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The Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s budget and spending review, announced on Wednesday 27th 2021, has increased the duty rates on all tobacco products by inflation, the retail price index (RPI), plus 2%. The Chancellor has also increased duty rates for hand-rolled tobacco by inflation (RPI) plus 6%, meaning their price will rise by 10.9%. The price rises came into effect at 6PM last night, Wednesday 27th 2021.
The changes mean that the most expensive pack of 20 cigarettes, previously costing £13.50, will go up by 93p to £14.43, and the cheapest pack of 20 will go up by 61p from £8.80 to £9.41. The price of a 30g bag of hand-rolled tobacco will rise by 89p from £8.14 to £9.02. The Government is also increasing the Minimum Excise Tax (MET) on cigarettes and the price at which it applies by an additional 1% to 3% above inflation (RPI), meaning that it is now £6.96 for a pack of 20 cigarettes (previously £6.42) and applies to cigarettes sold at or below £10.30 (previously £9.23).
Deborah Arnott, Chief Executive of ASH, said: "Today’s budget was a small step forward on tobacco, but on its own won’t deliver on the Government’s commitment to a smoke free 2030. ASH is pleased to see tobacco taxes go up significantly above inflation. Raising tobacco prices through taxation reduces smoking prevalence, increases tax revenues, and reduces costs to public finances. But on their own tax increases are not enough to deliver the Government’s Smokefree 2030 ambition. What’s also needed is a fully funded and ambitious strategy, including stricter and more support for smokers to quit. The Government promised to publish a new Tobacco Control Plan this year, but with only a couple of months to go we’re still waiting."
Editorial Note: The figures quoted above regarding the price increase for different tobacco products are provided by The Mirror and differ slightly from the figures in the ASH press release, which were provided by HMT.
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Councils are to receive an increase in grant funding worth £4.8bn over the next three years in what the Chancellor described as the biggest increase in funding for over a decade as he announced his Spending Review and Budget yesterday (Wednesday 21st October). The extra money will increase the Department for Levelling up, Housing & Communities’ funding for local government by 9.4% over the three-year spending review period, to £12.5bn by 2024-25, the largest percentage increase of any government department. The government has also allocated £1.7bn to its £4.8bn levelling up fund.
The funding rises will increase councils’ core spending power by an average of 3% in real-terms each year over the three-year spending review period, though this depends upon councils increasing council tax to the maximum permitted extent. The threshold for increases in council tax will remain at 2% a year, meaning that if local authorities wish to increase council tax bills by 3% they must first hold a referendum for local residents to vote on the rise. The threshold for increases to the adult social care precept stands at 1%. The Budget also maintains the public health grant “in real terms”. All of this means that councils’ core spending power will increase by £8.5bn over the spending review period, to £58.9bn, with more than half of this coming from the additional £4.8bn in grant funding and much of the remainder likely to be from council tax increases.
The £1.7bn rise to the Government’s levelling up fund has been earmarked for projects from 105 areas across the UK, with the biggest single grant, worth £49.6m, awarded to Derbyshire County Council for the South Derby growth zone and infinity garden village and the North West receiving funding for more projects (12) than any other region. The government has also announced £5.3m for the first 21 projects to benefit from the £150m community ownership fund.
Source: LGC, 27 October 2021
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The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) is expected to warn that council services such as social care, bin collection, sport centres, and road repairs are likely to be cut following real-term reductions in funding for councils in Rishi Sunak’s Spending Review. Analysis by the IFS shows that despite rises in household council tax bills and £4.8bn of new grant funding for local authorities up until 2025, these additional revenues will be offset by rising costs, leaving councils forced to cut at least some essential services.
The IFS found that the expected average rise in council tax bills across all councils equates to a 2.8% increase each year until 2025, meaning the average household would pay £39.92 more from next April, and £123.13 more from April 2024, than they paid this year. However, the IFS analysis finds that even this extra income for councils will be wiped out by inflation, with the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasting a Consumer Price Inflation of 3.6% between this year and next, and 8.3% by 2024/25.
Reaction from councils was mixed. Sam Chapman-Allen, chairman of the District Councils Network and Conservative leader of Breckland District Council in Norfolk said: “We cannot see how the £4.8bn new grant funding announced by the Chancellor will come close to addressing the financial pressures district councils and the rest of local government are under. This leaves councils with an unpalatable choice between increasing council tax for hard-pressed local residents or cutting services that every local resident and business relies on.”
James Jamieson, chairman of the Local Government Association, said that he was “pleased that today’s spending review has provided new government grant funding for councils over the next three years to support vital local services. However, he added that “It is disappointing that the Chancellor has not provided additional funding to address existing pressures on adult social care services, and not increased public health funding. We remain concerned that the money allocated to social care from the Health and Care Levy will be insufficient to fund reforms.”
Source: iNews, 27 October 2021
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More than 150 illegal e-cigarettes have been seized following a raid on a store in Cumbernauld, a town north-east of Glasgow in Scotland. The e-cigarettes look like highlighter pens and come in flavours like bubblegum. They contain as much as twice as much nicotine as a packet of cigarettes and some users have reported adverse reactions such as coughing up blood.
North Lanarkshire Trading Standards initially began investigating the illegal e-cigarettes after a tip off from a worried parent who alleged that kids were buying the disposable vapes. Disposable nicotine vapour products should not contain any more than 2ml of liquid, the nicotine equivalent of one packet of cigarettes. The 2ml liquid is enough for around 600 puffs, but some of the seized products contained liquid for more than 1,500 puffs.
