Smokers in Ayrshire spend about £112.3 million a year on cigarettes, a new analysis of official figures shows. That works out at £372 for every adult who lives here, which is 20 per cent above the UK figure of £309. There are an estimated 32,100 smokers across Ayrshire.
Spending by council area
East Ayrshire has the highest spend per adult at £412, with a total of £40.6 million a year. North Ayrshire follows at £376 per adult, totalling £41.3 million, while South Ayrshire spends £325 per adult, adding up to £30.3 million.
Vaping retailer Ecigone used the smoking rate for every council area in the UK, published by the Office for National Statistics on 6 October, to share the UK’s 4.9 million smokers between 359 council areas. Each smoker was then costed at the ONS average of 10 cigarettes a day and an average price of about £19.18 for a pack of 20 since tobacco duty rose on 1 October. That comes to about £3,500 a year for each smoker.
UK-wide comparison
Across the UK the bill adds up to about £17.2 billion a year, or £309 for every adult. In St Albans, the lowest of the areas with a reliable estimate, the figure is £151.
Birmingham has the biggest bill of any single council area. Its estimated 90,900 smokers spend about £318 million a year, ahead of Glasgow on £248 million and Leeds on £216 million. Smokers spend more than £100 million a year in 27 council areas.
Scotland spends the most of the four nations for its population, at £351 for every adult, followed by Wales on £337, Northern Ireland on £328 and England on £303. Yorkshire and the Humber is the highest-spending English region on £335, and the South East is the lowest on £276.
Duty and vaping
The price of a pack went up by about £1.21 on 1 October, according to HM Revenue and Customs, when the yearly tobacco duty rise and a one-off extra increase arrived on the same day as the new duty on vape liquid.
Shane Margereson, owner of Ecigone, said the new vaping duty had not closed the gap between the cost of smoking and the cost of vaping. He said: “The duty costs a typical vaper around 79p a day, or about £290 a year. That is real money, and it is fair to be annoyed about it. But the tobacco duty on 20 cigarettes a day is many times larger.”
Mr Margereson said some smokers move to rolling tobacco to save money. He said: “Rolling your own is cheaper per cigarette than buying packs, which is why plenty of smokers switch to it when money gets tight. It is worth being clear that it is not any safer.”
He added: “The NHS is clear that vaping is substantially less harmful than smoking and one of the most effective ways to stop. It is not risk-free, and if you do not smoke you should not start.” Free help to stop smoking is available from local stop smoking services and through the NHS Quit Smoking app.
The two lists leave out 13 areas where ONS says the local estimate is unreliable because few people were surveyed. ONS publishes no figure for the City of London or the Isles of Scilly. The same survey is used for all four nations so that every area is measured in the same way, although ONS says official smoking rates for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should be taken from their own health surveys.
