There’s no ideal time to learn that you have skin cancer. But being 26 years old, and a few weeks into a new job, must be one of the worst. I was in the middle of the open-plan office when I felt a warm sensation running from my eye. I checked my reflection and saw that, without warning, the blocked pore below my lower-right eyelid had begun to bleed. A lot. Mortified, I crept away from my new colleagues to book a GP appointment, all the while telling myself it couldn’t be anything serious.
“That’s not a blocked pore. That looks like skin cancer,” said the doctor the next morning. “Do you use SPF?”
The answer was no. But after a tumour excision that took my lower eyelid with it, a skin graft from my arm to cover the hole the cancer had left, and several laser surgeries to make my eye work like a normal eye again, my casual view of sunscreen shifted. My face had been disfigured by a cancerous tumour. On doctors’ orders, I began wearing sunscreen daily.
The single most effective way to prevent skin cancer is by using sunscreen on all exposed skin. It works by blocking the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which cause skin cells to mutate and ultimately become cancerous. In fact, melanoma – the deadliest type of skin cancer – could be prevented in nine out of 10 cases simply by staying safe in the sun.
Sunscreen is a healthcare essential, and not just for cancer-prone people like me. It benefits people of all skin tones, in all weather and all seasons. So why does the UK government class sunscreen as a cosmetic product, and charge 20% tax on each bottle sold?
It’s shocking that the likes of kangaroo meat, chartered helicopters and chocolate-chip cookies are VAT zero-rated, yet the Treasury charges VAT on life-saving sunscreen. That can add a couple of quid on to each purchase. In a cost of living crisis, every penny counts, and pricing British people out of basic disease prevention cannot be justified. Especially not when the biscuits at the cancer clinic are VAT-free.
If the government taxes sunscreen as a cosmetic product, consumers will use it as such. That’s one reason why Australia and the US have already made sunscreen exempt from VAT-equivalent taxes. By not following suit, the UK government is sending a dangerous message about the importance of sun safety to our public health.
It also gives the lie to the Brexit promise of freedoms over tax levies. For years, the UK’s membership of the EU was given as a reason for not abolishing VAT on sanitary products, despite a public outcry against it. But in 2020, thanks to a campaign led by Laura Coryton, the “tampon tax” was eliminated. Now that we have left the EU, the government can, and should, do the same for sunscreen.
The case for axing VAT isn’t just about the cost to individuals. Where the state is concerned, there’s an intersecting economic and healthcare argument for making sunscreen more accessible. Skin cancer is now the most common form of cancer in the UK, and the NHS spends about £500m every year to tackle it.
Soaring incidents of skin cancer mean greater NHS spending. There could be more than 262,000 new cases of non-melanoma skin cancer and 26,500 new cases of melanoma every year in the UK by 2038-40. That’s an increase from about 225,000 cases and 20,800 cases respectively today. The status quo is unsustainable.
The rising skin cancer rates among younger people should also cause concern. I’m living proof that the disease can occur in your 20s. With a recurrence rate of up to 60% for cases like mine, it’s likely that I am looking at a lifetime of NHS visits for the condition. That’s not cheap.
But young people are at risk long before they spot a suspicious lesion. We know that sunburn in childhood has a huge impact on your odds of developing skin cancer later in life. Yet children’s sunscreen also has a 20% tax levy. Kids’ clothes, footwear and cycling helmets are not subject to VAT, but their skin safety is.
It’s clear that skin cancer affects our health service as much as its patients. The solution is not to focus on treating skin cancer through the NHS. It should be on preventing it in the first place. That must start with incentivising consumers to wear sunscreen regularly by axing the VAT on SPF products.
I don’t want any other twentysomething to endure what I had to. It was devastating and it still is. As any cancer survivor will attest, the ordeal doesn’t end when the treatment does. I still fret over every new mark and freckle. The greatest antidote to that anxiety is making sure I wear sunscreen religiously, despite each purchase costing me 20% more than it should.
With cancer rates rising, no one should be taxed to protect themselves and their children from skin cancer. That’s why I’ve launched a campaign, Axe the SPF Tax, petitioning the government to scrap VAT on sunscreen. The campaign is backed by Coryton, the brains behind the Stop Taxing Periods movement, and it’s my hope that it will make a similar difference. If it stops even one more person dying from a preventable disease, it will have been worth it.
Jessica Zbinden-Webster is a campaigner, writer and political strategist
• This article was amended on 16 August 2024. An earlier version referred to the elimination of a “20%” tax on tampons; the applicable tax at the point of abolition had in fact been 5%.
