Smoking banned, Britain aims at the first 'smoke-free' generation

A 'smoke-free' generation by law, in the hope of being able to alleviate the burden of tobacco-related diseases on an already overburdened national healthcare system. This is the aim of the ad hoc legislation - unprecedented in a major European country - finally passed in Westminster (after announcements in recent years and a long parliamentary process) to ban for life the purchase and consumption of cigarettes of any kind by all 17-year-old Britons born after 2008.

The initiative, prepared at the time by Rishi Sunak's conservative government (after the libertarian predecessor Boris Johnson's turn for the better), is the result of a text revised and corrected in an even more rigorous key by Keir Starmer's current Labour team. The text has received the final green light from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and has been sent in these hours to King Charles III, as Head of State, for the necessary institutional automatism of countersignature: the so-called Royal Assent.

The law, called the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, provides for a generational ban on smoking and vaping e-cigarettes extended to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009. The current Health Minister, Wes Streeting, hailed its forthcoming enactment as "an historic moment for the nation's health", pointing to the goal of creating "a first smoke-free generation" in the UK: "protected for life," he said, "from the harms of addiction". It also introduces further restrictions against older people smoking in open spaces adjacent to public places, children's playgrounds, schools or hospitals.

And it is part of a wider crackdown called for by the public health service (NHS) to relieve the pressure on medical facilities of a plague that, in England alone, is estimated to have caused 75,000 deaths in 2024. Another recent law, passed by the Starmer government in June 2025, which imposes a complete stop to the trade in disposable electronic cigarettes on the island, is also part of this clampdown. In spite of the protests of the more liberal right, raised now mainly by the Trumpian leader of Reform Uk, Nigel Farage, to the cry of 'no to the nanny state'. In 2022, New Zealand had been the first country in the world to outlaw (at least on paper) smoking for young people born since 2008; but the initiative of the then Labour cabinet in Wellington was later called into question by the Conservative coalition that came to power.

While it is the Maldives that implemented a similar rule before London last year: banning smoking in the archipelago's crystal-clear Indian Ocean reef waters to all natives from 2007 onwards.