Government will miss key levelling up targets on health inequalities, study warns

Although the study concludes that a notional immediate outright ban on tobacco sales would eventually increase healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years, it would not be enough for the government to meet the targets for reducing health inequalities set out in its levelling-up white paper. An immediate ban on smoking would, however, extend the working lives of both men and women, the paper concludes, with the greatest impact in more deprived areas.

Local government secretary Michael Gove’s 2022 levelling up white paper pledged to narrow the difference in ‘healthy life expectancy’ (HLE) between England’s most prosperous and most deprived local authorities by 2030, and to boost overall HLE by five years by 2035.