BRITISH PRIME MINISTER Rishi Sunak has proposed raising the smoking age by one year, every year, effectively meaning that 14 year olds today will never legally be sold a cigarette.
Sunak made the anti-smoking pledge during his leader’s speech at the Conservative party conference in Manchester this afternoon, saying that “measures that restrict choice are never easy”.
Sunak said more must be done to “try and stop teenagers taking up cigarettes in the first place” but that targeting those already addicted to smoking would be unfair.
“Without a significant change thousands of children will start smoking in the coming years and have their lives cut short as a result.”
He added: “I propose that in future we raise the smoking age by one year every year.
That means a 14-year-old today will never legally be sold a cigarette and that they and their generation can grow up smoke free.
“I know not everyone in this hall will agree with me on this. But I have spent a long time weighing up this decision. Simply put, unlike all other legal products, there is no safe level of smoking,” he said.
What has ultimately swayed me is that none of us, not even those who smoke, want our children to grow up to be smokers and this change can make that a reality.
He added: “It will save more lives than any other decision we could take.”
Referring to smoking as the single biggest cause of preventable death in the UK, he added: “We have a chance to cut cancer deaths by a quarter, significantly ease those pressures, and protect our children, and we should take it.
Sunak said there would be a Commons vote on the change in the law in the future, but said it would be a free vote, describing it as a “matter of conscience”.
Sunak’s plan matches an approach in New Zealand to effectively ban smoking by progressively increasing the legal age. These plans were announced in 2021 and enforced last year.
Then-taoiseach Micheál Martin was asked about the plans back in 2021 and described them as a “very interesting and clever idea”.
Sunak also said he will bring forward measures to restrict the availability of vapes to children.
Speaking about this, he said: “We must act before it becomes endemic, so we will also bring forward measures to restrict the availability of vapes to our children, looking at flavours, packaging displays and disposable vapes.
HS2
Elsewhere in his speech, Sunak confirmed that the proposed high-speed railway line linking London to Manchester is being scaled back.
Instead, HS2 is to run from London to Birmingham and that the money earmarked for it to run onwards to Manchester would instead be invested in local train lines.
“I am ending this long-running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project and in its place, we will reinvest every single penny, £36 billion, in hundreds of new transport projects in the North and the Midlands, across the country,” he said.
“This means £36 billion of investment in the projects that will make a real difference across our nation.”
The move was criticised by the head of one the UK’s biggest unions GMB, with its head of research and policy saying that the decision to cut HS2 to Manchester will cost “hundreds of jobs”.
“We can’t rebalance the economy or fix the railway capacity crisis without HS2. It’s essential that the planned route is now protected so that a future government can reverse this disastrous decision,” said GMB’s Laurence Turner.
Touching on the culture war topics that have dominated many of the speeches from the Conservative conference, Sunak said that the UK was not a “racist country”.
“Never let anyone tell you that this is a racist country. It is not. My story is a British story, a story about how a family can go from arriving here with little, to Downing Street in three generations,” he said.
Speaking about gender, Sunak said: “We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. A man is a man, a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”
Sunak’s 64-minute-long speech was the joint longest delivered by a Conservative prime minister at a party conference this century, nearly half an hour longer than the speech given by his predecessor Liz Truss last year and equalling the longest managed by Theresa May in 2017.
- With reporting by Press Association
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