Tim Almond

Smoking ban costs will be £100m over budget

The Department of Health estimated that the bill for the ban, that comes into force in a month’s time, would run to £1.6 billion.

While this takes into account paying for advertising, falling tobacco duty and hiring extra staff to police the ban, the Government has said it will be offset by the benefits to the NHS as smoking diseases fall.

I’d like to see their numbers on that. The ones that I read from 1998 are:-

Smoking costs the NHS between £1.4bn and £1.7bn a year
The UK Government should raise £8.9bn from tobacco duty in 1998/99

 Which suggests that on average, a smoker pays about 6 times for their NHS treatment.

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Tags: Politics, Health //