A Sussex woman is calling on the government to scrap VAT on sunscreen after being diagnosed with skin cancer at the age of 26.<\/p>\n
Jessica Zbinden-Webster from Ferring in West Sussex will deliver a petition of almost 100,000 signatures to Downing Street, calling on the government to scrap the 20% VAT charged on sunscreen products.<\/p>\n
Diagnosed in 2018 Zbinden-Webster said she wanted the government to axe the tax to make sunscreen “more accessible to more people”.<\/p>\n
The government says it will “fight cancer on all fronts”.<\/p>\n
Describing her treatment Zbinden-Webster said the tumour had spread quite deep underneath the surface of her skin. <\/p>\n
“So I had that lopped off and then the hole was so big that it couldn’t be closed with stitches. <\/p>\n
I was warned, you know, you may look a little different for a while and as you can see from the pictures, I did look a little different for a while.”<\/p>\n
Determined to raise awareness of the disease she says it affects about 20% of the population, but it is avoidable in nine out of 10 cases.<\/p>\n
“In a cost-of-living crisis, the poorest are priced out of skin cancer prevention because of the 20% ‘cosmetic’ tax on sunscreen products. Sunscreen is not ‘cosmetic’ – it’s critical,” she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Sussex woman is calling on the government to scrap VAT on sunscreen after being diagnosed with skin…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747978,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-747977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}