Not Invented Here (1): obesity

This month I'll be writing a series of articles about Not Invented Here Syndrome - when institutions reject practical solutions because they weren't part of their plan. The first is about obesity and weight loss drugs.

 

The Department of Health and Social Care says that obesity costs the NHS ‘up to £6.5 billion a year’. The health secretary Wes Streeting has claimed that it costs the NHS £11 billion a year. When wider societal costs, including lost productivity, are included, Frontier Economics estimated that obesity cost Britain £58 billion in 2020, and when they made a further estimate to include the cost of people being overweight in 2023, this rose to £98 billion, of which £19.2 billion were direct costs to the NHS.

Obesity is routinely referred to as a ‘crisis’ in the UK and elsewhere. Fifteen million adults (28 per cent) have a body mass index of 30 or more and are therefore classified as obese. The number of obese Britons has been gradually growing for decades and none of the anti-obesity policies enacted so far, such as the sugar tax and traffic light labelling on food, has made any tangible difference. Some countries have gone further. Hungary, for example, has an extensive system of taxes on food that is high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS). Chile has had mandatory health warnings on HFSS food since 2016 and has banned the use of cartoon mascots such as Tony the Tiger. Both countries have seen obesity rates continue to rise.

Given how seriously public health campaigners take obesity as a health problem, you might think that they would be delighted to find something that makes people lose a great deal of weight in a short space of time. But you would be wrong. A new generation of pharmaceuticals that have been shown in randomised controlled trials to help people lose an average of 15 per cent to 20 per cent of their body weight have been given a cautious welcome at best by those who should be most excited by them.

 

Read the rest.

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Has vaping backfired? (No)

Has vaping backfired? That is the question asked by Sunday Times journalist Tom Calver yesterday. He claims that rising e-cigarette use has left Britain with more nicotine users than it did when the smoking ban was introduced in 2007 and that nearly 40 per cent of 16-24 year olds are “hooked” on nicotine. This, he says, “might just about be tolerable if cigarette smoking rates were quickly falling. But they are not.” He even claims that there are “some signs that the number of young cigarette smokers is ticking back up again”.

Read the rest at The Critic.

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Rachel Reeves' taxes on working people

 

Not entirely unpredictably, taxes and spending are set to go through the roof after Labour's first budget since 2010. Having promised not to tax working people, Rachel Reeves announced tax rises for smokers and drinkers, announced a new vape tax and increased the sugar tax. Details below from the Red Book.

 

Alcohol duty will rise in line with the RPI from February 2025 and it was implied that this would be an annual thing. Draft beer duty will be cut by 1.7%, which apparently amounts to a penny off a pint. I will be personally making sure that the IEA's local in Westminster has cut the price of a pint of Paulaner from £7.55 to £7.54. 

While the draft beer duty cut will be barely be felt by drinkers, the vape tax will cost vapers around £300 a year. And yet the beer duty cut will cost the government £100 million a year while the vape tax will only bring in £15 million. Is it really worth it?

 

My comment on behalf of the IEA:

 

"A wealth of economic evidence shows that taxing e-cigarettes leads to more people smoking. Taxing vape juice shows that the government is not serious about its 'smokefree' ambitions.  

 

“Reeves says that yet another 'one-off' tax hike on tobacco will dissuade vapers from switching back to smoking, but with 26% of the cigarette market already in the hands of organised crime, the legal price of cigarettes is irrelevant to a growing number of smokers. Tobacco duty revenue has fallen by £1.5 billion in the last two years and it will go on falling, despite the tax rate rising, because smokers feel no moral duty to buy legal cigarettes and give money to politicians who so obviously hold them in contempt.  

 

“Cutting draft beer relief so that a pint in a pub is 1p cheaper doesn't come close to compensating from this tax raid. Drink 600 pints and get one pint free? It is a cheap gimmick."

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The Guardian view on gambling

It looks like the Guardian has let its anti-gambling correspondent Rob Davies have a go at writing a leader.

 

The Guardian view on gambling: a public health approach is a good bet

The regulation of internet gambling was left out of the last government’s online harms bill. So far, Labour’s plans for the industry are opaque. But the industry’s rapid growth...

 

What growth? The industry only appears to have grown if you don't adjust for inflation. In 2014/15 (the first year for which we have comparable data), gambling spend in the UK was £13.5 billion. If this had kept pace with inflation, it would be £18.1 billion today. In fact, gambling spend last year was £15.1 billion. It has shrunk in real terms.

