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Teenage smoking is double government target levels

Anti-smoking campaigners have expressed anger at the government’s continuing refusal to ban tobacco advertising, despite an increase in teenage smoking to double the target levels set in the Health of the Nation (HoN).

According to Fit for the Future, the second progress report on the HoN, the proportion of 11-15 year olds smoking regularly rose to 12 per cent in 1994 -up 2 per cent on the previous year. The government had targeted smoking among teenagers to fall to 6 per cent by the end of 1994.

Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell, described the situation as ‘a problem’ but denied that it justified a ban on tobacco advertising.

He pledged that the government would continue to increase the price of tobacco above the rate of inflation and claimed that this would be more effective.

Pamela Furness, chief executive of anti-smoking group ASH, called on the government to ‘stop pandering to the tobacco industry and to ban the advertising and promotion of the deadly product which kills half of all regular smokers’.

While welcoming the government’s commitment to increase tobacco taxes by 3 per cent in real terms in future budgets, it was not enough, she said. ‘Voluntary agreements on advertising have been in place for over 20 years and have suited the tobacco industry nicely: they are not worth the paper they are written on.’

A spokesman for the BMA added that the rise in teenage smoking removed ‘any last pretence’ that the government’s annual tax increase on cigarettes was working. Without a ban on cigarette advertising the government’s approach was a ‘one-horse policy’, he said.

Fit for the Future shows also that English people are becoming fatter and less fit, with the number of obese men and women doubling since the early 1980s. Progress is, however, being made towards targets in a number of other key areas, including suicides and accidental deaths.