General Introduction
Tobacco smoking is responsible for more preventable cases of cancer than any other single cause. Lung cancer remains the biggest cancer killer in the UK, claiming nearly 35,000 lives each year and 72% of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking. Smoking is a cause of many other types of cancer as well, and accounts for half of all health inequality in the UK.[i]
1. Key legislation
The 2006 Health Act made smoking in enclosed public spaces illegal and was seminal legislation in curbing passive smoking.[ii] Legislation which has followed this, including the Children and Families Act 2014 has standardised tobacco packaging and prohibited smoking in vehicles when children are present.[iii]
The Smoking and Vapes Bill, currently making its way through Parliament, aims to:
- Introduce a generational ban on the sale of tobacco, by making it an offence to sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009.
- Provide powers to extend smoke-free restrictions to a wider range of locations, and to include heated tobacco products in these restrictions.
- Provide powers to ban advertising and sponsorship of vaping products and to regulate these products, including contents, flavour, and packaging.
We strongly support the Smoking and Vapes Bill. The most important thing we can do to prevent cancer caused by smoking tobacco is to stop people from becoming addicted to tobacco in the first place.
2. Taxation and Price Regulation
Taxes on tobacco raises some £12 billion a year and represent around 80% of the price of a pack of cigarettes.[iv] Raising tobacco duties has proved effective in encouraging smokers to reduce and halt their consumption, but these taxes fall almost entirely on consumers of tobacco, while the tobacco industry continues to make extraordinary profits on the back of a products which kill those who use them and place a major burden on the public purse.
We believe the Treasury should go further and introduce a “polluter pays” levy on tobacco company profits in order to, among other things, fund comprehensive smoking cessation programmes.
3. Marketing and Availability
Cigarettes are widely available on the high street, from corner shops – where they form a high percentage of sales – and from supermarkets. By law, cigarettes must be behind the counter and not on show, though this can have the effect of making it harder to see where cigarettes are and aren’t being sold.
Some supermarkets, such as Aldi, refuse to sell tobacco on principle, but others, such as Tesco and Waitrose, make tobacco readily available, despite this contradicting the stated ethos of their companies. For instance, Tesco’s company values include a commitment to “reduce our environmental impact and support a healthier way of living.”[v]
See our campaign page about Tobacco and Supermarkets.
We support the move in the Tobacco and Vapes Bill to introduce a licensing scheme for all those selling tobacco products.
We also believe that greater action should be taken to persuade the large supermarkets, for whom smoking is contrary to their stated ethics, to cease selling all tobacco products.
4. Vaping and E-Cigarettes
E-cigarettes or vapes are proven to be more effective for smoking cessation than traditional forms of nicotine replacement therapy.[vi] Vaping is much less dangerous than smoking and does not carry the same risks of passive smoking.[vii] Vaping can therefore be used as both a harm reduction tool and a smoking cessation aid, when used with professional support.
However, vaping is not entirely free of health risks and the longer-term effects of vaping are not fully understood. For these reasons, a tougher regulatory response to vaping is now being widely adopted. This is especially the case in respect of children and young people and a desire to reduce the risk of them being tempted into vaping and tobacco addiction. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill (see above) will introduce a much tougher regulatory approach to vaping in the UK.
Our view of vaping is that those who already smoke should be encouraged to use vapes to reduce the risks to their health and to help them quit. But those who do not smoke should be discouraged from taking-up vaping.
5. The National Health Service
NHS statistics have suggested that around over 400,000 hospital admissions per year are directly attributable to smoking, of which 19% are attributable to cancer.[viii] The Khan Review: Making smoking obsolete in 2022 stated that smoking costs the NHS £2.4 billion each year and identified a critical role for the NHS in reducing smoking, stating that “prevention must become part of the NHS’s DNA.”[ix] We strongly agree.
The Khan Review made a series of recommendations as to the how the NHS can integrate smoking cessation support across its services. The forthcoming National Cancer Plan should make sure that the Khan Review’s recommendations are fully implemented and that prevention and smoking cessation work is fully embedded in every part of the NHS.
6. Local Government and Smoking Cessation Services.
Responsibility for smoking cessation services has sat with Local Government since the Health and Social Care Act 2012. Between 2013 and 2023 smoking among adults in England reduced from 18.4% to 11.6%, despite relatively low levels of funding for smoking cessation. Recent evidence has suggested that falls in smoking rates may have levelled off since the Covid-19 pandemic and some parts of England may even have seen increases.[x]
We believe that local government should be provided with additional and ring-fenced funding to strengthen their smoking cessation services in order to continue the decline in smoking rates.
This could be fully funded by a polluter pays levy on tobacco company profits (see above) allowing local authorities to focus more intensively on those ‘hardest to reach’.
[i] Department for Health (2017), Towards a Smokefree Generation: A Tobacco Control Plan for England
[iii] The Children and Families Act 2014
[iv] ASH (2017), The Economics of Tobacco
[v] Tesco, Core Purpose and Values
[vi] University of Oxford (2022), E-cigarettes are more effective than nicotine-replacement therapy in helping smokers quit
[vii] Cancer Research UK (2023), Is vaping harmful?
[viii] NHS Digital (2024), Statistics on Public Health, England 2023
[ix] Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (2022), The Khan review: making smoking obsolete
[x] The Guardian (2025), Smoking rates in parts of England rise for first time since 2006, study shows