Herefordshire gears up for campaign to stop young people smoking
News that the legal minimum age for buying tobacco is to rise from 16 to 18 years of age has been welcomed by health, education and enforcement agencies in Herefordshire.
Herefordshire Council and Herefordshire Primary Care Trust are surveying secondary schools in the county to help direct future anti-smoking campaigns and support sales testing of tobacco outlets by trading standards officers.
The legal minimum age goes up from 1 October, following on the heels of the government announcement that England is to go smoke free from 1 July 2007. Raising the legal age to 18 will make it easier for retailers to spot under-age smokers and lead to a fall in the number of teenagers who get addicted to nicotine and continue to smoke into adulthood.
Councillor Don Rule, cabinet member for children and young people, said: “Nationally about nine per cent of young people aged between 11 and 15 smoke, and Herefordshire will soon have its own figures for teenage smokers available following a Young People’s Lifestyle Survey carried out in most secondary schools at the end of the autumn term. We are determined to try to prevent all young people from starting to smoke and help those who are already hooked to quit”.
Dr Frances Howie, associate director for health improvement at the primary care trust, added: “Smoking is dangerous at any age, but the younger people start, the more likely they are to become life-long smokers and to die early. Someone who starts smoking aged 15 is three times more likely to die of cancer due to smoking than someone who starts in their late twenties. The law change will hopefully reduce the number of people with smoking related preventable diseases. It will also help to tackle health inequalities since we know that a major factor in explaining these is that people in poor areas are more likely to smoke than are people in more affluent areas.”
The government has made the law change after consulting with the public, the retail industry, the NHS, local authorities and other stakeholders.
Councillor Phil Edwards, cabinet member for environment, said: “It is still too easy for older children and young people to buy tobacco. National figures show that three out of every four who try to buy it found it easy to do so, usually from small shops like newsagents or corner shops.
“The council’s trading standards service strongly supports the change to the legal age limit on sales of tobacco. The council has long been concerned about the health risks associated with smoking among children and teenagers and has regularly run age restricted sales testing campaigns to try to stop the sale of tobacco to young people under the age of 16.
“Changing the age of sale to 18 will help eliminate confusion among retailers and will make it more difficult for young people to purchase cigarettes. This can only be a good thing.”
ENDS
Notes to editors:
The raising of the minimum age for buying tobacco from 16 to 18 will be effective from 1 October 2007.
The legal age for the purchase of tobacco products has been 16 since 1908. The current law controlling the sale of tobacco to children under 16 is set out in the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 as amended by the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act 1991.
The Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Among Young People in England Survey 2004 showed that nearly 70 per cent of 11 to 15 year old smokers say they buy their cigarettes from small shops such as newsagents and corner shops.
The decision to increase the age from 16 to 18 follows a public consultation this summer. The consultation document can be found here:
http://www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/13/67/33/04136733.pdf
Other EU countries to recently increase their minimum age for sale of tobacco products include Ireland, Malta and Spain.
The new measures will be supported with education for retailers on better compliance with underage sales law; guidance for magistrates and a communications programme for local authority enforcement.
