Twice as many people buying illegal tobacco since 2023

From The Independent…

Sales of illegal cigarettes soar as cost of living crisis bites

The proportion of smokers purchasing cheap cigarettes from illicit sources has almost doubled since 2023, according to new analysis. This significant increase is believed to reflect the rising cost of living that has impacted households in recent years, researchers suggest.

Tsk! I wonder which tobacco industry front group is behind this baseless scaremongering?

The study, spearheaded by UCL and funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK), examined survey responses from 9,996 individuals aged 16 and over who identified as current smokers.

Oh.

The study is here and it does indeed find that the number of smokers buying tobacco from the black market doubled from 12.2% to 23.1% between mid-2023 and 2025. Since people are reluctant to admit to engaging in criminal activity, we can safely assume that both of these figures are underestimates. Among those aged 16-17, the figure was 32%, which doesn’t bode well for the success of the generational tobacco ban.

Moreover, 32.8% of smokers are buying tobacco abroad, up from 8% in October 2020 (when there wasn’t as much foreign travel, to be fair).

The massive rise in the the black market for tobacco since 2021 has been obvious to some of us for quite a while. As I said on TV yesterday, we don’t need this study to know that the black market has got out of control, but now that some ‘public health’ researchers are saying so in a study published by Cancer Research UK, the mainstream media have to take it seriously.

With the generational tobacco ban starting in January 2027, the last thing the anti-smoking lobby wants is for the government to worry about the illicit trade. Both CRUK and ASH have responded to the study by saying that a doubling in the number of black market customers doesn’t necessarily mean that the black market has grown. Maybe they’re just buying half as much!

Hazel Cheeseman, ASH’s Comical Ali, said:

“While the findings do not necessarily indicate a major expansion of the illicit market, they suggest there is a need to continue monitoring trends closely and maintain efforts to prevent illegal tobacco sales.”

Dr Ian Walker, executive director of policy and information at CRUK, said:

“While this research doesn’t signal that the illicit tobacco market has grown, it’s concerning that amongst the declining proportion of people who smoke, an increasing number of people are purchasing tobacco from illegal sources.

This was echoed by one of the authors of the study, Jamie Brown, who said:

“While our findings suggest a growing proportion of smokers are purchasing some or all of their tobacco from illicit sources, this does not necessarily mean the illicit market itself has become much larger.”

This is a blatant cope. Of course the black market has got larger! Legal sales have more than halved since 2021 and you can buy a pack of cigarettes for £5 anywhere.

As for this being a response to the ‘cost of living’, let’s be clear about why this particular cost of living is so high. Since 2020, the minimum excise on a pack of cigarettes has gone from £5.88 to £9.44 and will to rise to £10.38 in October. With VAT added on, that’s a rise from £7.06 to £12.45 before the retailer and manufacturer make a penny.

The tax on a 50g pack of rolling tobacco has gone from £14.08 to £30.23 in the same period and will soon be £34.46.

The government has been asking for trouble and now it has got it. And this is before they start banning 800,000 people from buying tobacco each year every year.

Lead author Sarah Jackson said:

“With the Smokefree Generation policy being introduced, it is hoped that access to tobacco will become more difficult for teenagers as the age of sale gradually rises.”

You can hope all you like, but it’s not going to happen. As I’ve said before, tax rises will make the generational tobacco ban irrelevant within a few years because it will be so normal to buy cigarettes illegally that age restrictions might as well not exist.

 

Cross-posted from my Substack. 

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Alcohol cancer warnings - why?

Interesting article in The Drinks Business about alcohol cancer labels...

 

“Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s tobacco control was consuming enormous public health resources,” says Dr Creina Stockley, co-director of the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research. But that began to change once smoking was banned in enclosed public spaces, following Ireland’s lead in 2004. Before long there were plenty of scientists, lobbyists and NGOs in need of a new purpose in life.

The direction of travel was obvious. As Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s then chief medical officer, told the Daily Telegraph under a headline, ‘Fat Binge Drinkers Beware’, in 2007: “Tobacco is a good example of a health problem that is in hand, but when we turn to obesity and alcohol misuse, those are not yet anywhere under control.”

 

My question about alcohol health warnings has always been why, if you think people are uninformed about the risks, would you focus on a relatively small number of mostly rare cancers when liver disease is by far the biggest cause of alcohol-related mortality?

