Saturday 1 July marks the 10th anniversary of the introduction of the smoking ban in England. The new law prohibited smoking in all workplaces and a variety of other public places. Many workplaces had already quarantined smokers to designated rooms or banned smoking altogether, so while the ban was an irritation, it only continued an existing trend. Where the smoking ban really hit was in pubs. The result has been to transform pubs, and in many ways for the worse. Many old-school boozers disappeared altogether, driven out of business as customers stayed away.
It shouldn’t have been like this. The original proposals put forward in Labour’s 2005 General Election manifesto offered a degree of flexibility about the ban. Firstly, pubs that don’t serve food and basically are just drinking establishments – ‘wet-led’, as they say in the trade – would not have been subject to the ban. The other kind of establishment given the freedom not to implement the ban would have been membership clubs, whether the posh gentlemen’s clubs of London or working men’s clubs around the country. It would be up to the members to decide.
That reflected the fact that there were still voices in the Labour hierarchy that had some sense of the party’s working-class roots. In particular, John Reid, who was health secretary at the time the legislation was first put forward, had been vocal in arguing that poorer people should be allowed their pleasures – including smoking – without undue interference from the state. However, Reid was moved in a cabinet reshuffle to be replaced by Patricia Hewitt, someone deaf to such subtleties.
There then followed much lobbying by health campaigners to make the ban more comprehensive. Any exemptions would cost lives, we were told. Bizarrely, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) also argued that a ban that exempted some pubs and clubs – that is, something that would allow at least some pubs to continue to allow smoking – was unfair. The exemptions were whittled away until all drinking establishments – apart from the bars in the Houses of Parliament, infamously – were banned from allowing smoking.
So, what has been the impact of the ban over the past 10 years? The first thing to be said is that the impact on health has been small or non-existent. That’s not surprising because the claim that passive smoking is a killer has always been shaky. The results of studies on passive smoking have been very inconsistent and at least two major studies in the past 15 years have concluded that, for the majority of people exposed to secondhand smoke, the risk is so small as not to be statistically significant.
That hasn’t stopped the claimsmaking since the ban. First, there was the bizarre tale of the ‘heart attack miracle’ – that rates of major coronary events plummet after the implementation of smoking bans. The first place for which this was claimed was the small town of Helena in the US state of Montana (current population: 28,000). A report in the British Medical Journal claimed heart attacks had fallen by 40 per cent there during a short-lived smoking ban. More pertinently, a study covering Scotland found a fall of 17 per cent in heart attacks after the smoking ban came into force in 2006. On closer inspection, however, the heart attack miracle fell apart, to the point where any fall in heart attacks at all due to the ban was called into question.
The second big health claim was that smokers, denied the convenience of smoking indoors, would throw in the towel and quit altogether. In fact, smoking rates, which had been falling steadily for decades, actually plateaued. It was only with the emergence of e-cigarettes into the mainstream that smoking rates started to fall again. Rather than state-imposed restrictions, it was the offer of an almost-as-good alternative product that led increasing numbers of smokers to quit.
