Smokefree Ideology - available now!

A new Forest report, ‘Smokefree Ideology: How local authorities are waging war on choice and personal freedom’, is published today.

Based on data gathered via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to 372 local authorities in England, Wales and Scotland (283 of whom replied), it includes an analysis of the policies that regulate smoking throughout the UK.

Written and researched by civil liberties campaigner Josie Appleton, director of the Manifesto Club, the key findings were:

• There is a new wave of restriction on smoking, occurring not through parliamentary legislation but via local authority policies, many of which are not subjected to democratic scrutiny

• 192 councils (68% of those that responded) have a policy restricting or banning smoking at work while almost a third now restrict smoking in open-air public spaces, including children’s play areas, parks, beaches, council campuses or open-air public events: some of these bans are enforced with fixed penalty notices

• Smoking is no longer seen merely as a health risk to the consumer but as a moral offence to be kept ‘out of sight, out of mind’

• Councils are increasingly keen to distance themselves from any association with the act of smoking, with one council even requiring people to not smoke near council vehicles

• 49 councils ban cigarette breaks entirely, even if workers clock off, while a further 87 councils require workers to clock off or to obtain permission from a manager

• In total, 113 councils currently ban smoking outside council buildings with some requiring employees to leave the site entirely or stand up to 50 metres from a council building to light up

• Some councils are also targeting social housing residents to persuade them to change their smoking behaviour. Social inequality is being recast as the consequence of a lifestyle habit and the restriction of that habit is the answer to social inequality

The Telegraph yesterday published a report that focussed on our discovery that Hammersmith and Fulham's policy on smoking included the direction that "any part of a private dwelling used solely for work purposes will be required to be smoke-free" (Council banned staff from smoking at their desks at home):

The guidance was issued in 2015 in a joint "bi-borough corporate health and safety "document setting out the council's no smoking policy with Royal Kensington and Chelsea.

A spokesman for Kensington and Chelsea, which had told its staff that "home workers should not smoke at their workstation during office hours", dropped the smoking ban on home workers when it issued new guidance in February this year.

The London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham declined to comment. However a council source said the advice, while still technically in force, was being replaced.

Josie conducted her research between March and August 2020. Curiously, Kensington and Chelsea did not send her the "new guidance" (issued, allegedly, in February) so we were reliant on the joint "bi-borough corporate health and safety" document supplied by Hammersmith and Fulham.

Nor did Hammersmith and Fulham give any indication that the rule on (not) smoking whilst working at home was being replaced.

It must be pure coincidence then that, having been put in the spotlight by our report, both councils appear to have disowned the policy.

Anyway, had it not been for Kensington and Chelsea telling the Telegraph that it had changed its policy in February, the story might have appeared on the front page. Instead it was relegated to page nine (where it was nevertheless the lead story on that page).

Nevertheless, as a result of the Telegraph report the Hammersmith and Fulham policy was also reported online by the Mail (Labour-run Hammersmith and Fulham council bans all staff from smoking at their desks while working from HOME) and The Sun ('WAGING WAR' Labour-run council in west London bans staff from smoking at their desks while working from home).

The reports also generated a lot of reaction on Twitter that was overwhelmingly negative (ie most comments opposed the council's policy).

I was interested to see that one of the many people who tweeted the Telegraph report was government minister Greg Hands, MP for Chelsea and Fulham.

Other than tweeting the story Hands made no further comment but as of this morning the his tweet had attracted 296 retweets and 239 comments.

You can download the report here.

PS. Yesterday evening I discussed the Hammersmith and Fulham issue on LBC with presenter Ian Payne and Dr Sarah Jarvis, a rather gobby GP who appears regularly on programmes such as The One Show (BBC1) and Jeremy Vine on Channel 5. It got quite heated and Jarvis ended up asking me “How do you sleep at night?” which you don't expect to hear from a doctor.

I'm not sure what got her goat but it may have been my suggestion that not all GPs are "paragons of virtue" and many of us are sick of being told how to live our lives.

Off air the producer told me, "That was great radio." Perhaps Jarvis and I should become a double act. What do you say, Jeremy Vine?