Sunak’s smoking ban plan: A sin tax that’s certain to turn to ashes?

Rishi Sunak wants to gradually outlaw the sale of cigarettes in the UK. Sean O’Grady looks at why the prime minister is throwing his weight behind such a flagrantly un-Conservative policy – and asks if it’s destined to crash and burn

Under the proposal, any child now 14 or under will never be able to legally purchase tobacco (PA)

One of the more eye-catching initiatives to emerge from prime minister Rishi Sunak’s speech to the Conservative Party conference was the proposal to gradually raise the minimum age for purchasing cigarettes and other tobacco products by one year each year (the current threshold is 18 years of age). Thus, any child now 14 or under will never be able to legally purchase tobacco. It’s a policy that was recently introduced in New Zealand. The idea has been given a mostly warm welcome, but some wonder where such an approach might lead.

Why has the prime minister done this?

He agrees that as a Conservative it feels wrong to control things, but he makes a special case for tobacco because people get addicted to it so young, find it so hard to give up, and because there is no safe level of smoking, unlike, say, obesity-inducing fat or sugar in a balanced diet.

Mainly it’s on public health grounds, because smoking kills 64,000 people a year and significantly increases the risk of strokes, heart disease, dementia and stillbirth.

“When we raised the smoking age to 18, smoking prevalence dropped by 30 per cent in that age group,” said Mr Sunak. “When the US raised the age to 21, the smoking rate dropped by 39 per cent in that age group.”

What could go wrong?

Evasion, as ever; and the fact that one day, say, a 40-year-old won’t be able to buy tobacco while a 41-year-old can. Policing that might be tricky.

Won’t people just vape instead, as they are doing already?

Sunak has thought of that, but perhaps not quite hard enough, because the policy is far more vague: “So we’ll also bring forward measures to restrict the availability of vapes to our children. Looking at flavours, packaging, point-of-sale displays and disposable vapes.”

It’s fair to say that vaping is safer than smoking, but the problem now is that young people in particular are taking it up under the illusion that it’s completely harmless.

What will the Treasury do about the lost tax revenue?

It will take place over such a long period of time that it will be almost imperceptible. The total eventual loss of tax revenue of £12bn a year will be more or less balanced by the savings to the NHS in relation to the treatment of smoking-related illnesses.

On the other hand, smokers live shorter lives, which reduces the demands they make on the welfare state, including the old age pension. That’s a bit of a macabre approach, though, and misses the point about human suffering and loss.

Does this mean there’ll be a meat tax?

Unlikely anyway, given that the bogus scare story about scrapping plans for a meat tax formed a part of Sunak’s net zero U-turn a couple of weeks ago. An accompanying graphic stated that “taxes on eating meat” were one of the “heavy-handed measures” the government was “stopping”. There’s no evidence of any government department, body or advisory agency making any such proposal. Indeed, when Boris Johnson was in No 10 and a similar story blew up, his spokesperson said: “We will not be imposing a meat tax on the Great British banger or anything else.”

All Sunak could later claim was that a “range of different things have been proposed by lots of different people”. He cited a report by the independent Climate Change Committee which had suggested reducing meat consumption because it is so inefficient and generates greenhouse gases – but not taxation as such. One “nudge unit” document suggested it as an idea in 2021, but there is no evidence of the government ever having pursued the policy in any form.

Still, none of that stopped Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, from declaring: “It’s no wonder that Labour seems so relaxed about taxing meat” – a false claim she embarrassed herself with.

Isn’t this a bit ‘nanny state’?

Yes, but “sin taxes” have a long and honourable history in terms of raising useful sums for public services and helping to reduce the harms caused by the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and sugar in foodstuffs, all of which are currently subject to taxes, duties and levies in the UK. The industry levy on sugary drinks is thought to have been successful, especially in encouraging food manufacturers to “reformulate” their products.

The sugar tax arose from the old Downing Street “nudge unit”, which was given the remit of using small sums of public money and modest taxes to trigger much larger changes in patterns of behaviour – the opposite of coercion. Such taxes generally enjoy wide public support.

Nonetheless, Liz Truss, who has a libertarian attitude to life, has said she will vote against Sunak’s policy.