... coupled with growing concern about problem gambling in the UK and around the world, means ministers deserve to come under pressure if they don’t clarify their intentions soon. 

The sports minister Tracey Crouch resigned in 2018 when a pledge to cap the stakes on fixed-odds betting terminals was delayed. 

 

The idea that the government was delaying the cap was the last lie from the anti-FOBT people in a campaign full of lies. It was originally planned for April 2020 and was brought forward to October 2019. Crouch's dishonest stunt brought it forward by a further six months.

How did that cap on FOBTs go anyway? Weren't they the crack cocaine of gambling, responsible for hundreds of suicides a year? Shouldn't things be much better now they've disappeared? As far as I can see, the only tangible result has been the closure of lots of betting shops and the loss of thousands of jobs. As I predicted.

Six years on, proposals to cap the stakes on digital slot machines are up in the air, after last year’s white paper was shelved. Also on hold are the introduction of a statutory levy on businesses to pay for research and treatment, and the creation of an ombudsman.

 

It's that last bit that really concerns the pressure groups and the 'public health' quackademics. They were told there was a £50 million slush fund coming their way. They are getting impatient.

 

Arguably even more concerning is the lack of any clear direction on restricting gambling advertising, which has become ubiquitous in sport, and particularly football. Recent research showed that Premier League fans were bombarded with almost 30,000 advertisements on a single weekend, with half of clubs found to have promoted betting on webpages aimed at children.

 

The claim here is that fans of the Premier League saw an average of 30,000 gambling advertisements in a single weekend. Does that seem remotely plausible? The source of the claim is some 'research' by people at Bristol University who watched six televised football games in August, but instead of watching the football, they were looking for gambling 'messaging'. This included "static pitchside hoardings, electronic
pitchside hoardings (both full or part), clothing worn by supporters, the front of a player’s shirt, the sleeve
of a player’s shirt, integrated graphic, sponsorship lead-in, commercial advertisement break, interview
or press conference, stadium structure, and ‘other’ to capture anything else."

So not really advertisements, then. And far from being 'bombarded' by them, people would have seen them - if at all - in the corner of their eye. Every time a logo appeared somewhere on the screen, it was counted as a 'message'. And because they counted "the maximum number of logos per format that were visible during each individual camera shot", this added up to a very large number. They then added in coverage on TalkRadio, Sky Sports News and social media for good measure.

This is the kind of meaningless garbage academics want to spend millions of pounds on once they get their hands on the levy money.

In 2023 the Guardian banned all gambling advertising, because of the risks.

 

I'm sure that was a huge blow to the industry.

 

Meanwhile, the NHS has doubled the number of specialist clinics in England to 15.

 

That is a good thing. It will be interesting to see how busy they are. It's just a shame that taxpayers are paying for them now that the NHS has refused to use the industry's money.

 

Last week’s report from the Lancet medical journal grouped gambling with tobacco, alcohol and other “unhealthy commodity industries”, and argued convincingly that governments and regulators should strive for a common approach.

 

The Lancet report is a long document with remarkably little substance. 'Public health' academics want to get their hands of gambling, that much is clear, but they don't have much idea of what they're going to do with it when they do. Banning advertising is about their only concrete proposal. The other ideas that 'public health' chancers have come up with are demented and show their total ignorance of the industry and its customers.

 

Anti-gambling activists want gambling treated as a 'public health issue' because they think - correctly - that a 'public health approach' means incrementally banning things. But gambling is not a public health issue by any reasonable definition and there is nothing to be gained by having people who know nothing about it getting involved. 

 

This would include a recognition of corporate practices designed to influence both consumer behaviour and regulation – and a robust challenge to the industry’s preferred framing. This treats problem gambling, like other addictions and obesity, as the result of poor choices by individuals, rather than as the predictable result of an environment in which people are encouraged to adopt risky habits.

 

Problem gambling is a recognised psychological disorder and it cannot be dealt with unless it is understood as such. The 'public health' framing thinks it is all about tHe InDuStRy and that is why a 'public health approach' will never work. Paradoxically, treating problem gambling as a public health issue is antithetical to treating it as what it is: a (mental) health issue.

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Sin taxes and the Laffer Curve

It's the Budget tomorrow. Either Rachel Reeves has being engaging in some epic expectation management or if it is going to be the mother of all tax grabs. In expectation of the latter, every killjoy pressure group in the land has been lobbying for taxes on activities of which they disapprove. 

