The government has stated that it effectively wants to ban smoking tobacco in the UK, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has moved one step closer with the second reading of a bill in the House of Commons which backs the government’s plans to create a “smoke-free generation”.
Tuesday was MPs’ first opportunity to debate the bill and to vote on it. It cleared its first Commons hurdle by 383 votes to 67, giving a majority of 316, with the support of the Labour party.
Rather than try to impose an immediate and total ban on smoking, the plan is to restrict sales of cigarettes by age, with an annual sliding scale. Each year the legal age for cigarette sales – currently 18 – will increase by one year, so that people born in or after 2009 will never be able to legally buy cigarettes, leading to an effective ban. The law would not affect those who are allowed to buy cigarettes now, so the reduction in overall cigarette smoking would be gradual. To deter sales to those underage, the proposal includes measures to introduce £100 on-the-spot fines for shops which sell tobacco and vapes to underage people.
The government says that it would spend £30m on enforcement of the new laws, including tackling the availability of cigarettes on the black market.
There are some exceptions in the proposals; for instance the rules would apply in all duty free shops in the UK, but anyone buying cigarettes abroad would be able to bring them back to the UK as long as they were legally acquired elsewhere.
Legislation
The government aims to have the new system in force by 2027, and to work with the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to make the laws consistent across the UK.
Although the first reading of the bill was passed in the House of Commons, it met some opposition, including from Boris Johnson who described the idea as ‘nuts’. Also voting against the bill were Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary; Suella Braverman, the former home secretary; Robert Jenrick, the former Home Office minister; and former prime minister Liz Truss, who described the measure as “unconservative”.
The aim of the bill is to improve national health. Cigarettes release thousands of different chemicals when they burn, including carbon monoxide, lead, and ammonia. Many components of tobacco are poisonous, and up to 70 cause cancer. Smoking is also linked to other serious illnesses, including lung disease, heart disease and strokes. Smoking is still the number one preventable cause of death, disability and ill health, causing around 80,000 deaths per year across the UK, and costing the NHS and the economy an estimated £17bn every year. The government estimates that creating a “smoke-free generation” could prevent more than 470,000 cases of heart disease, stroke, lung cancer and other diseases by the end of the century.
Packaging
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill also includes measures to tackle vaping among young people who have never smoked before. Vaping is less harmful than smoking cigarettes but is not free of health risks, and health experts agree that anyone who doesn’t already smoke should not start vaping. While vaping is too recent a phenomenon for any long-term effects to have become clear, the NHS says it “unlikely to be totally harmless”, and the government has already announced plans to ban disposable vapes in England as soon as April 2025, and hopes to extend this ban across the UK as well. Contents, flavours and packaging of nicotine vapes will also be restricted in order to make them less attractive to children, and a new tax on vaping will be introduced from October 2026.
A final vote in the House of Lords is expected to take place in the middle of June after the bill passes its third reading there, but much has to happen in the Commons first. The committee stage comes later in April, when amendments can be tabled, before there is a vote on them in May, and then a vote by MPs on the bill’s third reading.
Other countries around the world are already working on reducing smoking, with New Zealand’s previous government planning to ban anyone born after 2008 from buying cigarettes or tobacco products in their lifetime (though the current government said it will scrap the law); Mexico banning smoking at beaches, in parks and in some cases in private homes; Portugal aiming to have a “smoke-free generation” by 2040, and planning laws to stop bars, cafes and petrol stations from selling tobacco products; and Canada planning to reduce tobacco use to less than 5 percent by 2035, and becoming the first country to rule that health warnings should be printed on individual cigarettes.
