Smoking ban could include beer gardens
The Government is set to review whether the smoking ban should be extended to include areas such as entrances to buildings and beer gardens.
Health secretary Andy Burnham will conduct a review of the smoking ban legislation and has outlined a new strategy to halve the number of smokers from 21% of the population to 10% by 2020.
As part of the push, the Government is set to consider insisting cigarettes are sold in plain packaging and extensions to the current ban, including public open spaces.
The Government has already committed to ban cigarette vending machines from October 2011.
The EU is also pushing for member states to ban smoking in outside public places.
"The Government has made massive progress on tobacco over the past decade," said Burnham. "Ten years ago, millions more people smoked and many have died early as a result.
"We've come so far and now we'll go even further — to push forward and save even more lives.
"Government should and will do everything in its power to protect young people. One day, in the not too distant future, we'll look back and find it hard to remember why anyone ever smoked in the first place."
The Government strategy includes:
• Protecting everyone, especially children, from the harms of second-hand smoke by promoting smokefree homes and cars and reviewing smokefree law. This review will include, for example, whether to extend legislation from enclosed public places and workplaces to areas like entrances to buildings.
• Stopping the sale of tobacco from vending machines
• The Government will carefully consider the case for plain packaging.
• Every smoker will be able to get help from the NHS to suit them if they want to give up
• Stopping young people being recruited as smokers by cracking down on cheap illicit cigarettes.
Chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, added: "We must keep pushing hard for a tobacco free future and keep up the momentum gained by England going smokefree in 2007.
"Since then, the number of people who have given up smoking has increased, so this new strategy and targeted support will help smokers who want to quit, to give up for good. It will also discourage children from taking up smoking and prevent a great number of unnecessary and early deaths."
Draconian
Bob Feal-Martinez, licensee at the Carpenter's Arms in Sindon, led the campaign against the smoking ban in 2007. He said the move to extend the ban was "inevitable".
He said: "It is absolutely ludicrous and totally draconian but I am afraid once the ban came in, it was always on the agenda.
"How can you ban smoking near a doorway? How far is near? If you have a landlocked pub, you are effectively saying that no smokers are welcome there.
"By the same token, they should ban cars from driving down the high street because there also people there and car emissions are far more poisonous.
"It will mean more people staying at home rather than going to the pub. I think its fair to say that the traditional pub won't exist in 10 years time — they will all be more like restaurants."
