Who do ASH think they are kidding?

The con artists at ASH are at it again.

 

The state-funded prohibitionist pressure group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) has published a report claiming that “the UK’s illicit tobacco market is now only a fraction of the size it was at the turn of the century” and that “the UK has one of the most effectively controlled illicit markets in the world”.

Even for the seasoned liars at ASH, this is risible. Their entire argument hinges on HMRC’s tobacco tax gap estimates being correct and everyone else being wrong. But HMRC’s figures are blatant underestimates. It hasn’t had the data needed to make a half-decent estimate since 2019. Its figures between 2020 and 2023 were “imputed” because it didn’t have tobacco consumption data from the Office for National Statistics, and its figures since then have been “projected” from the imputed figures because of problems with “data availability and small sample sizes”.

In short, it is guesswork, and not very good guesswork at that. As I have said before, their claim that “only” 14% of the tobacco market is illicit is impossible to square with the 52% decline in legal tobacco sales between 2021 and 2025.

 

Read the rest on my Substack. 

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