Latest updates: Deputy PM says she is not going to get into hypotheticals when challenged over potential spending cuts
Thérèse Coffey, the health secretary and deputy PM, also refused to deny reports that she intends to shelve the government’s proposed smoking action plan in her morning interview round.
The questions on this were prompted by a story by my colleague Denis Campbell saying ministers are expected to break a promise to publish a smoking action plan later this year. Denis reports:
The government had committed several times to publish a tobacco control plan “later this year”. However, the health secretary, Thérèse Coffey, does not intend to honour that promise, according to officials with knowledge of her intentions.
Coffey, who is also the deputy prime minister, smokes and has previously accepted hospitality from the tobacco industry. Since becoming an MP in 2010 she has voted in the Commons against an array of measures to restrict smoking, including the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, the outlawing of smoking in cars containing children and forcing cigarettes to be sold in plain packs.
I’ll be looking in the next few months at all our different prevention programmes, seeing what’s potentially working, seeing how many things there. There’s quite a lot of things in draft at the moment and working that through. But my top priority is where the majority people interact with the health and social care today [she means ambulances, backlogs, care, and doctors and dentists – her “ABCD” priority list].
I’m the government minister, so if that’s government policy today, then that’s what I agree with.
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