Tobacco control was one of the most successful life-changing reforms of the last Labour Government. The ban on smoking in enclosed public places and other measures encouraged more than two million people to quit and thus saved thousands of lives and millions in treatment on the National Health Service.
A effort by a Tory backbencher David Nuttall to repeal the ban was soundly defeated in the House of Commons. He argued for allowing pub and club owners to determine whether smoking would be allowed on their premises. This was the position adopted by Labour in 2005. Subsequently, though, we went beyond that – to popular acclaim.
Even the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government has announced that there will be no review of the smoking ban. Tackling second-hand smoke is now an established feature of life across Europe and is increasingly being adopted internationally.
We should go further. People have the right to their vices, but they don’t have the right to inflict them on others. Many will remember the literally smoke-filled rooms at political meetings and the tobacco fog at public events.
We should now embrace a ban on smoking in cars which carry children. For many children, their first encounter with tobacco is when their parents or other adults take them out for a weekend drive or on a long car journey.
Dame Helena Shovelton of the British Lung Foundation rightly says that “Smoking just one cigarette, even with the car window open, creates a greater concentration of second-hand smoke than a whole evening’s smoking in a pub or a bar. A ban on smoking in the car with children would prevent some of the 22,000 new cases each year of asthma, caused as a direct result of passive smoking.” This measure commands widespread support. For instance, a survey of 1,000 mumsnet.com users showed 86 per cent in favour and almost the same number of smoking parents in accord.
But the current ban and any extension is only one part of the strategy to encourage people to give up smoking and reduce the cost in human lives and wasted NHS resources. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, of which I am a member, launched an inquiry to look hard and long at the effectiveness and economics of tobacco control.
We concluded that efforts to cut smoking and reduce tobacco smuggling have been highly effective, with a return on investment of nearly10 times their annual cost. Slashing these budgets will boost tobacco smuggling and mean massive losses to taxpayers.
Cutting this investment would mean net losses not gains to the Exchequer. The cost of these measures is less than £300 million a year, while the net annual revenue benefit from this investment is £1.7 billion – plus increased tax revenues resulting from a reduction in tobacco smuggling, which bring in a further £1.2 billion a year. Some are also seeking to roll back plans to stop the sale of tobacco from vending machines, as well as the prohibition on the display of tobacco. These last two measures were agreed in the last Parliament and aim to choke off the supply of young recruits to the tobacco habit.
The notion that scrapping these two measures would be a retrograde step has been endorsed by our cross-party group. The Government is being lobbied hard by tobacco control groups, on the one hand, and tobacco manufacturers and retailers, on the other. Ministers will make a decision on these measures in the forthcoming white paper on health.
Those who believe that the strategy of “denormalising” tobacco has already paid handsome dividends should keep up the pressure on the Government to maintain this vital strategy.
Smoking remains the single biggest cause of preventable premature illness and death in this country. If the Government wants to avoid storing up health problems for the future, a little investment into preventing the young in our “Big Society” from falling into the clutches of tobacco peddlers would not go amiss.
Such measures should be at the heart of the new public health service and public health strategy.
Ian Mearns is Labour MP for Gateshead
