Template letter to the Secretary of State and Public Health

Minister for APPG on Smoking and Health Delivering the vision of a ‘Smokefree Generation’ report

Email the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock MP, and the Public Health Minister, Jo Churchill MP, by using the below template and inserting relevant information in place of the red text. For local costs, please find your local data with ASH’s Ready Reckoner tool.

The email should be sent to Matt Hancock (matt.hancock.mp@parliament.uk; [email protected]) and Jo Churchill ([email protected]; [email protected])

Dear Secretary of State/Minister,

In England, smoking kills 200 people a day, led to nearly 500,000 hospital admissions in 2017/18 and costs my local area £[XX] every year.

That is why it is vital that Government enact the recommendations made by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health’s 2019 report Delivering the vision of a ‘Smokefree Generation’.

As the [insert council role] for [insert local authority], I am calling for the following recommendations to be implemented:

• Making the polluter pay: a charge on the tobacco transnationals designed to deliver a fixed sum annually to the Government to fund high impact, evidence-based measures to encourage smokers to quit, and discourage youth uptake. • Raising the age of sale of tobacco from 18 to 21: to discourage uptake by those most at risk and reinforce the message that smoking is uniquely dangerous. • Retail licensing: to support enforcement activity against underage sales and illicit tobacco, by banning the sale of tobacco from unlicensed retailers or those who break the law. • Increased funding for education campaigns: using the charge on the industry to fund targeted campaigns to increase attempts to quit, and discourage uptake, using social and mass media. • Support for innovative regional collaboration: to motivate quitting, enforce age of sale regulations and reduce illicit trade.

To see the harm caused by tobacco eliminated and advance our progress towards a ‘Smokefree Generation’, as committed to in the 2017 Tobacco Control Plan for England, I would also welcome the following actions which would further support the delivery of local authority tobacco control:

• Reducing the affordability of tobacco: by increasing the annual tobacco tax escalator with an added uplift for hand-rolled tobacco (currently much more lightly taxed) to prevent down-trading detrimental to public revenues and public health. • Government mandated pack inserts to support quitting: a cheap and effective means of supplementing on-pack warnings with messaging encouraging smokers to quit. • Collection and publication of tobacco manufacturers’ sales and marketing data: to monitor the evolving behaviour of the industry and inform better regulation. • Enhanced guidelines on smoking on screen (film and TV): to reduce the exposure of young people to images of smoking which have been proven to increase uptake of smoking.

These recommendations were backed by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and 16 other organisations in a submission to the Department of Health and Social Care ahead of the Green Paper on prevention. I look forward to the Green Paper and hope to see the inclusion of the above recommendations to further reduce rates of smoking in England and in [insert local area].

Many thanks,

[insert name]