In 1947 pensioners did not get free bus passes funded by HM Government – but they did get free cigarettes.
That year, when Britain was bankrupt, the Chancellor Hugh Dalton announced rises of 50% in tobacco duties - his purpose was “to check smoking and save dollars.” Recognising that this would fall particularly harshly on “old people whose habits by the time they had reached pension age were well formed,” a scheme was devised which gave any pensioner who claimed to be a smoker tokens worth 2 shillings and fourpence a week which could be used for the purchase of tobacco.
[For connoisseurs, if you scroll down here you will find a nice explanation by Dalton of how he told his civil servants, in mandarin-speak, to ‘just do it.’]
As is the way of such things, the concession stayed, became very difficult to get rid of, despite much grumbling & criticism.
In 1955 The Times thundered “The subsidy on pensioners’ tobacco is an oddity of the welfare State that passes none of the tests of public usefulness beyond the most near-sighted politician’s test of immediate electoral advantage.”
It was unfair on others of the poor who were smokers, and to pensioners whose pleasure lay in drinking tea or having a flutter on the pools. It was also open to abuse – any non-smoking pensioner could obtain tokens & convert them to cash. As far as I have been able to find out so far none of the objections was based on health effects.
Then in March 1957 Mr David Llewellyn, MP for Cardiff North, asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Why, in view in the established relationship between tobacco-smoking and lung cancer, smoking by retirement pensioners is subsidised; and whether he will withdraw the subsidy and increase the basic retirement pension for all pensioners by the amount that would be saved.”
The Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, replied sniffily that “The tobacco token scheme, which enables retirement pensioners who smoke to buy tobacco at a reduced price, was introduced solely to meet the special circumstances arising out of the heavy increase in tobacco duty in 1947; it is therefore not, in any correct sense of the term, a subsidy.”
However the time had come, & tobacco tokens were abolished in the National Insurance Act of 1958
Pensioners' Tobacco Tokens (Hansard, 7 December 1950)
Pensioners' Tobacco Tokens (Loss) (Hansard, 5 February 1953)
Tobacco Tokens: 5 May 1953: House of Commons debates ...
Smoke signals: women, smoking and visual culture in Britain - Google Books Result
Tobacco duty
Pensioners' Tobacco Tokens (Loss) (Hansard, 5 February 1953)
Tobacco Tokens: 5 May 1953: House of Commons debates ...
Smoke signals: women, smoking and visual culture in Britain - Google Books Result
Tobacco duty
