal level of nicotine following an investigation by the Mail suggesting they were being sold to children across the UK and online. The Geek Bar Pros have nicotine levels as high as 5% and users have reported adverse effects after using the high strength products.

Officers from Oxfordshire County Council’s trading standards unit raided 13 stores in the county following calls from concerned parents. They confiscated vapes with fruit, bubblegum, and ice-cream flavours.

A spokesman for China-based Geek Bar said: “We do not in any way condone the selling of vapes to those under the age of 18, nor the selling of non-compliant products. We are contacting all distributors and retailers that we work with to ensure that this is fully understood and that these third parties take full responsibility for their actions, or potentially face a legal challenge.”

Source: Daily Mail, 4 October 2021
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** The Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said that he wants to see the most far-reaching review of NHS bosses in England for 40 years and has appointed former vice-chief of the defence staff Gen Sir Gordon Messenger to lead the work. Messenger will be asked to consider how to replicate the best hospitals, GPs’ services, and social care delivery across the country.

Tory sources said it was not about a reorganisation of leadership structure or apportioning blame for failure but “identifying the best leadership, finding out why it’s so good and looking at how we roll it out more widely”. They said it was a key plank of “levelling up”. The Government has committed to £36bn in funding for health and social care after the pandemic and in his announcement, Javid said that with more funding for the NHS must come “change for the better”.

NHS bosses criticised the review as a “slap in the face” after the pandemic and described it as a political move to shift blame on to trust, hospital, and social care leaders as the NHS struggles with a big backlog. NHS bosses suspect that the Government has been “stung” by publicity around the fact that leaders of some of the new NHS “integrated care systems” will earn about £250,000, significantly more than the prime minister.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents hospital trusts, warned that the review could hinder health service leaders. “If we are going to look at leadership and leadership qualities, then we also need to review the context in which our leaders are operating. The operating environment is among the most fraught that NHS leaders have experienced and this review will need to support, not hinder, their progress,” Taylor said.

Source: The Guardian, 2 October 2021
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** The Local Government Association (LGA) has warned that councils in England currently face costs of around £8bn by 2024-25 simply to maintain vital services functioning at their current levels. The LGA has concluded that funding from council tax alone will not meet these significant financial pressures. The £8bn figure has been compiled from the future pressures faced by councils and does not account for the ongoing demands on councils.

Councils have also expressed concern over the Government’s apparent expectation that councils will be required to raise funds for social care primarily through the use of the social care precept in council tax bills. In its spending review submission, the LGA has called on the Government to give councils a multi-year funding settlement including a £1.5bn funding injection to stabilise the adult social care provider market together with annual funding to meet councils' social care cost pressures of £1.1bn. The new UK-wide health and social care levy offered no additional funding for frontline social care.

The LGA is also asking the government to create an ongoing community investment fund worth £1bn in 2022/2023 and increasing to £3 billion by 2024/25. It is also calling on the government to invest £900m in the public health grant to return it to its 2015/16 level in real terms. Aside from funding, the LGA’s spending review submission stresses the need to devolve further power to local government in areas such as education, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), skills, and planning.

Source: LGC, 1 October 2021
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** International
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** The Belgian Competition Authority (BCA) said on Friday 1st October that it had charged four cigarette companies with breaching competition law by exchanging information on future prices to wholesalers. The BCA said in a statement that the companies were subsidiaries of Philip Morris, Imperial Brands, Japan Tobacco, and British American Tobacco, which account for 90% of cigarette consumption in Belgium. The BCA said that the ''anti-competitive practices’’ had lasted for ''several years’’. A formal inquiry started in May 2017 followed by raids a month later as part of the investigation.

Source: Reuters, 1 October 2021
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** The German supermarket chain Lidl has announced that it will stop selling cigarettes and tobacco in the Netherlands with immediate effect. The decision has come earlier than expected and coincides with the launch of the October stop smoking campaign Stoptober. The company previously announced in 2018 that it would cease selling tobacco by 2022 but has now implemented the move in all of its 440 supermarkets in the Netherlands, becoming the first Dutch supermarket to do so.

Lidl has previously joined the “towards a smoke-free generation” movement, an initiative set up by the Dutch Heart Foundation, Longfonds, and KWF Kankerbestrijding, the organisations involved in the organisation of Stoptober in the Netherlands. The Dutch government announced a ban on selling cigarettes in Dutch supermarkets last year (2020) for implementation in 2024. A ban on cigarette vending machines is due to be implemented in 2022 and on selling tobacco online from 2023. After this time, cigarettes will only be available at petrol stations, tobacco stores and places like newsstands.

Source: IAmExpat, 4 October 2021
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ASH Daily News is a digest of published news on smoking-related topics. ASH is not responsible for the content of external websites. ASH does not necessarily endorse the material contained in this bulletin.

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