With yesterday’s headlines captured by the SACN’s virtual declaration of war on sugar, the government chose an interesting moment to publish draft legislation on plain packaging for tobacco.

Action on plain packs was notably absent in this year’s Queen’s Speech, despite the government saying in April it was “minded” to introduce such a measure. Plain packs, it seems, is the idea that just won’t die (let’s not forget it was shelved as recently as July 2013, only to be resuscitated four months later in the Chantler Review).

The draft regulations outlined yesterday pave the way for the introduction of plain packs in May 2016, coinciding with the start of the EU Tobacco Products Directive (TPD). They borrow heavily from existing laws in Australia, down to the proposed design of the packs: the outside must be a “drab brown with a matt finish”, and all text must be Helvetica.

Suppliers would be allowed to print their name once on each of the front, top and bottom surfaces, as well as on individual cigarettes. Furthermore, “packaging would not be permitted to include aspects that change after purchase, make noises or produce a smell not normally associated with tobacco packaging” – unlikely, though I’d give full marks to any company that tried.

The government says it hasn’t made up its mind on whether to introduce plain packs, and a consultation on the regulations is open until 7 August. But the tobacco industry and retail groups have been quick to cry foul (again), pointing out that the Chantler Review struggled to find evidence that plain packs actually discouraged kids from smoking (and that two-thirds of responses to the last public consultation were against plain packs). The lessons from down under are still unclear; recent data indicated that, faced with shelves of identical-looking packs, Australians had gravitated towards buying the cheaper brands – cutting their spend rather than their intake.

The government’s policy will “provide counterfeiters with a blueprint of exactly how to copy UK tobacco brands in the future”, Daniel Torras, JTI’s UK managing director said yesterday. “There needs to be better assessment of the effectiveness of (and need for plain packaging in the face of) existing and forthcoming regulation, such as the full implementation of the retail display ban and the EU’s Tobacco Products Directive.”

Forthcoming regulation is also a concern of the ACS, which warns that smaller retailers will end up footing the bill for the government’s chopping and changing of policy. In particular, why introduce a tobacco display ban (due on 6 April 2015) only to wipe brand names off packs?

“One of the main reasons given for introducing a tobacco display ban was that brands needed to be hidden from children,” said the ACS’ James Lowman. “Now the government is proposing to remove those brands, yet the tobacco display ban is going ahead at an average implementation cost of £1,000 per store… This makes a mockery of the government’s continued rhetoric about reducing the burden of regulation on business.”

There may be a saving grace for those opposed to plain packs: having been killed off before, there is no guarantee legislation will make it to the statute book in the lifetime of this Parliament. But yesterday’s draft regulations make those “drab brown” packs much more likely.