 

The answer is that they are copying the anti-smoking blueprint.

 

“If you do your research most of the guys now doing alcohol, came from tobacco, and that’s in every country,” says Stockley. Having run what has been called ‘one of the most successful social change campaigns’ against smoking, it was only natural to apply the same tactics to drink given the links to cancer. Clearly part of that is to insist on cancer labels.

 

Dr Stockley gets it.

 

“If the goal is informed consumer choice, modest labels may be sufficient,” says Dr Stockley. “If the goal is measurable reductions in drinking, the historical trajectory of tobacco control suggests continual pressure for larger, more prominent, and potentially graphic warnings. I consider that distinction may become a central debate in alcohol policy over the next decade.” 

 

Me too. If we've learned anything from tobacco control is that it goes on forever, or until the product is banned entirely. 

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How to get things banned

As I have argued before, the anti-smoking lobby created a playbook which has become the Bible of the anti-obesity, anti-alcohol and anti-gambling lobbies. Yesterday’s announcement follows that playbook to the letter. If you have something you would like to ban, here are some of the boxes to tick.

1. Flatter politicians 

Most parliamentarians are powerless pygmies with delusions of grandeur. Having no answers to the big problems facing the country, they indulge themselves in the displacement politics of petty prohibition. They want to be seen as heroic, so be sure to flatter them by portraying the policy you are proposing as “bold” and “brave”. When the Health Committee proposed a sugar tax in 2015, it subtitled its report “Brave and Bold Action”. Jamie Oliver urged ministers to be “big and bold”. This week’s report from the Health and Social Care Committee uses the words “bold” or “bolder” six times. The first line of the press release calls for “a new, bold approach”. The committee’s chair, Layla Moran, said: “We ask this government to be bold, not to fudge and delay food restrictions.”

In truth, there is nothing courageous about taking on food companies that have shown no interest in standing up for themselves, let alone individual kebab shop owners who are just trying to make a living, but that is the beauty of it. MPs want to feel brave but don’t want to take risks. You have just the policies for them.

 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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Ultra-processed documentary

I was invited to provide some balance to a short documentary on ultra-processed food recently. The programme was broadcast by Al Jazeera on Saturday and you can watch it below. 

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End the licence fee to save the BBC

There is a new element to the BBC’s World Cup coverage this year. At some point in every match, the commentator will earnestly remind viewers that they need a TV licence to watch the game. It is a well targeted message, though almost certainly ineffective. If there is one time when the millions of people who claim to never watch the BBC are watching the BBC, it is during the World Cup.

 The BBC’s doom loop is gathering pace. The trickle of non-payment of the licence fee is becoming a flood. Prosecutions for non-payment have plummeted in recent years and the threat of licence fee “evasion” being decriminalised hangs over the corporation. As revenue declines, budgets are cut and services are cancelled. Radio 4’s long wave broadcasts ended over the weekend and the BBC is looking for £500 million of savings by ending shows like The World Tonight and Money Box Live.

 

The solution? Switch to a Netflix model and go global. 

Read the rest at The Critic. 

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HMRC is still downplaying the illicit trade

HMRC put the latest tobacco tax gap estimates out on Tuesday. As with the previous few years, they defy both belief and mathematics. Only 14% of tobacco is illicit, they claim, and illicit hand-rolling tobacco is at an all time low! 

 

Simple maths shows that HMRC’s figures cannot possibly be accurate. Converting kilograms of rolling tobacco into sticks, the equivalent of 36.6 billion cigarettes were sold legally in the UK in 2022. If this declined at the same rate as smoking prevalence (-17 per cent), it would have been 30.4 billion by 2024. In fact, there were only 22.9 billion cigarettes sold legally in 2024, a shortfall of 7.5 billion.

If we imagine, for the sake of argument, that there was no illicit tobacco at all in 2022, this would mean that 25 per cent of the total market was illicit by 2024/25 (7.5 billion is 25 per cent of 30.4 billion). If you believe, as HMRC does, that 13 per cent of the market was illicit in 2022/23, it means that 33 per cent of the market was illicit in 2024/25. If HMRC underestimated the size of the black market in 2022/23, the real figure is higher still, but the absolute minimum it could be in a wildly optimistic and frankly impossible scenario is 25 per cent.

