HMRC is now testing the nation’s wastewater to work out how much tobacco is being smoked illegally. At a huge cost to taxpayers compared to easier methods like high street enforcement or surveying empty illegal packets….
Taxpayers are shelling out for researchers to visit waterworks around the country, looking for traces of nicotine and other tell-tale metabolites. The idea is to show where smoking is highest and help HMRC decide where to send investigators and raid teams. A one-year Home Office wastewater analysis contract was worth £1.3 million in 2023…
The key facts are already public. Cancer Research UK estimates smokers got through 28 billion cigarettes in 2024, while HMRC records show only 14 billion were sold legally. That leaves roughly 14 billion cigarettes unaccounted for and billions in tax revenue going up in smoke…
Wastewater can tell you how much nicotine people are consuming from a public health perspective, but obviously not whether those cigarettes were bought legally or on the black market. HMRC still has to make a series of assumptions to work that bit out. The evidence is simply sitting in discarded cigarette packets and is visible to enforcement agencies on every high street. HMRC methodology going down the toilet…
Lucy Powell told Sky News that the Ed Miliband-Russell Brand interview happened in part because the ‘social media age’ had not begun by 2015:
“Look, I mean, he approached the Labour Party, he approached the campaign team, and we’re in very different times now. We weren’t in the social media age at the time – where you could maybe search things up and see allegations about somebody at the time. and as I say, if there was any suggestion at all, we were dealing with someone who was a known sexual predator at the time, then, of course, you know, no one would have done that. But as I say, he was a well known public figure. Lots of people from Hollywood to the BBC to many others gave this person a very, very powerful platform. And we didn’t know at the time, unfortunately. It was a different era.”