What steps she is taking to help tackle the sale of illicit 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 10.5% in 2023/24 and for hand-rolling tobacco from 65.2% to 22.9% over the same period. In the tax year 2023 to 2024, the duty gap for tobacco duty was 13.8% of the theoretical tobacco duty liability, or £1.4 billion in absolute terms. HMRC publishes annual data on seizures, criminal investigations and civil penalties related to tobacco. Between April 2024 and March 2025, HMRC and Border Force seized 1.19bn cigarettes and 125,088kg of hand-rolling tobacco. In January 2024, HMRC and Border Force published the latest illicit tobacco strategy, ‘Stubbing Out the Problem [1]’. This sets out the Governments’ continued commitment to reduce the trade in illicit tobacco with a focus on reducing demand, and to tackle and disrupt the organised crime groups behind the illicit tobacco trade. The strategy is supported by £100 million of new smokefree funding over 5 years to boost existing HMRC and Border Force enforcement capability. HMRC has not specifically assessed the impact of illicit tobacco on the annual revenues of corner shops. [ 1 ] Stubbing out the problem: A new strategy to tackle illicit tobacco - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)