It would be impossible not to be moved by the sight of desperately ill Covid patients on respirators reported on the nightly news. As of 1/3/2021 around 86,000 of our fellow citizens have died of this disease – and many others have suffered grievously. These statistics and images – and the traumatised stories from families left behind – have galvanised extraordinary societal efforts to mitigate suffering and to produce a vaccination. They have also induced great levels of compassion for the suffering, and admiration for the women and men who care for them. No efforts are too great in our desire to alleviate this misery and to prevent these premature deaths.
Alongside those patients in hospital struggling with Covid 19, are, annually, around 440,000 patients suffering from smoking-related illness; around 77,000 of whom will die. Of all admissions for respiratory illness 22% are smoking-related. How can we extend the deep compassion and desire to prevent illness and death that we’ve demonstrated during the Covid crisis to these patients? There will be no vaccine roll-out to protect against the damage smoking wreaks upon them, but they too are victims of a health scourge which we should be bearing down on with all of our effort.
Successive governments have made significant progress in anti-smoking measures: from bans on smoking in enclosed public spaces; to plain packaging for cigarettes; to smoking cessation clinics. Year-on-year tobacco consumption is falling by around 0.4% as a result of these, and other, measures. But we can go much further. The next step to disincentivise consumption should be to radically impact on the price at which cigarettes are sold, in a way unfeasible with tax increases alone.
My proposal is a simple one – the government should legislate that cigarettes, and hand-rolling tobacco, can only be sold in cartons of ten packets. At current prices this would raise the cost of buying cigarettes in an instant from around £10 to around £100. The government estimates price elasticity for cigarettes to be -0.72 meaning that a 1% increase in price will result in a 0.7% reduction in consumption. This policy would have the potential to impact strongly on consumption, perhaps particularly on younger people in the process of developing the habit. In turn many thousands of premature deaths could be prevented.
Of course some of the benefits of this change would be undermined by the consumption of cigarettes and tobacco smuggled into the UK. Estimates of this are that 12% of cigarettes, and 56% of hand-rolling tobacco (ASH, 2005). So in tandem with this legislation we should re-double our efforts at UK borders to bear down on this illicit trade. New technology and some of the freedoms enabled by Brexit give us new opportunities to achieve this. As smuggled and counterfeit tobacco is disproportionately consumed by lower income smokers (ASH, 2005) to significantly reduce this supply will help redress some aspects of health inequality.
We have been consuming tobacco in these islands for 450 years. The damage wrought is incalculable. We’ve known for 65 years of the definitive link between smoking and lung cancer. People made ill by smoking deserve all the compassion, care and commitment to alleviate suffering that has been so movingly shown toward Covid patients in the last year. My policy is one more significant step in ending our relationship with tobacco, and the year-on-year suffering it creates.
2075-11