UK bans smoking for anyone born after 2009

Members of Parliament have backed a UK government proposal to ban anyone born after 2009 from buying cigarettes. The Tobacco and Vapes Bill - which passed with a huge majority - also places curbs on vaping. It effectively means that the UK's smoking laws will be among the strictest in the world. To find out more, we put in a call to Linda Bauld, a public health expert and a social policy advisor to the Scottish government…

Linda - The tobacco and vapes bill is quite an ambitious piece of legislation and it does two things primarily. It passes into law, or it will, raising the age of sale for those born after 2009 until effectively it'd be very difficult for people to buy tobacco. I think it'll come in 2027. That's quite a big change from at the moment where the legal age of sale is 18. The other things the bill does are a series of measures which are primarily around vaping. The overall bill applies to all four nations of the UK, but the independent devolved assemblies or parliaments like the Scottish Parliament have to endorse the legislation. But I think it's a good thing because it certainly means the main measure, raising that age of sale of tobacco, would apply across the UK.

Chris - What's the evidence this is going to work though? Rishi Sunak, when he was discussing this, used words like 'we know this works,' but actually some people gave him some pushback. 57 of the standing MPs also voted against this. They said, 'well no, we don't know it works. There's no evidence, no one's ever done anything like this.' The closest we ever came was in New Zealand where it was announced, but then a change of government saw the whole idea go up in smoke.

Linda - That's correct. So in New Zealand they were going to introduce it and it was passed into law. But then a shift in government has meant that they've, as you say, turned away from that. We don't have direct evidence of this precise measure. What we do have is evidence from a range of countries who've raised the age of sale of tobacco in the past. And let me just explain the evidence for the UK. So when we raised the age of sale last time from 16 to 18, I have to be honest that those of us in the nicotine and tobacco research community would not have chosen that as our top ask for reducing smoking. But to our slight surprise, it actually made quite a big difference. So we saw a statistically significant drop in smoking in young people between 16 and 18 in the couple of years after the change came into force. We've also seen other parts of the world raise the age of sale, for example, from 16 to 18 or even to 19 in some parts of the US. And again, you see a reduction in smoking. So I think it will make a difference. But this sort of stage, doing it year by year, actually hasn't been done in any country.

Chris - Do you think that that's maybe going a bit too far and being a bit too complicated? Because if we can get a win, as you are saying, with just a raise in the age, do we need the complexity of saying, well you are 14 and you can't do it, but someone who is born the year before you can and won't it just be a bit difficult? Are most people who are going to smoke not caught up by smoking when they're in a vulnerable age? We target that age, put it beyond their reach and then we just leave it be.

Linda - Like any legislation, the proof will be in the pudding and certainly we'll need to look at how it's implemented. And there's a variety of things that could go wrong. I completely agree with that. But we're kind of in an interesting position in the UK where actually we have prevented a lot of smoking uptake through a range of measures, not just age of sale. So we're down to very low levels of smoking amongst young people. And what we've actually seen is, in the past, it'd be very common for somebody to start smoking at 13, 14, 15. But now we're actually seeing that the age of uptake is going up a little bit. So it's not impossible that some people start even above the age of 18. But by actually changing it gradually, I think we'll even do even more for prevention and that means that we'll be kind of stopping the remaining teenagers who are starting. And I think additionally de-normalise the sale of tobacco. So I think it's an interesting policy. It's got widespread support, including from those of us in the research community who are interested, I guess from a research perspective, to see how it happens in practice. But I think we're so close to actually getting to almost no young people smoking that I think this will help as an additional measure.

Chris - Indeed, because you've put your name to a letter that was published in the Daily Telegraph this week, and one of the things you write there is 'the majority of tobacco retailers and the public, including people who smoke, support the legislation which will remove the blight of smoking for future generations.' Do you know that the retailers want this added bureaucracy? It sounds like it will be a headache for them. And is it true that smokers actually want to see this?

Linda - The advocacy organisation, ASH, did a series of surveys. So they've actually done and commissioned that polling very recently. So 69% of adults, including more than half of smokers, support the legislation and half of small retailers. And actually it doesn't surprise me because we and my colleagues here at the University of Edinburgh produced a paper looking at small retailers in Scotland and they found that actually small retailers were making very little profit from tobacco and it had gone down in recent years. So I think a lot of retailers are kind of seeing this as it's not a product which is really important for them. So it's part of that denormalisation. Now the public doesn't surprise me at all because in all my years of doing research on smoking, I have never met a smoker, an adult smoker, who wants their children to start. And the vast majority of smokers want to stop themselves, but they find it really tough. And so I think unlike a lot of other public health measures that we're debating at the moment, this one has pretty broad support.

Chris - Hasn't had support from all quarters though, including a couple of former prime ministers who have come out saying, this is the nanny state and it's an overreach. Is there a danger that if we do things like this, it might turn people against what public health is trying to achieve? There's a danger that it might make people feel that they're being controlled a bit too much and there's pushback and it actually de-powers other interventions.

Linda - I think that's interesting. I certainly think that if you look at different political colours, political persuasions, if you're a strong libertarian, as many of the MPs who voted against it will be, then you don't want the state to interfere too much in anything that people have in their lives. So I fully understand that and their fear as well is that if you do it for smoking, we often hear the argument when we brought in standardised packaging for tobacco, there was a big lobby that said, 'oh, you know, you're going to do that for sweets or soft drinks or donuts next,' they'll have to have scary warning labels on them. So the sort of slippery slope argument. Tobacco is quite an unusual product. The only consumer product when used as intended, is likely to kill you in the longer term. It's quite black and white, so understand where they're coming from. But I think there is pretty broad support and we'll have to see how it goes when it's implemented.