An extended smoking ban: could it herald a new dawn in cancer prevention?
The announcement that the new government is considering extending the smoking ban is welcome news, but could it signal a much stronger focus on tackling preventable cancers – one that would have the support across the country and Parliament?
It appears the government is considering a major extension to the indoor smoking ban, first introduced by the last Labour government back in 2007. Reports, effectively confirmed by the Prime Minister last week, suggest that the government is looking to dramatically extend the ban to include many outdoors areas.
The details of this will only be confirmed when actual proposals are published. However, on the basis of documents leaked to it, The Sun newspaper has suggested the new ban could extend not just to beer gardens, outdoor spaces in restaurants and clubs, but also to children’s play areas, and areas outside sports grounds, universities, hospitals.
CancerWatch strongly welcomes what looks like a bold new move by the government, though we echo comments made by Chief Executive of ASH that the priority should remain bringing the smokefree generation policy into law.
Could this be a Parliament for cancer prevention?
But what we find most exciting is the possibility that this could signal a much stronger focus on preventative health policy, and cancer prevention specifically. There are some good reasons to hope that this could be the case.
For starters, the Prime Minister’s language. When asked about the policy, he stressed the importance of taking a preventative approach to health, highlighted the 80,000 ‘preventable deaths’ each year attributed to smoking, and talked about the burden of preventable illness on the NHS and the public purse. This follows from a strong focus on prevention in the Labour manifesto
Given the size of the Labour government’s majority, this is important. But there also appears to be broad-based support for this stronger approach to prevention across a wide swathe of British society and across Parliament.
A YouGov poll suggests that 58% of the public would support the proposed ban, with only 35% opposed. What’s more, it showed majority support across all nations and regions, across all age groups, classes and genders, and among supporters of all political parties, with the sole exception of Reform.
The new outside smoking ban will come forward as part of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, outlined in the Kings Speech in July. And the centrepiece of this Bill will be the smokefree generation policy which would make it illegal for anyone born after 2009 to ever buy cigarettes. But this was a law the previous Conservative government had already been in the process of taking through Parliament. There were some Tory backbench dissenters to the policy, but the Bill passed its second reading by 383 votes to 67 in a Conservative-dominated parliament.
And consensus goes further than this. Obesity and poor diet are also major causes of preventable cancers. The Labour government has pledged to ban junk food advertising to children, but restrictions on junk food advertising featured in all of the largest three parties’ manifestos. And the Liberal Democrats, with a much-increased presence in this Parliament, went furthest of all in their manifesto, pledging to introduce a new levy on tobacco company profits to fund smoking cessation services.
Properly funded cessation services can play a crucial role in helping us reach a smokefree country by the end of the decade and it should be the extraordinary profits being made by tobacco companies that pay for this, not the hard-pressed public pursed. This is why CancerWatch placed this idea at the heart of our Cancer Prevention Manifesto for 2024. It is not an idea the government appears to be considering yet, though in a tough fiscal environment, the ‘polluter pays’ model should be an attractive one.
Yet we hope that the proposed extension of the smoking ban signals the beginning of a tougher approach to cancer prevention, in which the government recognises the enormous benefits of prevention – to peoples’ lives and health and the public purse – and is prepared to take on vested interests to pursue this. Let’s hope they grasp the nettle. If they do, it appears they should have broad-based support, across the country and across the new Parliament.