I’ve been reading the Impact Assessments for the government’s latest anti-vaping proposals and am once again shocked by how little evidence exists for their efficacy and how little thought has gone into the unintended consequences. The cost alone should have been enough for the government to reject these policies, especially when it claims to be on the side of small businesses.
I’ve written about this for The Critic today…
The costs of the display ban alone will be substantial. According to the Impact Assessment, it will cost £2.2 million to familiarise staff with the new law, £22.6 million to print and update price lists and £27.6 million to buy the appropriate drawer units and display cabinets. Longer transaction times are expected to add costs of £43.1 million and the extra time it will take to assess and replace stock will add a further £185.1 million. Once you include the lost profits that DHSC expects to result from the policy, there are £872.5 million of costs, mostly to independent retailers and specialist vape shops.
… The display ban is just one of a number of anti-vaping policies the government is threatening to introduce thanks to the Sunak-Streeting School of Virtue Signalling. Plain packaging for vape juice will cost the country £641.1 million, according to the government’s Impact Assessment. Extending the smoking ban to e-cigarettes will cost another £531.8 million. Forcing manufacturers to only produce vapes that are an “opaque matt achromatic colour (black, white, grey) with no variation in shades” is going to cost £330.9 million.
The costs range from businesses having to make unwanted purchases, such as buying storage cabinets, to making staff less productive (e.g. by slowing down transaction times).
There is a lot more to say than I could squeeze into one article so I thought I’d expand on it here.
One peculiar aspect of the display ban consultation is that it doesn’t include the cost of purchasing new cabinets and gantries if they are paid for by ‘industry’.
It is assumed that convenience and small shops will opt for additional storage with a smaller footprint and up-front cost. This could include under counter storage or drawer units rather than additional display cabinets. Additionally, industry may provide funding for small retailers for storage similar to when the previous display regulations were introduced. Based on this, cost of display storage for convenience and small shops is taken as an average of:
• £0 where industry funds the cost of the storage, £99 where under counter storage is used, and £372.01 where additional drawer units are used. Each option is assumed equally likely.
Elsewhere in the Impact Assessment, they say…
… profit losses to tobacco manufacturers are not considered to be in the total costs, whereas profit losses to vape manufacturers are.
How can this be allowed?! You can’t just ignore a cost because it is paid by a business of which you disapprove!
And it is very clear that the authors disapprove of not only the tobacco industry but the vaping industry. That’s why they refused to get any information from them…
Several of the assumptions have not been tested with industry at this stage. The UK Government is committed to upholding Article 5(3) of the FCTC which requires FCTC members to protect public health policy from the vested interests of the tobacco industry. Whilst some vaping organisations have taken steps to remove Tobacco Industry influence this is not the case across the industry as a whole and it can be difficult to verify where stakeholders are free from Tobacco Industry influence unless this is stated and proven outright.
This gold-plating of Article 5(3) is a red flag for activism. Article 5(3) says that “in setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, Parties shall act to protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”. It doesn’t say that the government should never speak to the industry, nor that it shouldn’t collect data from the industry, and it certainly doesn’t say that the government shouldn’t speak to other industries just in case they might have associations with the tobacco industry.
You expect this kind of thing from ASH or from Bloomberg’s puppets at Bath University, but to hear it from DHSC in an Impact Assessment is proof of ideological capture.
As a result of not speaking to ‘industry’, DHSC has even less of a clue about the market than it would otherwise have. It has no idea how many pouches the average consumer uses, for example, and it doesn’t know anything about “the growth rate in the market”.
In the absence of sufficient data and evidence, we have assumed that this [the growth rate] is constant across the appraisal period. We realise that in practice this may not be the case.
