Martin Cullip 14 May 2025

 

New research has revealed that the UK’s official smoking figures are about as accurate as the country’s weather forecasts. It turns out the UK has been dramatically underestimating the number of people who smoke because there has been a dramatic undercounting the people who exist.

The Hidden Populations Skewing Smoking Statistics

Specifically, the new study points out that so-called “hidden populations” like people in care homes, prisons, temporary housing, and those experiencing homelessness aren’t included in household-based smoking surveys. These groups, all too often ignored by policy and polling alike, have smoking rates upwards of 60 percent. Once you factor them in, the UK’s supposedly impressive 2022 smoking prevalence figure of 12.9 percent shoots up to somewhere between 14.5 percent and 14.8 percent – an extra 1-1.2 million smokers. That’s a lot more cigarettes and a lot less progress.

A Misguided Approach to Harm Reduction

If the government were to follow pragmatism, this would be a cue for policy makers to double down on harm reduction to get serious about helping smokers. This is especially important for the most vulnerable to help them switch to safer alternatives like vapes, heated tobacco, or nicotine pouches. But instead, in a plot twist worthy of a Kafka novel or a Whitehall memo, the UK government is choosing this moment to make safer alternatives less visible, less accessible, and more expensive.

The Tobacco and Vapes Bill currently making its way through Parliament reads like it was drafted by someone who gets their policy evidence from a Daily Mail article. It includes a ban on all advertising for reduced-risk nicotine products (because heaven forbid smokers find out there’s a less deadly option), a ban on heated tobacco and snus (because countries like Sweden shouldn’t have all the fun with their record-low smoking rates), and flavour bans for vapes (because only teenagers enjoy mango, apparently).

But the hits keep coming. Vapes will have to be hidden behind screens in shops—as though they’re shameful contraband instead of the most effective smoking cessation tool ever invented. They’ll be sold in plain packaging to make them as dull and uninviting as possible, and vending machines in mental health settings will be banned, apparently because helping people in psychiatric care quit smoking just makes it too easy for them. And if that weren’t enough, the UK is also moving to ban disposable vapes entirely and slap the highest vape tax in the EU on liquids next year. If the goal is to make cigarettes look good by comparison, then mission accomplished.

The Consequences of Restricting Safer Alternatives

This would all be faintly amusing if it weren’t so deadly serious. The very groups who make up this “hidden population” are the ones most in need of effective harm reduction strategies. For example, people in mental health institutions are far more likely to smoke and far less likely to be reached by conventional cessation programmes. Taking away their access to vapes in the name of tidiness or moral panic is not just misguided, it’s a public health failure in the making.

Even for the general population, making vapes more expensive and less appealing while keeping cigarettes readily available is like taxing salad and subsidising doughnuts. You can wrap it up in child protection language or puritanical disdain for nicotine all you like, but the result is the same. Smokers will be discouraged from switching, and many will never even try.

Ironically, the government’s flagship policy – achieving a “smokefree” UK by 2030 – is now even further out of reach than previously thought. The new research makes clear that we’re starting from a higher baseline than anyone admitted, and even if current trends continue, we’re not on track. But instead of responding with urgency and pragmatism, the UK is gearing up for a theatrical crackdown that targets the solutions rather than the problem.

If policymakers really want to help people quit smoking, they need to stop pretending harm reduction is the enemy. More, not less, access to safer products is required. More regulation that builds trust is needed, not confusion. And it must be recognised that for many smokers, especially those in the margins of society, vaping isn’t a trendy vice or a youth epidemic, but a lifeline.

At this rate, the UK heading toward a future where vaping is demonised, cigarettes remain on the shelves, and the smokefree target becomes yet another government goal that quietly expires from neglect. It’s not just bad policy; it’s a missed opportunity of historic proportions.

And frankly, if the idea of making it harder to buy a vape than a pack of Marlboros doesn’t strike you as absurd, then maybe you are a British politician.

Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.