Remember my posts about Stoptober 2015?

In February it was reported that the annual quit smoking campaign organised by Public Health England gave £195,000 of public money to four comedians – Al Murray, Bill Bailey, Rhod Gilbert and Shappi Khorsandi – in the hope it would encourage smokers to kick the habit.

This was the second time Murray had been recruited to promote Stoptober. In 2014 he was joined by another "team of British jokers", Paddy McGuinness, Andi Osho and Simon Brodkin.

Well, as I had reported last year, fewer people joined the Stoptober smoking challenge in 2015 than the previous year. In fact, numbers fell by a whopping 15 per cent.

Desperate to reverse this downward trend, Duncan Selbie, CEO of Public Health England, today announced that PHE will spend £1m on advertising - with more than half going to Facebook - to promote this year's campaign.

One million pounds! At least there's no sign of Murray and his fellow comedians laughing all the way to the bank, but it's early days.

Anyway, here's what I had to say in a press release issued by Forest this morning:

"This is a waste of taxpayer's money. Quit smoking campaigns like Stoptober are increasingly ineffective because smokers are fed up being nagged and cajoled by government and other publicly-funded bodies.

"Last year the number of people joining Stoptober fell by 15 per cent compared to 2014. This happened despite the fact that Public Health England paid a total of £195,000 to four high profile comedians to support the campaign.

"Having failed with that initiative PHE is now spending even more money to promote the campaign on Facebook. It's crazy."

"The government should review its quit smoking strategy because it's clear that stop smoking services and campaigns like Stoptober are producing diminishing returns.

"At a time when resources are very tight we can ill afford public money to be spent like this."

You can read the full press release here – Stoptober: Facebook ads a "waste of public money".

Update: It's been reported on Twitter that this year's Stoptober budget has been slashed from £5m to £1m. So that's good news.