Smoking Out

The leaked Labour plan to ban smoking in outdoor spaces such as pub gardens, restaurant ­terraces and university campuses has caused outrage in some quarters. The Conservative leadership candidates Dame Priti Patel and Robert Jenrick have suggested it is a nanny state move which will cause economic damage. The Tory MP Esther McVey went further with an ill-judged, feverish post on X which, in protest at an outdoor smoking ban, cited Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the dangers of staying silent during the ­Nazis’ rise to power. Many in the hospitality industry have voiced better modulated concerns, ­although Sir Tim Martin, founder of JD Wetherspoon, has said that he doesn’t think it will have a big effect on business, and is more a ­question of how far the state should intervene in risky behaviour.
The argument that an outdoor ban protects non-smokers from the dangers of passive inhalation is certainly much less powerful than it was with regard to the 2007 prohibition on smoking indoors in pubs, restaurants and workplaces. What it may do, however, is to protect smokers from themselves. Yes, they will still be able to smoke in their own homes, or in wide-open public spaces such as parks. But the inability to do so in many social ­spaces, even outdoors, is part of the marginalisation of the habit which has so successfully brought the number of UK cigarette smokers down.
In 2005, two years before the indoor smoking ban, 24 per cent of adults smoked; by 2019, that had dropped to 13.9 per cent. A cadre of hardened smokers will find a way to do so come what may, but evidence suggests many others can be nudged into giving up through changes in social acceptability and ease of opportunity.
Smoking remains the biggest preventable killer in the UK, responsible for 64,000 deaths a year in England alone: if even a small proportion of regular smokers abandoned the habit as a result of an outdoor smoking ban, the numbers would still render Sir Keir’s policy tweak worthwhile. At the same time the ­Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which ­Labour has taken forward from Rishi Sunak’s government, will ­attempt to phase out smoking by prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009.
In determinedly tackling the harm done by ­cigarettes, however, it is imperative that the government does not underestimate the burgeoning health problem created by the vaping industry. Medical practitioners broadly agree that, on current evidence at least, vaping is significantly less harmful than cigarette smoking. For adult smokers struggling to kick the habit, a shift to e-cigarettes is therefore a relatively beneficial change.
Health experts also emphasise, however, that no young person should take up vaping, which carries its own health harms. It is linked to lung damage, nicotine dependence, and the inhalation of cancer-causing chemicals and heavy metals, which are particularly prevalent in the large numbers of illegal vapes flooding the UK market. Doctors frequently warn that the long-term effects of vaping are as yet unknown. Yet 18 per cent of 11 to 17-year-olds in the UK have already tried e-cigarettes, encouraged by an appalling laxity in legislation which has allowed vaping to establish itself as a recreational habit, and cynical marketing which uses bright colours, sweet-shop flavours and even free samples to hook children.
There is one obvious way to preserve possible benefits for adult smokers, while limiting harm to young people: to follow the Australian model and restrict vape sales to pharmacies, obtainable in a narrow range of flavours upon proof of age. This would no doubt occasion even greater squawks of protest from businesses than an outdoor smoking ban. It would certainly demand energetic enforcement. But it is the only logical and effective means of averting the next public health time bomb.