£600m goes up in smoke
MORE than £600m is lost in a puff of smoke each year in the North East, according to new research.
The astonishing figure is the total financial impact that smoking has on the region’s economy, as well as the amount spent on health treatment for smokers.
In all, £386.4m is the cost of the 5,584 early deaths smoking causes each year and other related illnesses, as well as absenteeism and smoking breaks.
Meanwhile, there’s a £127.5m bill to the NHS from over 1.2 million GP consultations, more than 256,000 hospital admissions and outpatient visits, and 693,133 GP prescriptions every year directly linked to the habit.
And, with many current and former smokers requiring care in later life as a result of smoking-related illnesses, smoking costs North East local authorities an additional £46.3m a year to fund social care, as well as individuals and families paying out £38.4m a year to fund their own social care.
When you add in the £15.1m cost of smoking-related house fires, that comes to a final figure of £613.7m.
Ailsa Rutter OBE, director of antismoking campaign Fresh, said: “We already know smoking deprives people of many years of good health and robs families of years they could spend with loved ones.
“But these figures show the damage it does to communities, costing every individual, every family, every GP surgery, every council, business and hospital.”
The new data was published in time for World No Tobacco Day yesterday by Action on Smoking Health. Figures from the Smokefree Great Britain Survey 2018 (YouGov) measuring public opinion showed the majority of adults in the region believe that the Government is either not doing enough (39%) or doing about right (37%) to limit smoking.
Only 8% of those asked thought the Government is doing enough to limit smoking.
Ms Rutter added: “We have seen the highest falls in smoking in England here in the North East and our local authorities deserve huge credit for working together to tackle this. However, smoking remains our largest cause of preventable death – the aim has to be to continue efforts to make smoking history for more children growing up here in the region.”
The Government’s Tobacco Plan for England “Towards a Smokefree Generation” outlines the importance of the NHS supporting smokers using, visiting or working in the NHS to quit.
A 2016 audit by the British Thoracic Society found that more than one in four hospital patients were not asked if they smoke and 50% of frontline staff are not given routine smoking cessation training.
Public health charity ASH and Fresh argue that the tobacco industry should be forced to pay to address the harm it causes in line with the “polluter pays” principle.
It is estimated that tobacco companies in the UK make a collective annual profit of around £1bn.
ASH and Fresh want Government to place a levy on the tobacco industry, with the money used to fund support for the recurring costs of tobacco control measures.