The EU is right to be ashamed of its evaluation report on nicotine policy. Even its own watchdogs have disowned it.
Two years ago, I wrote about the EU Commission burying its own smoking data, and opined on why they might have done it. Tl;dr: because the data didn’t tell the story they wanted the public to hear.
Fast forward to 2nd April. It’s the day before the long Easter weekend. I’m on vacation with my wife’s family near where they live in Madrid. It’s actually what the Commission calls a “recuperation day”: their staff are on vacation by default, but can choose to work it if they like, and get a day in lieu as a reward. In short, it’s a good day to bury bad news.
So what bad news did they bury? Their report on how well the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive has performed, and how they plan to justify more bans.
I’m told by people who know that this is how DG SANTE operates when it comes to announcements on nicotine related matters: push it out at the start of a holiday season when none of the usual journalists are around to ask too many questions and hope no-one notices how rubbish their policy product is.
Apart from our coverage of the blatant corruption and self-dealing that went into the creation of the report, the tactic largely succeeded. In fairness, we were lucky that we happened to be working to finalise our piece just as the Commission released the evaluation report.
So what are they hiding?
Buried on page 71 of the report is the thing that Brussels really wanted to hide: a negative opinion from an obscure body called the Regulatory Scrutiny Board (RSB), an internal watchdog which exists to oversee the quality of Commission policy-making. But while the Evaluation Report itself at least fessed up to the fact that the report hadn’t been blessed by the RSB, the opinion of the RSB itself was withheld.
This is unusual: pretty much all legislative proposals and evaluation reports in any policy area come complete with the opinion of the RSB attached. Its absence here had the pungent smell of rat.
Clearing the Air immediately filed an Access to Documents request (the EU’s equivalent of Freedom of Information) which demanded, among other things, access to the full report. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of that in the coming weeks, but the Commission clearly realised holding back the RSB’s opinion wasn’t going to be a position they could hold. And so a week later (on 9th April), they very quietly amended the webpage that hosted the Evaluation report to include the RSB’s opinion. And just as they planned it, no-one seems to have noticed.
It’s fairly obvious why.
The RSB opinion is an unusually forthright rebuke of the Evaluation report. It’s unusual enough for a report with a negative RSB opinion to see the light of day (it’s actually against Commission policy to do this with a legislative proposal, but they can get away with it on a report like this).
Usually, if the RSB comes back with a no, the department drafting the report has to go away, implement its recommendations and come back to ask for permission again. But in this case, to satisfy the RSB would be to amend the entire character of the report and its policy recommendations, which the Commission will never do because they’ve already made up their minds.
Unusually for an official Commission publication, you can’t copy and paste the text in the PDF they published. They really don’t want people repeating what the RSB said about this monstrosity of a report in a public forum.
Probably the most astonishing comment comes towards the end of the two page report.
The report’s “conclusions on effectiveness…should not go beyond what is supported by evidence”, the RSB notes, and “should reflect uncertainties of analysis on the contribution of the legislation to reducing smoking prevalence…and on the health impact of novel products”.
Let me translate that from EU official parlance to normal English: “you are saying that your legislation reduced smoking and that novel products are super harmful to health, but you don’t have enough evidence to claim either of those things”.
I’ve read far more of these kinds of reports in fifteen years following the EU institutions and cannot remember a statement quite this damning. And yet, rather than take it on board, the Commission pushed ahead and published these claims anyway.
And what about Sweden?
The EU tends to look at the continent wide smoking rate, not that of individual Member States. That’s because if it were to drill down into its own country by country data, it would have no choice but to accept that harm reduction works. According to the last Eurobarometer data, the most stunning declines in smoking rates happened in Sweden, Czechia and Greece. All countries that have embraced harm reduction and are consistently critical of the Commission’s stance.
This did not go unnoticed by the RSB. “The Member States’ specific tobacco control measures and the interplay with the overall effectiveness of the EU level framework are not sufficiently analysed”, it noted dryly. That’s about as close as they can get to saying “but why didn’t you look at Sweden”?
“The report should better distinguish between the intervention covered by the evaluation and other factors impacting consumer behaviour”, the RSB continue, “for example, price and changing consumer preferences”. In other words, the Commission shouldn’t credit falls in smoking rates to its legislation without looking at other possible causes, like people switching from smoking to safer products.
I could go on, but you get the point.
As far as I can tell, this is the only article that has covered the RSB’s reaction to the evaluation report. The legacy media in the Brussels bubble were happy to cover the report and then note that negative reaction “unsurprisingly” came from the industry. Both make far more money from paid subscriptions from pharma companies than big tobacco, so they know which side their bread is buttered.
With any luck, someone here in the bubble will pick it up. But for the moment, the Commission’s media management machine seems to be working as intended.
