Action man
Saturday, March 12, 2022 at 10:22 Earlier this week I invited readers to contribute to an ‘independent’ review on tobacco control.
Many of you have subsequently done so and I am grateful for your response.
The review was announced last month by the Department of Health and Social Care and the man appointed to conduct it was Javed Khan, a former chief executive of the children’s charity Barnardo’s.
The announcement was made on February 4 and two weeks later (February 18) Khan tweeted:
CALL OUT: I want to hear your views and what we can do to support current smokers to quit, and to stop people taking up smoking.
Ten days or so later he tweeted:
Very productive week on the #tobaccoindependentreview. Several roundtable discussions with parliamentarians, devolved administrations, academics, civil society, directors of public health & clinicians. The scale of the problem is enormous, but the solutions are within arm’s reach.
This week, as well encouraging friends of Forest (and readers of this blog) to respond to the review, I wrote to the DHSC to ask what the closing date is because there was nothing in the original DHSC announcement, the ‘terms of reference’ published this week, or any of Khan’s tweets to indicate when it was.
Wearing my Forest hat I also requested a meeting with Khan to discuss our concerns about the ‘smoke free 2030’ target and the threat of further tobacco control measures.
To be fair the DHSC responded very quickly but their reply was a bit odd. Ignoring my request for a meeting with Javed Khan, it read:
Thank you for your email. The call for submissions that Mr Khan tweeted is not necessarily a formal government consultation, and as such does not have a formal closing date. We are currently a little over half way through our 12 week review. If you would like for your views to be considered, I would advise sending them in the next 2-3 weeks to give us time to properly consider where they might fit into the report.
Note the phrase ‘not necessarily a formal government consultation’. How weird is that? It either is or it isn’t.
I rather assumed that it wasn’t (the clue is in the description, an ‘independent review’) but it seems strange that the DHSC is unsure.
This is pure conjecture but my guess is that the Secretary of State for Health Sajid Javed announced it on a whim without fully consulting his colleagues at the DHSC who are therefore slightly in the dark, but I may be wrong.
Either way you would think there would be a formal closing date for responses.
Intriguingly The Times today reports that Javed Khan - who they call the ‘new anti-smoking tsar’ - wants even tougher action if the Government is to meet its ‘smoke free’ target.
This includes raising the age of sale of tobacco to “19, 20, 21, or even 25”. The latter is highly unlikely but The Times naturally picked it up and ran with it (‘Under-25s could be banned from buying cigarettes’).
More important, perhaps, why is the head of an ‘independent’ review talking to the media and effectively lobbying government for tough action while the review is still ongoing?
Surely Khan has a duty to remain fair and impartial, at least while the review is being conducted?
Instead it seems that he has already made his mind up on the need for a radical anti-smoking programme that could hit legitimate consumers (and retailers) hard.
Nevertheless I would still urge you to email him at this address:
TobaccoIndependentReview@dhsc.gov.uk
It can’t do any harm to inform him on the strength your opinions.
PS. Click on the link below for the review’s ‘terms of reference’. Curiously, although they read like a job spec for a job application, they were only published on March 9, a full calendar month after the DHSC announced the review and three weeks after Javed Khan started tweeting about it.
Go figure.
Update: Javed Khan has tweeted a link to The Times’ report. Note who has ‘liked’ it.
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