After failing to achieve anything as Prime Minister, Theresa May set a number of challenges for her successors once she had one foot out of the door. In June 2019, the demob-happy PM announced that the UK would be legally bound to “eradicate its net contribution to climate change by 2050”. The following month, just two days before she finally slung her hook, she announced that England would be “smoke-free” by 2030.
This came as a surprise to anyone who thought that England had gone “smoke-free” in 2007 when smoking was banned in all so-called public places under the “smoke-free legislation” and the public health minister, Caroline Flint, declared that England had gone “smoke-free”. But the goalposts have a tendency to be moved in “public health” and by 2019 the “smoke-free” ambition no longer involved places but people. Weirdly, however, not all people. Under the government’s definition, England would be officially “smoke-free” when the smoking rate fell to 5 per cent or below. No one knows what will happen when this target is reached. Perhaps the government will accept that 5 per cent of adults have the right to smoke tobacco and should be left alone to enjoy their highly taxed habit. Then again, perhaps not.
Theresa May gave “industry” an “ultimatum” to make “smoked tobacco obsolete by 2030, with smokers quitting or moving to reduced risk products like e-cigarettes”. This was already happening at pace. The smoking rate had fallen from 20 per cent to 14 per cent since vaping went mainstream in 2012. It seemed unlikely to fall to 5 per cent as early as 2030, but so long as smokers were given accurate information about the relative risks and so long as the government didn’t wreck the e-cigarette industry, a “smoke-free” England was within sight.
In 2024, the number of vapers exceeded the number of smokers for the first time and the smoking rate dropped to 10 per cent. Without any new anti-smoking legislation since the damp squib of plain packaging in 2016, England was suddenly on track to reach the 2030 target. Despite a tsunami of scare stories about e-cigarettes, smokers were making the switch. Regular smoking among school children had all but died out and the smoking rate among 18-24 year olds, traditionally the age group most likely to smoke, was just 8 per cent.
In Sweden, the smoking rate had dropped to 5.4 per cent, by far the lowest in Europe and tantalisingly close to the “smoke-free” target. The Swedes hadn’t taken to vaping with the same gusto as the British, but they had the smokeless tobacco product snus and this served the same purpose as a low-risk substitute for cigarettes. In the rest of the EU, where snus was banned and e-cigarettes were often subjected to taxes, flavour restrictions and indoor vaping bans, the smoking rate was 24 per cent.
It didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on. The British government’s relatively laissez-faire approach to vaping had paid off and all it had to do was stand back and watch. Instead, it decided that Theresa May’s target required more government. Rishi Sunak announced a ban on disposable vapes, Wes Streeting promised to come down on the vaping industry “like a tonne of bricks” and the Tobacco and Vapes Bill made its way through Parliament.
The most notorious — and risible — part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill is the generational ban on tobacco sales which will effectively raise the smoking age by a year every year. This will do nothing for people who have been smoking for decades and whose health is most at risk. But the Bill also gives unlimited “Henry VIII powers” to the Health Secretary to regulate e-cigarette flavours, packaging and advertising, as well as controlling where people can legally vape. The government has said that it plans to use these powers as soon as it gets them and since the Health Secretary is Wes “tonne of bricks” Streeting, it is unlikely to use them wisely.
This is where the Tobacco and Vapes Bill stops being merely stupid and illiberal and becomes counter-productive even on its own terms. There is strong evidence from other countries that bans on vape flavours, e-cigarette advertising and other anti-vaping policies lead to increased cigarette sales and higher smoking rates. Since cigarettes and e-cigarettes are direct substitutes for one another, this is hardly surprising. Vape taxes undoubtedly have the effect of boosting the smoking rate and yet a punitive tax on e-cigarettes will be introduced in October. All this is happening at a time when the black market in tobacco is exploding and the de facto price of a pack of cigarettes is five pounds.
Viewed objectively, the Tobacco and Vapes Bill looks like an almost deliberate attempt to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and yet it remains popular with “public health” academics for whom doing something is always better than doing nothing. Yesterday, a bunch of them published a study in the advocacy journal Tobacco Control which modelled the effects of the generational tobacco ban. They forecast that if all goes well with the incremental prohibition, it will take until 2049 for smoking prevalence among 12-30 year olds to drop to 5 per cent, although it will take another ten years for rates to reach this level among the “most deprived” and the overall smoking rate among these people — who will have never been allowed to buy tobacco legally — will still be above 2 per cent in the 2070s!
Remarkably, the authors portray this as a success, but only because they make the truly ludicrous assumption that if the Bill is not passed, the smoking rate among 12-30 year olds will rise for a while before remaining at 11 per cent for the next fifty years. Back in the real world, the smoking rate has fallen from 26 per cent to 8 per cent among 18-24 year olds since 2011 and from 9 per cent to 3 per cent among 11-15 year olds (and most of the latter are only occasional smokers). If this modelling is correct, it would represent a dramatic slowdown in the progress that has been made since vaping came on the scene.
And yet perhaps there is some truth in it. The generational ban will do little or nothing to reduce the smoking rate and everything else in the Bill pushes in a pro-cigarette direction. Hazel Cheeseman, Chief Executive of Action on Smoking and Health says that “this modelling shows it [the Tobacco and Vapes Bill] could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the nation’s health for the long term.” Indeed Hazel, but in which direction?
