A non-controversial public health policy? The UK's gradual ban on smoking has been a PR success | Devi Sridhar

Last week saw the passage of the tobacco and vapes bill, which has a very ambitous aim: to create a “smoke-free generation” and eventually end smoking for ever in the UK. Quite simply, anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never be legally able to buy tobacco products. From 2027, the minimum legal age for the sale of tobacco will increase by one year (from the current age of 18) every year. There will be a permanent generational line: everyone above it will still be allowed to buy cigarettes and vapes; everyone below it won’t. But over time the proportion of people allowed to smoke will become smaller and smaller as older citizens die – until one day no one in the UK will be able to legally buy cigarettes.

It’s quite a clever piece of legislation: rather than an outright ban that will result in conflict over rights with smokers now, it gradually reduces the number of those able to purchase tobacco products legally year by year, hopefully leading to further declines in smoking that happens invisibly. Public health researchers will be studying the impact of this legislation (a policy experiment and one of the first of its kind), and whether it could be a model to introduce in other countries and areas.

The law also extends the regulation of vapes – including their advertising and marketing to youth, and banning their use in playgrounds, public and commercial buildings and cars carrying children, and outside hospitals and schools. Despite an increasingly politically polarised climate, this law enjoys remarkable cross-party consensus, with strong support from Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. Some of the strongest support for the legislation has come from smokers. Research carried out by YouGov in 2024 found that 52% of smokers supported raising the age of sale by one year every year and 78% of the public supported the idea of a smoke-free generation.

Before you jump forward a few decades to the idea of police arresting a 50-year-old lighting up a cigarette, it’s worth clarifying that the law doesn’t criminalise smoking itself. Instead it only applies to those selling tobacco products, with the burden falling on retailers. Over time this will create a slightly odd situation: two adults going into a shop could be treated differently based on their birth year. A 40-year-old would legally able to purchase tobacco, while his 39-year-old friend would be refused service. This is intentional: to move towards a steady decline in smoking that almost happens invisibly as years pass.

Why would smokers support this policy? Perhaps it’s because they wish this legislation had been in place when they were younger: most people who smoke became addicted at a young age, with 90% of people who smoke starting before the age of 21. Many became addicted before they fully understood the health risks or how it would affect the quality of their daily lives. Understandably, polls tend to show that the vast majority of smokers regret starting. But quitting is notoriously difficult: it’s estimated that 80% of people who smoke have tried to quit, and struggled. Many of these smokers now know it’s killing them: two-thirds of deaths of female smokers in their 50s, 60s and 70s are linked to smoking, and smokers are estimated to die 10 years earlier than non-smokers.

But there’s a deeper philosophical question around rights for adults: does this kind of generational ban infringe on individual freedom? It depends on your interpretation of freedom. Freedom isn’t only the ability to choose harmful products – it can also mean the freedom to grow up without being systematically targeted by industries built on addiction. In addition, smoking is ruinously expensive to the NHS: smoking-related disease and complications are estimated to cost our health system £2.6bn a year and society more widely about £11bn a year. In an overstretched service facing multiple demands and pressures, freedom can also mean being able to access timely, high-quality healthcare in an NHS that isn’t overstretched by preventable disease.

The profit from smoking is made by private companies and their shareholders, while the costs are paid by individuals in their health and wellbeing, and by taxpayers supporting health services. Tobacco companies have long been aware of the same statistics that public health experts now cite on why this needs government regulation: if someone doesn’t start smoking by their early 20s, they probably never will.

Other countries will be closely watching how this UK policy experiment goes and whether they should follow: it’s a public health approach rooted in not banning a product immediately but quietly engineering its disappearance year by year. (The Maldives implemented a similar ban beginning late last year.) Perhaps the biggest testament to why it’s needed? Some of its loudest champions are the smokers who wonder what their own health and life would have looked like if this legislation had been introduced when they were young.

- Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)