Britain is moving forward with plans to standardize cigarette packaging after a government review announced on Thursday that the move would help cut smoking rates, Reuters reported.
An independent review commissioned by the government in November showed "compelling" evidence that standardized packaging would reduce the number of child smokers and improve public health.
"It is in my view highly likely that standardized packaging would serve to reduce the rate of children taking up smoking and implausible that it would increase the consumption of tobacco," Cyril Chantler, who conducted the review, said in a letter to Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt released on Tuesday, according to Reuters.
Chantler said that if approved, the law could come into force by May 2015, the month of the next election. Draft regulations and the results of a short consultation are expected to be published later this month.
Labour Party, the opposition, welcomes steps towards a ban on branded cigarette packets. However, they criticized the government for delaying a final decision by holding a consultation. Since there is an overwhelming body of evidence in favor of plain packaging, they think further consultation is unnecessary.
"Over 70,000 children will have taken up smoking since the government announced the review," she told parliament, according to Reuters. "How many more children are going to take up smoking before this government takes firm and decisive action?"
The tobacco industry argues that standardized packaging would encourage counterfeiting and smuggling. They don't believe it will have a huge impact on smoking, Reuters reported. They argue that evidence from Australia, which became the first country to bring in standardized packaging in 2012, shows little impact on smoking rates.
"You can only look at Australia who have had plain packaging for over a year. What you see is increased illicit cigarettes and consumers down-trading and neither of those things are particularly positive for the tobacco industry," Panmure analyst Damian McNeela told Reuters.
Britain's tobacco market is worth about $28 billion a year, according to Euromonitor International.
