UK ‘set to miss target for no smoking’

THE GOVERNMENT looks set to fail on its ambition for England to be smoke-free by 2030, a cancer charity has warned.

Cancer Research UK said current smoking trends suggested it would be 2037 before England was smoke-free and that smoking rates needed to drop 40 per cent faster than projected for the target to be hit.

The Government pledged last July to end smoking in England by 2030 as part of a range of measures to tackle preventable ill health.

Smoke-free means just five per cent of adults in England will smoke, a dramatic reduction from the 14 per cent at present.

Cancer Research UK said the ambition was being hindered by cuts to stop-smoking services and national campaigns and the gap between the least and most deprived people in England.

It said the richest group in England could expect to be smokefree by 2025 but the poorest would not be until the mid-2040s.

The charity also wants a fixed annual charge on the tobacco industry to help fund stop-smoking services.

Dr Katrina Brown, Cancer Research UK statistics manager and the report’s co-author, said: “Our modelling suggests that if the 2030 target is achieved, there could be around 3.4m fewer smokers in England compared with today.

“But unless Government acts to make smoking rates fall faster, we’re unlikely to reach the target.”

Smoking kills 115,000 people in the UK every year. Alison Cox, Cancer Research UK’s director of cancer prevention, said: “Smoking and its catastrophic impact on health remains more common within poorer communities so more funding is needed to help these disadvantaged groups as they are being left behind.”