Will ‘biggest public health intervention in a generation’ help lower Portsmouth’s smoking rates?

In his speech at the Conservative Party conference, Rishi Sunak said the legal age for buying tobacco should rise every year from 2009 to stop youngsters taking up smoking in a bid to “try and stop teenagers taking up cigarettes in the first place”.

He said “a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette” under new legislation for England.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “Smoking is unequivocally the single biggest preventable cause of death, disability and illness in our society.

“Everyone recognises this measure will be the single biggest intervention in public health in a generation.”

Asked about restricting people’s right to choose, Mr Sunak said there was “no safe level of smoking”.

In his speech, the Prime Minister said: “People take up cigarettes when they’re young – four in five smokers have started by the time they’re 20.

“If we are to do the right thing for our kids, we must try and stop teenagers taking up cigarettes in the first place.”

The News recently reported that the rate of people smoking in Portsmouth increased in 2022, bucking the national trend.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics show 14.7% of adults in the city’s local authority area smoked in 2022 – up from 13.6% the year before.

The national rate of smokers across England was 12.7%, the lowest level on record.

Compare that to 1974, where the average across the UK was 45%. By 1990, the figure had dropped to 30%.

Portsmouth’s percentage has dropped from 2018, when 17.5% of those aged 18 and over smoked.

In June of this year, NHS England figures for the former NHS Portsmouth CCG revealed 239 of 1,985 mothers were smokers (12%) at time of delivery in 2022-23.

That was double the national ambition of 6% or less.

In March 2020, meanwhile, data from Public Health England showed there were 1,441 admissions to hospital attributable to smoking in Portsmouth in 2018-19 – a 6% rise on the year before.

Over an 11-year period, 14,000 people were hospitalised – a figure that includes admissions for diseases that were wholly or partially attributed to smoking for people over 35.