CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP
The price of a pack of cigarettes will increase “like inflation” announced Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne. (Illustrative photo)
TOBACCO – Bad news for smokers. After two years of stability, the price of a pack of cigarettes “will rise like inflation”announced this Monday, September 26 the Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on RMC/BFMTV, before the presentation of the draft budget 2023 in the Council of Ministers.
“I confirm that the price of the package […] will rise like inflation. It would be quite paradoxical for the rise in cigarettes to be lower than theinflation »that would mean that “finally, relatively, the price would drop” she said. “In view of the health impact of tobaccoI think it would be more understandable and therefore we have planned to index the price of a pack of cigarettes to inflation”according to the Prime Minister.
The average price of a package over 11 euros in 2024
Friday, the newspaper The echoes had revealed that the government was considering modifying certain rules on the taxation of tobacco and to index tobacco excise duties to inflation. The social security financing bill (PLFSS) presented this Monday to the Council of Ministers provides for an increase in two stages, staggered between 2023 and 2024: the average price of the package, “today from 10.15 euros”will increase by “50 cents in 2023 and 35 cents in 2024”which the “will increase to 11 euros”, Bercy told AFP. The government also announces “new adapted tax scales” for products that are now less taxed, such as rolling tobacco and heated tobacco.
To justify this increase, the government argues that the tax increase from 2018 to 2020, which brought the pack of 20 cigarettes to 10 euros, paid off in terms of public health, by leading to a “unprecedented decline in the consumption of these products: -22% in volume between 2017 and 2021” and about “two million French people who have quit smoking since 2017, according to Public Health France”said Bercy.
However, after a tax freeze in 2021 and 2022, high inflation, if it were not passed on to tobacco prices, could lead to a “lower real tobacco prices”, and increase consumption, according to the ministry. Usually the rise in excise duties -taxes levied on the sale of certain products such as alcohol and tobacco and intended to dissuade their purchase- is indexed each year to inflation measured two years earlier. This increase is normally capped at 1.8%.
“If we let young people start smoking with a cheap pack, we produce the smokers of the next 30 years: but the real scandal is that at 14 or 15, they are already buying cigarettes without any control, at tobacconists »told AFP Loïc Josseran, professor of public health and president of the Alliance Against Tobacco.
“This important tax measure makes it possible to reflect on one’s consumption and to gain purchasing power, knowing that quitting smoking is completely covered by health insurance. A Smicard who quits smoking gets a third of his salary back”he points out.
A choice criticized by manufacturers
Unsurprisingly, cigarette manufacturers rose up against a “considerable tax increase” according to Jeanne Pollès, president of Philip Morris France which produces the best-selling brand in the world, Marlboro. It will penalize “the poorest French people” and “aggravate the rise in the trafficking of fake cigarettes at low prices”she told AFP.
Same story at British American Tobacco (BAT) which evokes a “gift to organized crime”according to a spokesperson, predicting the appearance of “new counterfeit tobacco factories in France” – two have been dismantled to date.
The leading cause of preventable death, tobacco kills some 73,000 people in France, with a direct cost of 20 to 26 billion euros per year for health insurance and a “social cost” total (deaths, illnesses, production losses, but also expenditure on prevention, repression and care, for the State) estimated at 120 billion by the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction.
Taxation on tobacco, it brings 13 to 14 billion euros per year to the State, according to Bercy. A year ago, a parliamentary report estimated the loss of tax revenue at 3 billion euros, linked to illegal tobacco consumed in France – estimated between 14% and 17% of consumption.
On Friday the tobacconists had demanded “a multi-annual visibility of taxation”told AFP Philippe Coy, president of the Confederation of tobacconists, which represents the 24,500 tobacconists with a monopoly on the sale of tobacco.
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