Last time I looked the UK govt received £18 billion in tobacco and related revenues (pharmaceuticals etc). Smoking costs the NHS £2.3 billion per year. The politicians quietly trouser the remaining £15.5 billion not that they make a song and dance about it of course.
Gov gets about £12 billion a year from tobacco tax revenue at point of sale. No one knows what their total tax revenue from tobacco is, that is to say all the many channels generated by cigarette sales, as there are so many. It's difficult to list them all:
tobacco tax revenue at point of sale
income tax from retail staff whose employment exists because of tobacco sales
ditto transport and warehousing staff
ditto tobacco company employees
ditto pharmaceutical company employees
ditto hospital and health service staff
corporation tax from tobacco companies
ditto retail companies
ditto transport and warehousing companies
ditto pharmaceutical companies
ditto private hospital and health service companies
Add to that insurance staff and companies, as some tax revenue will be attributable to smoking-generated funds.
Add to that other stuff I haven't taken into account as the list is too long.
Now add some very large amounts indeed from pharmaceutical sales generated by smoking: about 15% of all tax received from pharma, in fact. I don't know what this comes to but it's hundreds of millions at least.
£18 billion is probably on the low side once you add it all up.
Now double it - yes, double it - for savings gov makes: in a fully socialised state such as the UK, gov makes vast savings from people dying 10 years early. (People can argue about the loss of lifespan attributable to smoking, the deathrate, and the illness rate - but you can't have it both ways: either smoking kills and causes early death - and thus massive savings for government; and causes widescale illness - and thus massive revenues for pharma, which in addition generates tax for gov; or it doesn't - in which case there is no reason to tax it and ban it in public areas.)
We reckon that gov saves £7.5 billion *just on pensions* due to early deaths. Now add the same again for savings on social care costs for the elderly: that's healthcare, social support, etc. Now add more again for savings I haven't included due to the list being so long.
In the end, you get a gov profit of about £25 billion a year from smoking, maybe even £30bn. That's a hell of a big hole to fill if someone comes along and fixes smoking.
The truth is no politician worth his expenses would dare lose such a revenue stream even if, rather inconveniently, it costs the lives of 6,000 smokers a year. Their hypocrisy is breathtaking.
According to Prof West, the figure is 6,000 lives would be saved per year per million smokers who switch to ecigs. He reckons there are 8 million smokers in the UK; others say up to 10 million.
He also doesn't appear to agree that 80,000 a year die in England annually from smoking (it's often said to be 80,000 for England and 100,000 a year for the UK in total). By working various figures he has provided backwards, it looks as if he thinks about 60,000 a year die from smoking in England. He seems to think that about 6,750 die per year per million smokers, and a worst-case scenario is that 6,000 of those lives would be saved per million smokers who switch. 'Worst case' meaning that he thinks the maximum possible death rate from vaping would be 750 per year per million vapers.
It's kind of hard to see how a deathrate that high would be possible unless people started vaping plutonium, but never mind. About 100 to 1,000 a year if every single smoker switched is a more believable number, as you first need to find some sort of way these people would develop terminal diseases of some kind. Maybe ecig charger fires at night is the presumed method of death.