Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what steps he is taking to tackle the sale of illegal tobacco.

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 estimated duty gap for cigarettes from 16.9% in 2005 to 11% in 2021/22 and for hand-rolling tobacco from 65.2% to 33.5% over the same period.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) publishes annual data on seizures, criminal investigations and civil penalties related to tobacco. Between April 2021 and March 2022, HMRC and Border Force seized 1.35bn cigarettes and 212,949kg of hand-rolling tobacco.

As set out in the October 2023 command paper, Stopping the start: our new plan to create a smokefree generation, the Government is increasing investment to enforcement agencies by £30 million per year from 2024/25 to 2028/29, boosting our abilities to tackle illegal activity.

The paper also confirmed that HMRC and Border Force will publish an updated Illicit Tobacco Strategy, which sets out plans to address future challenges and opportunities that criminals seek to exploit. The strategy will be published in due course.