Mixed methods evaluation of £70 million per annum increased investment for local authority-led stop smoking services and support
Smoking causes over 64,000 deaths in England every year, and many more people live with smoking-related illnesses. Stop Smoking Services (SSS) are proven to help people quit, but since 2012 the number of people using them has dropped by nearly 80 per cent.
To tackle this, the government has announced an extra £70 million each year from April 2024 to boost Local Stop Smoking Services (LSSS), more than doubling current funding.
This research will find out how well the new funding is helping LSSS to:
- Encourage more people, especially those in underserved groups, to try to quit.
- Offer effective treatments and support to help people stop smoking.
- Build capacity so services can meet increased demand.
- Strengthen partnerships with local health and care services.
We also want to understand the challenges and successes in putting these strategies into practice, and whether the extra funding is improving quit rates, referrals, and success rates.
Methods
To answer these questions, we will use a mix of surveys, interviews, and data analysis:
- Surveys: Working with Action on Smoking and Health, we will analyse survey responses from local tobacco control leads to see how councils and services are using the funding.
- Workshops and interviews: We will run workshops and conduct individual and group interviews with staff from around 15 per cent of local authorities and their Stop Smoking Services, as well as commissioners and healthcare professionals, to explore experiences and barriers.
- Service data analysis: Using routine NHS Digital data, we will compare referrals, quit attempts, quit success rates, and costs per quit from April 2024 to September 2025 with previous years, broken down by treatment type, socioeconomic status, and region.
- Bringing it all together: We will combine all the findings to get a full picture of the impact of the extra funding.
Because of limited time and budget, we will focus on two quarters of data rather than four, and do less in-depth qualitative analysis than originally planned.
Impact
This is the largest government investment in tobacco control so far. Our findings will help the Department of Health and Social Care and local services improve how the funding is used over the five-year programme.
Principal Investigator
Senior Lecturer in Tobacco Harm Reduction
Affiliations
Funding
Funding Body: National Institute for Health and Care Research
Amount: £5,500,000.00
Period: January 2024 - December 2029