Workplace ban 'is best way to stop smoking'

Banning smoking in British workplaces would persuade far more people to give up cigarettes than the Government's policy of raising taxes, research claims today.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, says if all offices became smoke-free, smoking rates would fall by four per cent, or the equivalent of 440,000 people giving up.

And the total number of cigarettes consumed would fall by 29 per cent because persistent smokers would also smoke less, the researchers say. To achieve a similar reduction through taxation, the tax on 20 cigarettes would have to rise from £3.44 to £6.59.

The findings were described as the "most compelling argument yet" for the Government to press ahead with long- delayed proposals to ban smoking in most workplaces.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, found totally smoke-free workplaces in the USA, Australia, Canada and Germany reduced smoking by 3.8 per cent. When that was combined with the effect of people smoking less, total cigarette consumption among employees was reduced by 29 per cent.

Professor Stanton Glantz, who led the study, said that tobacco taxes in Britain would have to rise by 73 per cent to achieve the same reduction in smoking by employees.

Across the whole population, smoke-free workplaces would reduce cigarette consumption per head by 7.6 per cent but that would still cost the tobacco industry £310m a year in lost sales.

Professor Glantz concluded: "Smoke-free workplaces not only protect non-smokers from the dangers of passive smoking, they also encourage smokers to quit or to reduce consumption."

He added that, in 1992, the tobacco firm Philip Morris privately estimated that if all workplaces were smoke-free, total consumption would drop by about 10 per cent, through a combination of quitting and cutting down.

Professor Glantz said: "This loss in revenues explains why the industry fights so hard against legislation to ensure that workplaces become smoke-free."

Ministers have been criticised for failing to implement a nationwide code of practice on workplace smoking, approved by the Health and Safety Commission two years ago. The code amounts to a ban on workplace smoking by underlining the rights of employees to protection from tobacco smoke. It would benefit an estimated three million non-smokers who are currently exposed to cigarettes at work.

In an accompanying editorial in the BMJ, Professor Robert West of St George's Hospital Medical School in London, is critical of the way "even this limited initiative seems to have stalled". Even though the public was very much behind greater restrictions on smoking, he said the Government had failed to bring in measures that would help reduce smoking prevalence in Britain from 27 per cent to 23 per cent.

Professor West said: "The figures from the review are startling and would make workplace smoking bans by far the most effective short-term smoking cessation strategy, barring outright prohibition, available to any Government"

Ash, the anti-tobacco lobby group, said the US research provided compelling evidence for restrictions.

But, on "current form it would be no surprise if the Government ignores the advice," the spokeswoman for Ash, Marsha White, said.

The findings indicated that if smoking rates fell by four per cent, the lives of 4,800 smokers could be saved each year, or the equivalent of 92 lives a week among the UK's 11 million adult smokers.

Ms White said: "Ministers have been consulting and consulting on this issue for month after month after month. It is time for the Government to stop posturing and to start to protect people – smokers and non-smokers alike."