Indeed it may not be. In fact, it isn’t. I wrote in The Critic article about the spurious accuracy of many of its forecasts. For example…
They reckon that the number of nicotine pouch users will fall from 1 per cent to 0.933 per cent (!) under a display ban…
This is risible. The pouch market is small but it is obviously growing and is likely to grow further if the government proceeds with the indoor vaping ban. The current prevalence of 1% is clearly rounded up or down. The idea that it is exactly 1% and will stay at exactly 1% in the absence of further regulation is as ludicrous as the idea that a display ban will reduce prevalence by exactly 0.077 percentage points.
And yet this forms the basis of some further extrapolations…
This equates to roughly 2,400 [fewer] nicotine pouch users in 2028, and around 35,000 fewer nicotine pouch users in 2029 and rising slowly each year up to the end of the appraisal period.
The authors then proceed to lump pouches in with vaping and assume that both products carry 20% of the risk of smoking(!). Based on the standard assumption that a Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) is worth £70,000, they then work out how many people would have to quit, or never start, using vapes, pouches and heated tobacco for the display ban to break even. As shown below, it is a lot. If a more realistic assumption about the risks of pouches and vapes were applied, it would be many times higher. And if a more realistic assumption about substitution effects were applied – i.e. that policies which deter people from using safer nicotine products encourage smoking – every quitter would be an added cost.
However, these alleged benefits are not included in the final tally because…
Due to level [sic] of evidence available on the harms associated with the products in scope there are no monetised benefits.
There is more evidence about the potential harms than the authors acknowledge. Vapes have been widely used for 15 years and the only notable side effects are mild throat and mouth irritation, and since pouches contain no tobacco, they can be considered at least as safe as snus and nicotine gum. The longer term effects are obviously impossible to prove using observational epidemiology but we have plenty of toxicology and biomarkers indicating that the risks are a fraction of those of smoking. The authors didn’t have to rely on five anonymous quacks in Canada. If, as those idiots claimed, vaping was 20% as dangerous as smoking, the harms would already be visible. DHSC’s reliance on this unpublished outlier of an estimate is further evidence of ideological capture. Or perhaps it was simply the only way the policy could be considered even vaguely cost-effective.
From a public health perspective, we must hope that the display ban on safer products fails. The display ban for tobacco didn’t seem to work, although DHSC claims otherwise…
It is estimated that display regulations resulted in a reduction of 37,000 smokers in the UK, equating to health benefits of approximately £2.8bn.
DHSC’s reference for this claim is this study. It doesn’t say anything about 37,000 smokers, nor does it make any claim about saving money. God knows where DHSC got that idea from. But the study did claim that the tobacco display ban worked, based on the data in this graph…
Looking at this data (from the Smoking Toolkit Study), two things stand out. Firstly, all the policies in the late 2000s and early 2010s failed to cut the smoking rate. These included the smoking ban (July 2007), raising the age of sale (October 2007), graphic warnings (2008), the tobacco duty escalator (from 2009) and banning cigarette vending machines (2011).
Secondly, there was no reduction in the smoking rate immediately after the display ban was introduced (as the authors of the study acknowledge). The turning point was vaping going mainstream in 2013. This is equally obvious from the ONS smoking data, as I pointed out years ago.
The authors acknowledge that vaping could have been responsible for the decline of smoking after a long period of stasis but say it wasn’t that. So that’s alright then. Instead they claim that it was a delayed effect from the display ban. I’ll leave readers to make their own minds up about that little theory.
Although a display ban for safer products may fail on its own terms, the risk is that by regulating all nicotine products in the same way as cigarettes, people get the impression that vapes, in particular, are as dangerous as cigarettes. Since most Brits already believe that, this seems sub-optimal. The government should be countering misinformation, not consolidating it.
The authors of the Impact Assessment pay lip service to this problem, but say that DHSC is mitigating the risk by incrementally banning cigarettes. We are governed by fools.
I have focused on just one of the three regulatory proposals under consideration but, believe me, the Impact Assessments for the others are at least a bad as this. You can respond to the consultation here. Please do. The Save Vaping campaign run by the New Nicotine Alliance has updated its website to reflect these new threats to the category. Please give them your support.
(UKR)