More than a million people in the UK quit smoking in 2025, according to figures from UCL’s smoking toolkit study released to mark yesterday’s National No Smoking Day. Thirty-five per cent of current smokers had tried to stop, with 29 per cent quitting successfully. A separate poll by ASH, meanwhile, shows that more than half of smokers would like to stop.
According to the most recent ONS statistics, around 5.4m UK adults had used e-cigarettes in the previous year, with the number of vapers overtaking the number of smokers for the first time. The proportion of current smokers fell to 10.6 per cent of the population in 2024, the lowest since records began.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill – which aims to create a ‘smokefree generation’ by phasing out the legal sale of tobacco to anyone born after January 2009, as well as tightening the regulations around vape flavours and packaging – has now passed its final stage in the House of Lords. Although the bill still has to return to the commons for consideration of amendments, it is expected to become law by the end of next month.
However, health charities including ASH are urging the government to maximise the impact of the legislation by pairing it with a ‘national quit push’, including ‘properly funded’ smoking cessation services, a high-profile public health campaign, and targeted help for the groups with the highest smoking rates – such as people in manual jobs and people with mental health needs.
A report last year from the University of York called for urgent action to address the ‘unseen epidemic’ of smoking-related deaths among people with mental health issues, as those with conditions like depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were around three times more likely to smoke than the general population. According to the most recent NDTMS figures, almost half of people in drug and alcohol treatment were also smokers.
‘The smokefree generation policy is a vital step forward, but it will not on its own address the harm caused by smoking among the millions of people who already smoke,’ said Sarah Jackson of UCL. ‘To prevent avoidable illness and premature deaths on a large scale, we must ensure that existing generations of smokers are supported to quit. Making effective treatments accessible, affordable, and proactively offered through healthcare services will be critical if we are to translate motivation into long-term success and reduce the massive burden of smoking-related disease.’
‘History shows that big, high-profile policies create a real ripple effect,’ added ASH chief executive Hazel Cheeseman. ‘When smokefree laws banning smoking in public places were introduced in 2007, almost one in five people who tried to quit said the new law helped motivate them. Now we have the chance to do that again, inspiring the 5.3m people still smoking to join the smokefree generation and take a step towards ending the harm caused by tobacco.’
This year’s Global Forum on Nicotine will explore why prohibition of safer nicotine products such as vapes, pouches and snus in some countries risks rather than protects public health, and look at the emerging ‘deep structural contradiction’ between science and global public health policy from organisations such as WHO. Full details available here.