The Government's long-awaited response to 'The Khan review: making smoking obsolete' will finally be announced on Tuesday.
However it won't be the Secretary of State for Health Steve Barclay who responds to the report (which was commissioned by one of his predecessors, Sajid Javid) but a junior minister, Neil O’Brien.
The minister for primary care and public health will give the Government's response at Policy Exchange, the right wing think tank he led before he became an MP.
It follows a recent Westminster Hall debate during which O'Brien reassured impatient tobacco control campaigners by saying:
"While I can’t divulge the specifics of the proposals at this time, I can assure you that they are grounded in the best evidence of reducing tobacco use and its associated harms.”
'Achieving Smokefree 2030: Cutting Smoking and Stopping Kids Vaping' will be chaired by Dr Sean Phillips, head of health and social care at Policy Exchange.
Writing in November I noted that when O'Brien was director of Policy Exchange, the think tank published a report, ‘Cough Up: Balancing tobacco income and costs in society’.
Published in March 2010, it is summarised on the Policy Exchange website as follows:
Smoking is the single, largest preventable cause of serious ill health and kills tens of thousands of people in England every year. It is a popular myth that smoking is a net contributor to the economy – our research finds that every single cigarette smoked costs the country 6.5 pence. In order to balance income and costs, tobacco duty should be progressively increased until the full societal cost of smoking is met through taxation.
In an email to supporters, O’Brien also wrote:
Whilst tax on tobacco contributes £10 billion annually to the Treasury coffers, the true costs to society from smoking are far higher, at £13.74 billion, think thank Policy Exchange’s latest report finds. This cost is made up of the cost of treating smokers on the NHS (£2.7 billion) but also the loss in productivity from smoking breaks (£2.9 billion) and increased absenteeism (£2.5 billion); the cost of cleaning up cigarette butts (£342 million); the cost of fires (£507 million), and also the loss in economic output from the deaths of smokers (£4.1 billion) and passive smokers (£713 million).
The report, Cough Up, calculates that of this £13.74 billion, cigarettes – which comprise 93.3% of the tobacco market - cost us £12.82 billion a year. Currently, a pack of cigarettes costs just £6.13. But this would need to be increased to at least £7.42 for cigarettes to be revenue neutral to society and their true cost reflected by their price.
None of this fills me with confidence that O'Brien or his boss Steve Barclay (who voted AGAINST separate smoking rooms in pubs and clubs, and FOR plain packaging of tobacco) will stand up to the prohibitionists who want to forcibly make smoking history by 2030, but we'll see.
Word has it that the Treasury has been pushing back against proposals for a tobacco levy and raising tobacco duty by a further 30 per cent, but my fear is that the Government will want a headline-grabbing policy to appease tobacco control campaigners, and raising the age of sale to 21 might be the sacrificial lamb they are willing to offer.
There are two ways to listen to O'Brien's speech on Tuesday – online or in person. I've registered to attend in person but no word (yet) on whether my application has been approved.
Readers may recall that my application to attend the launch of the Khan review last year was rejected so I've also registered to watch the speech online, just in case.
Watch this space.