Saturday 10 November 2012

Big Lottery money pays for smoking cessation

A recent motion in the Scottish Parliament
 *S4M-04716 Dennis Robertson: Congratulations to CVS Aberdeenshire Central and South—That the Parliament congratulates CVS Aberdeenshire Central  and South on receiving an Awards for All grant of £4,400 from the Big Lottery Fund; understands that the grant will be used to support an existing smoking cessation pilot project by training volunteer ex-smokers to befriend smokers and encourage them to participate in local alternative activities groups; considers that CVS Aberdeenshire Central and South received this award as it will help people to have better life chances and make communities healthier, and thanks it for the work that it does.
Smoking cessation would seem (officially) to be a national obsession, but do we see a return on increasing levels of resources committed to smoking cessation?

I have recently put a FOI request to the Scottish Government on the amount of money spent since 1999 on smoking cessation. The response is due by next Friday. I'll report it here.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what you are bragging about, Belinda. I seem to remember reading a few months ago that ASH got several hundred thousand pounds from the lottery a few months ago.
Some bigwig from ASH is on the board of the lottery.

Junican

Belinda said...

hardly bragging!

auntieban said...

Looking forward to their reply, Bel.
Presumably the Scottish Government can only reveal the sums that the Scottish Government released. The Lottery Fund is a separate thing, along with Pharma support and the dribble they get from public donations. If you add it all up, the cost-per-successful 'quitter' must be about a million quid.

David said...

Not quite a £million/quitter....

I did a quick back of a fag packet calc a couple of years ago using Scottish government statistics and estimated the figure to be about £4000/per successful (12 month)quitter. That was based purely on cessation costs and did not include ancillary costs of advertising etc. Factor those in and the figure would, of course, be higher. The duty lost to the Treasury per ex smoker could add a couple of £thousand. This suggests the total cost to the taxpayer could be closer to £10,000. Might be wrong with the sums but it still seems an awful waste of money.

Lysistrata said...

The CVS (Council for Voluntary Service) will be looking to balance their books with this quick-fix grant.

They will be providing staff time to support an existing project. That is, they will defray the employment costs of one of their existing staff to manage this scheme, as an add-on to their existing job. And they will be charging management on costs.

The £4,400 is probably peanuts to them; they won't have any experience in smoking cessation, but only in organising volunteers.

Nor will their charitable aims and objects mention anything about smoking.

It's charity opportunism at its most cynical.

markthomson said...
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