Forest's response to the Budget (watch this space)

As a child I used to hate the Budget.

In the days of two-channel television (we didn't have BBC2 until 1970 so it was a choice between BBC1 or ITV and we rarely watched ITV) I'd get home from school to find that all the children's programmes had been replaced by Robin Day interviewing one deadly dull politician after another while a series of equally boring 'experts' commented on what had just happened.

At least I had a choice of watching that or doing something more interesting. Today I have no choice because it's my job to watch the Chancellor's statement and respond to the latest hike in tobacco duty so I'll be sitting at my computer taking notes.

I think it was Gordon Brown who first introduced the tobacco escalator – in 2002, if I remember. Or maybe that was the year he dropped it because the Government was losing too much revenue (around £3bn a year) to the black market.

It was a Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne, who reintroduced the escalator in 2010 and since then UK tobacco duty has been progressively hiked to the current, punitive, levels, matched only by Ireland.

In recent years, because of the metronomic regularity of the annual escalator, the media has slightly lost interest in the subject.

A couple of years ago the tobacco duty hike wasn't even mentioned in the Chancellor's statement to the House and we had to scrabble around to read the small print when the relevant documents were posted online by the Treasury later that afternoon.

Things could be very different today because, after a decade of low inflation, the current Retail Price Index (the flawed measure used to calculate inflation for the purpose of tobacco duty) is around 13 per cent.

Add another two per cent and you have an increase of 15 per cent, which would mean an average pack of cigarettes could rise by £1.15, and a 30g pouch of tobacco by £2, according to some reports.

That would be almost unprecedented, hence the headline of Forest's draft press release:

CHANCELLOR ACCUSED OF BEING "HEARTLESS AND CRUEL" – "THE NASTY PARTY IS BACK" SAY CAMPAIGNERS

Jeremy Hunt may surprise us of course so, just in case, we have drafted a second press release that reads:

CAMPAIGNERS WELCOME CHANCELLOR'S "COMMON SENSE AND COMPASSION"

Watch this space to see which version we send out!

Update: "We will uprate tobacco duty," says Hunt. No mention of by how much, though. Details should be posted online later.

Update: 'Tobacco duties – Duty rates on all tobacco products will increase by RPI + 2%. The rate on hand-rolling tobacco will increase by RPI + 6% and the minimum excise tax will increase by RPI +3% this year. These changes will take effect from 6pm on 15 March 2023.' Spring Budget 2023, page 83.

Note: I've been told that the increases are based on an RPI (Retail Price Index) of 10.1% (not 12.7%, the figure that is being more widely reported) plus escalators, so the duty on cigarettes will go up by 12.1%, although this has still be confirmed.

Interestingly, though, inflation is forecast to come down to 2.9% by the end of the year so by December smokers will be paying duty that may be 11% (not 2%) higher than the rate of inflation.

I think that's right.