Paul Bannister, Protective Services Manager at North Lanarkshire Trading Standards, said: “Our exercise has successfully removed a number of nicotine vapour products from sale, due to consumer product safety concerns. We will be writing to retailers with guidance on these products and advising them to return any stock not complying with the legal requirements. We will continue to monitor sales of nicotine vapour products and will not hesitate to take enforcement action against any retailer who continues to stock these potentially harmful products.”
The raid follows a separate shop raid last week (beginning 18th October) in Aberdeen in which officers seized £900-worth of e-cigarettes which had more than five times the legal level of nicotine. Shops in Aberdeen have reported to Trading Standards staff they have never had to check the age of so many young customers as they are doing now. Any adult caught buying vaping products for underage teenagers face an on-the-spot fixed penalty of £200.
Source: The Mirror, 27 October 2021
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The British Film Institute (BFI) considers how, on the 75th anniversary of the establishment of Britain’s Central Office of Information (COI), Britain’s first official anti-smoking health education films helped to encourage Britain’s smokers to quit.
When the films Smoking and You (1963) and The Smoking Machine (1964) were released, smoking had been the norm for decades, but this was challenged by the 1962 publication of the landmark Royal College of Physicians report Smoking and Health which officially designated smoking a major cause of lung cancer. The two films, intended for schoolchildren, helped to amplify the report’s message.
Smoking and You, produced and directed by Derrick Knight, was aimed at teenagers and young adults. It used hidden-camera footage of smokers shot from inside a blacked-out minivan and centres on a sinister smoking machine. It employs a straightforward informational approach with low-budget devices like animation, fake commercials, and jump-cut visual summaries of statistics, with an address to camera by clinical specialist Dr Charles Fletcher, a well-known media face of the medical profession. The Central Film Library made the film available for free and it rapidly broke booking records, reaching 100,000 viewers within one year and later successfully sold into the US education market.
The Smoking Machine was written and directed by Sarah Erulkar, the first person of colour to have a career as a film director in the UK. The film, aimed primarily at 9 to 12-year-olds, is described as “a smoking and health film in detective story style”. Five children play the leading roles, with an older teenage friend a keen smoker who cannot explain his enthusiasm for smoking. The kids investigate why people take up smoking, observing local people in Hampstead and discovering an extraordinary machine that smokes cigarettes mechanically. This demonstrates to the kids the unavoidable harm of cigarettes on lungs, with the protagonists finally cornering their friend after he runs out of puff.
Source: BFI, 27 October 2021
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A new report from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has found that cigarette sales in the US rose in 2020 for the first time in two decades. The report found that sales rose by 0.4%, with the total number of cigarettes sold to wholesalers and retailers increasing across the US by about 8 million from 202.9 billion in 2019 to 203.7 billion in 2020. The increases reverse the long-running trend of cigarette sales reducing, with the impacts of the Covid pandemic said to be behind the 2020 increases.
The FTC report, its annual Cigarette Report, was compiled from data submitted by four major US tobacco companies, Altria, ITG Holdings USA, Reynolds American, and Vector Group Ltd. The report found that these companies increased the advertising and promotion of cigarettes to $7.84bn (£5.69bn) in 2020 from $7.62bn (£5.53bn) in 2019. It found that the companies focused the bulk of their spending on "price discounts paid to cigarette retailers in order to reduce the price of cigarettes to customers".
The report did not indicate if the Covid pandemic and effects of the ensuing lockdowns had anything to do with the increase in sales, but Bloomberg reported in April 2020 that Altria's first quarter sales had jumped partly as a result of "bulk purchases — what the company calls 'pantry loading'" suggesting that smokers stocked up on cigarettes fearing shortages. There is also evidence that boredom, stress, and mental health impacts during the lockdowns contributed to more smoking.
However, the increase in sales last year looks unlikely to represent a long-term trend, with a Nielsen's convenience-store report for the four-week period ending on March 27th 2021 showing that overall sales of cigarettes were down 4.9%.
Source: NPR, 27 October 2021
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PQ1: WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
Asked by Jonathon Ashworth, Leicester South
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the implications of Philip Morris International's takeover of Vectura on the implementation of the World Health Organisation Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, in particular article 5.3.
Answered by Maggie Throup, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care
The proposed transaction is primarily a commercial matter for the parties concerned although officials will continue to monitor the situation. The United Kingdom is a signatory to the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and will continue to uphold our duties in protecting public health policy in accordance with the treaty.
Source: Hansard, 25 October 2021
PQ2: WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
Asked by Sir George Howarth, Knowsley
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the compatibility of the current WHO guidelines on the interpretation of Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control with Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Answered by Maggie Throup, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care
Whilst the Department is not aware of any guidelines for interpreting Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), there are implementation guidelines. These guidelines were developed in 2008 through wide consultative and inter-governmental processes. Our assessment is that they provide useful guidance in supporting countries to meet their obligations under Article 5.3.The Government is fully committed to its obligations under the WHO FCTC, including commitments under Article 5.3.
Source: Hansard, 26 October 2021
PQ3: WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
Asked by Sir George Howarth, Knowsley
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the Secretariat of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control has ceased to publish interventions from delegations in the summary records of subsidiary body meetings.
Answered by Maggie Throup, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care
We are not aware of any changes to the publication process for the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. We understand that the Secretariat will publish all outcomes and decisions from Ninth Conference of the Parties.
Source: Hansard, 27 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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