Although the original intention of the project was simply to describe current tobacco control policies in Europe, it seemed worthwhile trying to quantify these policies, in order to be able to compare countries systematically. However, while we have evidence which tells us broadly which tobacco control measures are effective, it is not easy to decide what weight should be given to each policy measure in a scale. Ideally this would be decided by the size of the effect of a policy measure, but relatively little rigorous research on the effectiveness of tobacco control policy exists, and such research that does exist is not precise enough to permit easy comparisons between countries. Therefore, in order to score the questionnaire and create the scale we had to assign scores to each tobacco control policy. To do this we convened an international panel of ten experts to agree the allocation of points to the scale.