2012 Annual Report

• On 29 February 2012, SFP held a high-level conference on pictorial warnings and plain standardised packaging in the European Parliament, Brussels. Hosted by a group of cross-party MEPs, the conference set the debate as to why pictorial warnings and plain packaging are needed in the upcoming revision of the Tobacco Products Directive.
• The TobTaxy project was successfully concluded in December 2012. Two more workshops were held in the course of 2012 and a TobTaxy toolkit was launched in twenty European languages. The toolkit is freely available on SFP’s website and aims to be a resource for the health community that explains tobacco taxation policies, while providing economic arguments for raising taxes on tobacco products, an effective measure in the fight against tobacco consumption.
• On World No Tobacco Day 2012, SFP published a research paper entitled “Block, Amend, Delay: tobacco industry’s efforts to influence the European Union’s Tobacco Products Directive (2001/37/EC).” The report exposes the strategies which the tobacco industry used to slow the progress of the current Tobacco Products Directive and weaken its content through the EU decision-making process between 1999 and 2001.
• In September 2012, SFP launched a new, streamlined and more user-friendly website with a dedicated site for TobTaxy, where all the resources regarding the project including the TobTaxy toolkit are freely available and easily accessible.
• As of January 2013, Smoke Free Partnership welcomed an additional partner, Action on Smoking and Health (UK) (ASH (UK)). ASH (UK) is a campaigning public health charity that works to eliminate the harm caused by tobacco and is represented on the SFP Board by its Chief Executive Deborah Arnott.