£½m an hour goes up in smoke

SMOKING costs the NHS more than £5 billion a year – up to five times the previously accepted figure, researchers have said.

Previous studies put the cost of smoking to the NHS at between 1.4 billion and 1.7 billion in 1991.

But the new analysis pushes this figure to 5.17 billion in 2005/06 and the researchers believe this is still an underestimate. It equates to 571,000 an hour.

The largest proportion of the money spent on illness caused by smoking was on cardiovascular diseases, at 250.8 million, the study showed.

The researchers, from the Department of Public Health at Oxford University, also calculated that almost one in five deaths in 2005 was due to smoking. "We estimate that 109,164 deaths (18.6 per cent of all deaths) in the UK in 2005 can be attributed to smoking," they wrote in the journal Tobacco Control.

This figure is similar to previous calculations and "suggests that the overall numbers of deaths attributable to smoking have not changed much in the past ten years".

The authors used a variety of sources to arrive at their 5.17 billion figure, including a review of studies published between 1997 and 2007 which calculated the cost of smoking.

Other data included NHS figures on deaths linked to smoking, NHS costs and information from the World Health Organisation's Global Burden of Disease Project, which looks at illness by region and gender.

One in four men and 23 per cent of women are smokers, based on 2005 figures, the paper noted.

But the authors warned that their figures were an underestimate. "First, we have not included indirect costs in our economic analysis; second, we have not included the burden due to passive smoking; and, third, we have not considered all conditions related to smoking," they wrote.

They noted, however, that the proportion of NHS money spent on smoking – around 5 per cent – has remained similar since the early 1990s.

The research comes after a report from the London School of Economics, published last week, put the cost of smoking to UK businesses at more than 2 billion.

Betty McBride, policy and communications director at the British Heart Foundation, said: "We are now spending over 5 billion a year dealing with the health consequences of smoking. This is money being drained out of the NHS as a direct result of something we have the power to prevent.

"Yet the true tragedy of this monstrous figure is the lives that are cut short or ruined as a result of smoking. This study shows exactly why we need the strongest possible measures to control the sale of tobacco."