I wrote about this for The Spectator last week, but it is worth underlining how unwilling smokers and drinkers are to be squeezed any further. Between 2021/22 and 2023/24, the smoking rate fell by 10% but the number of legal cigarettes sold fell by 31%. The shortfall has obviously been taken up by the black market and the government is receiving much less tobacco duty revenue as a result.

UK tobacco duty revenue (HMRC)

2020/21: £9,964 million

2021/22: £10,278 million

2022/23: £10,004 million

2023/24: £8,804 million

 

From an all-time high of £10.3 billion two years ago, revenues have fallen by £1.5 billion in just two years. Dig deep, nonsmokers!

Alcohol duty revenues tell a similar story. They had already begun to decline by August 2023 when the government introduced a 'simplified' new alcohol duty system which led to some serious price hikes for some drinks. This came alongside a large rise in alcohol duty overall, which rose in line with the Retail Price Index. As with tobacco duty, alcohol duty was bringing in record amounts in 2021/22, but despite significantly higher taxes, revenues are now lower.

Wine duty revenue (HMRC)

2020/21: £4,659 million

2021/22: £4,734 million

2022/23: £4,391 million

2023/24: £4,611 million

Spirits duty duty revenue (HMRC)

2020/21: £4,115 million

2021/22: £4,401 million

2022/23: £4,136 million

2023/24: £4,137 million

 

Revenues from beer and cider duties have fallen too.

 

All these figures are in nominal terms. Adjusted for inflation, tobacco duty revenue has fallen by £3.6 billion (-29%) since 2021/22 and alcohol duty revenue has fallen by £1.9 billion (-13%). By raising taxes, the government has created a blackhole of £5.5 billion, helped close more pubs and pushed even more smokers to the illicit market. Way to go!

As for the idea of doubling gaming duty to 41%, as being pushed by the Social Market Foundation, it would wipe out much of the legal market by demanding companies hand over much more than they make in profit. That might be a feature rather than a bug as far as anti-gambling groups are concerned, but it is not what Rachel Reeves wants.

 

As I said to the Telegraph recently....

 

“If Rachel Reeves thinks there is easy money to be had by squeezing drinkers and smokers, she will learn the hard way that higher taxes do not always produce more revenue. 

“Tobacco duty revenue has fallen by £1.5bn in the last two years as smokers turn to the black market. Tax revenue from wine and spirits has fallen by hundreds of millions.

“Britain is not a low tax country with plenty of money to spare. We have some of the highest taxes on alcohol and tobacco in Europe and people have had enough.”

 

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Farewell, disposable vapes

Part of me wishes that disposable vapes had never been invented. Until they arrived, it seemed like the battle for tobacco harm reduction in Britain had been won. The kind of people who want to ban everything wanted to ban e-cigarettes, but most people could see that they were a relatively harmless substitute for cigarettes and were helping to drive down smoking rates.

Then along came the Elf bars and Geek bars and the mood began to sour. Whether it was because of the price or the colours or because it was simply a fad, they became somewhat popular with teenagers, just as Juul had become popular with high school students in the USA a few years earlier.

 

Read the rest at the Spectator.

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Will the tobacco turf wars come to Britain?

The old adage that there is no smoke without fire has taken on a sinister meaning in Australia after a series of arson attacks on tobacconists. The word “series” barely does it justice. “Endless succession” is closer to the mark. When a shop selling illegal tobacco was firebombed in Adelaide last Tuesday, it was the 16th such incident in South Australia and the 130th nationwide since the “tobacco turf wars” began last year. It was followed by another firebombing in Adelaide on Saturday, an arson attack on a gym in Melbourne on Sunday, two tobacconists set ablaze in Melbourne on Tuesday and a smoke shop in New South Wales being ram-raided and blown up yesterday. 

With drive-by shootings and murders in broad daylight, Australia’s black market in tobacco and vapes should be a cautionary tale, but it has received little attention in the Northern hemisphere. The root of the problem is obvious. Australia has the highest tobacco taxes in the world and has banned e-cigarettes entirely. The market for both products is now largely in the hands of criminal gangs who encourage shopkeepers to sell their products by telling them to “earn or burn”. 

One of the more peculiar elements of “public health” ideology is the belief that taxes and regulation do not fuel the illicit trade, but when your nightly news bulletins start to resemble something from Judge Dredd, that becomes difficult to sustain. Even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which makes the BBC look like GB News, has had to acknowledge that “excessively high” cigarette taxes are responsible for the self-described “world leader in tobacco control” becoming a basket case.

 

Read the rest at The Critic.

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