Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will publish the names of the organisations who disclosed links to the tobacco industry that responded to the consultation entitled Creating a smokefree generation and tackling youth vaping.

Smoking is the number one entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability and death in this country. It is responsible for 80,000 deaths in the United Kingdom a year, and one in four of all UK cancer deaths. It costs our country £17 billion a year, £14 billion of which is through lost productivity alone. It puts huge pressure on the National Health Service and social care, costing over £3 billion a year.

The Government response to the consultation entitled Creating a smokefree generation and tackling youth vaping, was published on 29 January 2024. The consultation received nearly 28,000 responses. Whilst there are no plans to publish the names of all the organisations that responded, we did confirm that we received responses from 896 organisations as well as 307 responses from those who disclosed links with the tobacco industry.

As outlined in our consultation response, the UK is a party to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and so had an obligation to protect public health policy from the vested interests of the tobacco industry. In the consultation response we summarise the views of respondents with disclosed links to the tobacco industry but have been clear that we have not considered these views when determining our policy response.