Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, what steps his Department plans to take to reduce tobacco-related health inequalities in the forthcoming levelling up White Paper.

As set out in the recently published Levelling Up the United Kingdom White Paper, this Government is committed to levelling up society and helping people quit smoking. The White Paper outlines how the Government wants to make the country smokefree by 2030 and the Department of Health and Social Care will publish a new tobacco control plan later this year setting out how the government plans to deliver this.

The UK Government will set out a strategy to tackle the core drivers of inequalities in health outcomes in a new White Paper on Health Disparities in England in 2022. The Department of Health and Social Care will work with the whole of government to consider health disparities at each stage at which they arise, from wider determinants of health, to behavioural factors that influence health, to the health services that people access and receive. It plans to look in more detail at what can be done in communities with higher rates of behaviours, including smoking.