 

The calculation above is based on all other things being equal. HMRC always adjust the figures, but they must have really adjusted them in the last few years. They need to explain what they have done and why. Since 2020, the tobacco tax gap has been little more than a guess. 

 

The only piece of solid data is the legal sales figure. We have survey data for the number of smokers and the number of cigarettes they consume, but the ONS survey HMRC relies on had its status as an official accredited statistic withdrawn in 2024 due to “ongoing challenges with the response rates, levels, and weighting approach”. Moreover, smoking prevalence and cigarette consumption figures always need to be adjusted upwards to account for shy smokers and under-reporting. This requires a certain amount of guesswork. Estimates of how much duty-free tobacco is brought into the UK are also based on surveys and may be inaccurate. 

A further problem is that during the pandemic, the ONS stopped asking people how much they smoked. HMRC therefore “imputed” the figures for 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23. The question was asked again in 2023/24 and so HMRC describes its estimate for that year as “actual”, but it has gone back to guessing for 2024/25. Blaming “modifications to question sequencing and funding limitations” it says that “certain consumption data for 2024 to 2025 are incomplete”. It has therefore “projected consumption data” for 2024/25 “based on established historical trends.” But what we are seeing today is not in line with historical trends. That is the whole point!

 

One point that I didn't make in the article is that the ONS's estimates of how many cigarettes smokers consume has gone up, not down, since 2022. Since 2019, the daily cigarette consumption averages are:

 

2019: 10.6

2020: 9.3

2021: 9.8

2022: 10.5 

2023: 11.3

2024: 11.2

 

The figures for 2020 and 2021 are guesses. The survey question wasn't asked in those years so the ONS used "modelled predicted estimates". They seem suspiciously low. Since the question was asked again in 2022, the daily consumption estimate has risen from 10.5 cigarettes to 11.2 cigarettes.

 

That might not seem much but it represents a 7% increase in tobacco consumption or two and half billion extra cigarettes! That's another 2.5 billion cigarettes unaccounted for. More, in fact, because HMRC adjusts these figures upwards to account for under-reporting. 

 

HMRC seems to have ignored the ONS figure completely in its latest estimates, preferring "projections" instead. If nothing else, this shows how sensitive these estimates are to small changes and small errors. 

 

The current system has become farcical. Just use empty pack surveys for God's sake!

 

The best way to gauge the size of the black market in tobacco is to gather a large and representative sample of disused tobacco packs and see whether they were sold legally. Tobacco companies have been doing this for years. KMPG, acting on behalf of Philip Morris International (PMI), produce an annual empty pack survey which recently found that 33 per cent of cigarette packs in the UK were contraband or counterfeit. Japan Tobacco International (JTI) use a slightly different methodology in which they interview smokers in their homes and offer to exchange their empty or current pack of cigarettes for a JTI brand. Using this system, they estimate that 33% of cigarettes and 50 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco were illicit in 2024/25 (their figures for 2025/26 suggest that this has risen to 42 per cent and 60 per cent respectively). 

Many people are wary of claims made by tobacco companies, but the Irish government has been using a close cousin of the JTI survey since 2009 for its official estimates. With a similarly high level of tobacco duty, the official Irish figures are similar to the industry’s figures for the UK. Ireland’s 2025 survey found that 28 per cent of cigarettes and 37 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco was illicit. 

 

Read the whole thing. 

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The world won't listen

I spoke to Rohan Pike, the founder of the Australian Border Force’s Tobacco Strike Team, about his country’s black market tobacco nightmare. 80% of the market is illegal, tobacco tax revenue is down by three-quarters and there have been nearly 300 firebombings. It's a warning to the world but the world won't listen. 

Today, HMRC produced its tobacco tax gap estimate for 2024/25. As I have explained before, HMRC's methodology systematically underestimates the size of the illicit market and should be scrapped in favour of empty pack surveys (as used in Ireland). In their latest edition, they have resorted to "imputing" the figures for 2024/25. This is essentially guesswork based on projecting from past trends - and the past trends are themselves unreliable. It's a farce and needs to stop. According to HMRC, the amount of illegal handrolling tobacco sold is at an all time low!

Watch my interview with Rohan below. 

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