HMRC’s latest receipts show Tobacco Duty collapsed to £7.57 billion in 2025/26 – down £359 million, or 4.5%, on the year before. That’s almost £1 million a day vanishing from the Treasury…
Cigarette Duty dropped £225 million to £5.69 billion. Hand-rolling tobacco fell £130 million to £1.64 billion. It is now the fifth consecutive year of falling receipts since the 2021/22 peak. Ever-higher duties have not filled the coffers – in fact, they have pushed more smokers onto the illicit market. Ministers might want to look up the Laffer Curve…
The same Treasury had no trouble finding £335 million to keep British Steel’s Scunthorpe furnaces lit. That is almost the entire amount lost from Tobacco Duty in a single year…
Another duty hike lands in October. The official scorecard says it will raise just £80 million next year. Labour should stub out any idea that smokers will fund the next emergency scramble for cash…
Andy Haldane, Burnham’s recent adviser on the economy who has not taken up a No10 job, told Andrew Marr on LBC:
“The market now suspects that this is a traditional tax-and-spend socialist government with better TikTok videos…
imposing windfall taxes on oil & gas or on banks or upping capital gains tax would […] repeat the mistake that Rachel made […] The Achilles heel, the fiscal Achilles heel of this government thus far has been its unwillingness and/or inability to cut public spending.”