New TCRG paper outlines methodology behind UK Tobacco Industry Interference Index

03 October 2025, at 11:15.

A new methods paper on the 2023 UK Tobacco Industry Interference Index (UKTI) by members of the TCRG’s Tobacco Tactics team, alongside Mary Assunta from the Global Center for Good Governance in Tobacco Control, has been published in Tobacco Prevention and Cessation.

The UKTI assesses government compliance with Article 5.3 of the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) – in other words, to what extent the government and wider public sector manage to protect policymaking from tobacco industry interference, particularly when it comes to public health.

Monitoring tobacco industry interference can be challenging, with information found across many locations and in different formats. This paper outlines some of the methods and the sources used to produce the UKTI and reflects critically upon them.

Lead author Tom Gatehouse explains:

We consulted a wide range of different sources to produce the UKTI 2023 – lobbying registers, industry materials, MPs and Lords’ Registers of Interests and many more. We also submitted hundreds of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to access data which wasn’t in the public domain. However, despite this wealth of information, data on government-industry interactions is still not gathered and published systematically, and it is likely that further interference occurred which we were unable to document. Nonetheless, we hope that lessons learned in the UK may be relevant to researchers doing similar work elsewhere in the world.

Read the paper:

The UK Tobacco Industry Interference Index 2023: A methodological approach. T. Gatehouse, K. Silver, M. Assunta, R. Alebshehy, Tobacco Prevention and Cessation, 2025;11(September):43, doi: 10.18332/tpc/207097