Ms Janis Morrissey:

I certainly did not mean to imply that it would be easy, but there is an opportunity because of the commonality of those five risk factors across a range of chronic diseases. Rather than thinking about tackling cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia or respiratory conditions, there is a huge opportunity in front of us to look at those five areas. Addressing them with meaningful policy measures will have real benefits in terms of all of those preventable diseases I mentioned.

For example, 80% of premature heart disease and stroke is preventable, while 40% of cases of cancer can be addressed by taking these actions. There is that commonality of risk factors. As regards smoking, significant strides have been made but 18% is a failure. Our target is 5% in 2025, next year. In terms of where we go from here, it is looking at initiatives such as Tobacco 21 and considering why children start smoking. We need to protect them better and stop them starting to smoke. There is awareness in the context of people who are already smoking but we need to get to the root cause. We can take inspiration from other areas, such as the measure proposed in New Zealand to ban young people from accessing cigarettes in the first place. We need to keep building. We lost a significant amount of momentum. The workplace smoking ban was a fantastic achievement, but it was brought in 20 years ago and we have lost a lot of momentum since then. We have been a laggard in Europe in terms of addressing e-cigarettes. We very much welcome the developments recently announced by the Minster in terms of gaining ground in that area. It comes back to policy measures, such as looking at the marketing and pricing all of those common drivers. No matter what the harmful product is, whether it is tobacco, alcohol or unhealthy food, the drivers are very similar. It comes back to having a political culture of understanding and acting on those drivers rather than relying on people to be more educated or to inform themselves.