A neighbouring council has allegedly spent £55,000 a head on getting 21 smokers to quit!

The above figures come from a fascinating article, Council anti-smoking campaigns are an expensive failure,  by Harry Phibbs, published on Conservative Home yesterday. The council in question is Hammersmith & Fulham, and their grotesque squandering of the Public Health Budget - which comes from general taxation rather than the rates - should be enough to make anyone, whatever their political leanings, weep with frustration. Ultimately, that represents £1.2m taken from the private sector (where all the tax ultimately comes from - the tax paid by public sector workers was taken from the private sector in the first place) to help a handful of nicotine addicts who could have visited either Totally Wicked or Shop E-Cigarette on King Street and...

...picked up a decent starter kit and some eliquid for around £25! (And if the addicts are unable to get to the shops, I'm sure a council employee would be delighted to pick up a kit for them.)

It's not as if vaping is some sort of big secret. There are reckoned to be about three million vapers in the UK, half of whom have given up using tobacco entirely. It's a mainstream activity. There are still some nine million smokers in this country. If the government, or local councils, or NHS administrators, or health campaigners, or any of the vast army of morally superior busybodies who are addicted to spending other people's money really want to help smokers to quit, then, for the love of God, get them vaping. It's the cheapest, healthiest and cleanest method of ingesting nicotine yet devised. In an ideal world, of course, smokers would renounce nicotine altogether - but this isn't an ideal world. So go for the next best option - the one that even our health authorities reckon is at least 85% safer than smoking.  As Harry Phibbs puts it: "What this does show is that the market has come up with an innovative and cost-effective solution – while the municipal alternative is to spend a fortune of our money on alternatives which fail."

Discussing his £55,000 per quitter figure, Phibbs writes:

Even in the very stiff competition provided in the public sector that is staggeringly poor value for money. Yet I am not assuming that the anti-smoking element is any more wasteful than other items in the Public Health budget. Nor that Hammersmith and Fulham is untypical with such dire performance. Just ask for the equivalent figures for your own Council.

That's a chilling thought - but even more chilling is the suspicion that the public sector is pissing our money away on thousands of similarly pointless, fruitless schemes covering a vast range of "issues" across the whole country, while at the same time whining endlessly about Tory "cuts".  What a wicked, wasteful farce.