Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what dedicated funds have been made available to (a) HM Revenue & Customs, (b) Border Force and (c) Trading Standards to prevent the sale of illegal tobacco in each financial year since 2018-19.

The Government has dedicated significant resource to tackling illicit tobacco and has set out its approach to doing so in successive strategies dating back to 2000. These strategies have been highly effective in reducing the illicit trade for cigarettes from 22% in 2000-01 to 9% in 2020-21, and for hand-rolling tobacco from 61% to 34% in the same period.

Funding for tackling illegal tobacco is typically drawn from wider budgets and activities aimed at tackling illicit trade. However, at Budget 2020 the Government announced further resources to combat illicit tobacco, dedicating £1million over two years to ‘Operation CeCe’, a joint initiative between HMRC and National Trading Standards to tackle illicit trade at a local level.