The health and social care crisis makes tobacco control an imperative

The healthcare community has for a long time been pressing the UK government to produce a tobacco control plan that sets out how it will deliver on its Smokefree 2030 objective, which was first articulated in 2017.12 However, reports from “insiders” now suggest that the secretary of state for health and social care, Thérèse Coffey, does not intend to honour the government’s repeated promises to do this.3 It was reassuring to see that the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) denied that the story was true.3 Given that smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the UK and that smoking causes more than 500 000 hospital admissions per year in England alone, only someone who was a committed enemy of human health and wellbeing would adopt such a bizarre position.4The health secretary set out her “ABCD” priorities clearly on her first day in office—ambulances, backlogs and social…
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