Smoking costs UK economy £50bn a year says vaping industry, quoting ASH

While The Times has been busy publishing a series of attacks on Big Tobacco and vaping, I was amused to see the vaping industry parrot ASH concerning the cost of smoking to the economy.

According to a statement by the UKVIA on LinkedIn:

Smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year. Coupled with the emotional cost to the 76,000 families who lose a loved one every year, the public health role of vapes, proven as the most effective way for smokers to quit, is increasingly critical.

The £50bn figure comes from a press release issued by ASH on December 6, the day the consultation on smoking and vaping legislation closed.

According to ASH:

Smoking costs England £49.2 billion each year in lost productivity and service costs, plus an additional £25.9 billion lost quality adjusted life years due to premature death from smoking.

The claim got very little coverage so kudos to the UKVIA for spreading the word. (I’m kidding. You’d have to be extremely gullible to believe such rubbish, so let’s put it down to self-interest.)

Contemplating those figures does however make me nostalgic for the days when treating smoking-related diseases was said to cost the NHS a mere £800,000 a year.

That sum later jumped to £1.5bn, then £2.5bn, before peaking at £2.7bn. Today ASH says it’s £2.2bn, although no-one really knows because it’s all based on estimates and calculations, and blaming smoking ignores the fact that most ‘smoking-related’ diseases are multifactorial.

So how did we get from there to the figure of £50bn?

You can probably trace it back to the fact that whenever ASH raised the cost of smoking to the NHS, opponents were able to point out that smokers actually contributed £10bn to the economy (£12bn if you included VAT) through tobacco duty so, economically at least, they were a net benefit.

And that’s how the argument played out for many years. It got to the stage where I was delighted if the subject was raised in interviews because we always won that particular argument. The receipts were clear and on our side.

To combat this, ASH eventually moved the goalposts and argued that the true cost of smoking to the country was, in fact, £12bn a year.

But it didn’t end there.

Despite falling smoking rates, in January 2022 it was announced that the cost of smoking to the economy had risen by £5bn to £17bn.

This year we hit peak absurdity when a report claimed that the total cost of smoking to the UK economy in 2022 was just over £173 billion!!

As I wrote here (February 10):

This absurdly inflated figure is broken down as follows:

1. Productivity costs. These total just under £31 billion. The largest single component is reduced output due to expenditure on tobacco products compared to other goods and services, amounting to just under £14 billion. Reduced employment for smokers compared to non-smokers, and reduced earnings for working smokers compared to non-smokers, both account for between £7 billion and £8 billion of reduced productivity.

2. Service costs. These total just over £18.6 billion. The additional cost of informal care in the social sector is the largest single component of service costs at just over £9 billion, followed by the cost of additional unmet need for social care services at just over £5.7 billion, and the cost of smoking to the NHS at £2.2 billion.

3. Cost of early deaths from smoking. This is the largest single component of costs at just under £124 billion.

Curiously, the link to the report on the ASH website no longer works, so we are left with the most recent claim that ‘smoking now costs the UK economy £50bn a year’.

Which is it? £14bn, £17bn, £50bn, or £173bn?

Or none of the above?

I’m confused, but as the former chairman of Forest, the late Lord Harris of High Cross, once wrote:

If laymen dare to question any of these guesstimates and projections, the sophisticated statisticians take refuge behind their computers which have been heavily programmed to incorporate a variety of elaborate assumptions and statistical techniques.

And since researchers have discovered that the bigger the reported risk the better the chance of attracting funding and getting their results published (known in the trade as ‘publication bias’), they have exerted much ingenuity in what is known as ‘data dredging’ – that is, torturing the statistics until they confess!

The hilarious thing is not that the UKVIA has fallen for this claptrap (I suspect they know it’s nonsense) but they must think there’s some benefit in recycling it.

Either way, I fear it will end in tears.

How soon, for example, before the cost of vaping to society is being similarly assessed and exaggerated by ASH and other nicotine control groups? (You could say the process has started already, albeit the current focus is on schools, not society at large.)

Cherry-picking figures that play to the Government’s anti-smoking agenda is going to look pretty foolish when those same sources start calculating the alleged cost of vaping, as they undoubtedly will, sooner or later.

Meanwhile it was reported by The Times this week that the All Party Parliamentary Group for Vaping, formerly the APPG for E-Cigarettes, has apparently closed down after chairman Mark Pawsey decided he was unable to commit any further time to the role, and no-one else wanted to do it.

That’s the spirit!

Comments

[Pat Nurse]

It is a myth that vaping is healthier than smoking and only those with vested interests refuse to acknowledge it. Maybe if it was better regulated without rogue vapes being sold to anyone that wants them on the internet, for example, there might be a standard that can be said to be healthier.

Vaping liquid often includes vegetable oil, for example, and say what you like but no way is it healthy to inhale that into your lungs. Personally, I've tried vaping and find it makes me cough far worse than moderate smoking and the flavours are sweet, sickly and leave a vile taste in the mouth.

The best that can be said is that it saves money due to the unfair punitive cost of tobacco but rather than swap one harmful activity for one that could cause greater harm, I decided to save money by smoking much less and therefore enjoying tobacco much more.

If vaping really was so much better for people who smoke then it would sell on its own merit instead of just being a cheaper alternative or used as a weapon to beat smokers with.

Meanwhile, no doubt any alleged cost to society from vaping will just be blamed on smoking.

The vaping industry has a nice little cover to keep hiding the harms of vaping behind.