UK’s generational smoking ban: Another bullet off target?

By Kumar Ranaweera

The UK sits at the cusp of enacting legislation to ban the sales of tobacco products to persons born after 2009, with the objective of creating a smoke-free generation. The draft bill passed in UK Parliament and now merely needs royal ascent to come into practice.

In 2022, New Zealand became the first country to enact such legislation but having learnt the errors of their ways repealed the law just two years later, due to revenue pressures and the growing prevalence of illicit products. 

The UK and Maldives are the countries currently sitting in line to enact generational smoking bans. Will it work? Doubtful. Prohibitionist approaches do not work and history provides ample evidence of failure. What works is sensible regulation, better enforcement and education. 

While New Zealand reversed the ill-thought-out ban, countries like Malaysia were not allowed to get it off the ground. The Malaysian government was hit with challenge as in the first place, a generational sales ban is a breach of individual human rights; it discriminates against a certain group as it creates a group of people who can never access a legal product. 

A former Chief Justice of Malaysia wrote, “The essence of a generational endgame can be argued to be discriminatory, as it deprives a generation of adults from exercising what they may claim to be their freedom of choice, whilst other adults face no similar deprivation.” 

The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties said, “The council believes that this bill is not compatible with a free and democratic society, nor can be amended to become compatible.” 

The Kiwi Health Ministry also noted that the illicit market increased exacerbated by these policy changes, whilst Customs required more resources to enforce controls. 

For a country like Sri Lanka, which is a global hot spot for cigarette smuggling due to price, a generational sales ban would result in dire consequences for its health and social order, due to the existing revenue and resource constraints, notwithstanding the infringements of civil liberties. Without doubt, a certain segment of smokers will engage with the illicit market as a result of such measures. 

Sri Lanka already has a large illicit market leaking billions of rupees in revenue to the government. A generational ban will add to that on top of an uncontrolled and unaccounted for health tragedy.

Despite the progress on the matter in the UK, some of the very pertinent questions against a generational sales ban came from the country. 

Christopher Snowdon from the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK said, “Laws that rely on prohibition to reduce the prevalence and harm generally fail to achieve their aim. That was true of historic alcohol prohibition laws.” 

Around 2010, Bhutan completely banned the sale of tobacco products. Within 10 years, the mountainous nation lifted its ban as illicit smoking incidence went up as much as 24 percent with many minors taking up smoking. As history shows, such promising but draconian pieces of legislation have never delivered the desired outcomes. They have only made matters significantly worse. What will happen in the UK is yet to be seen and if the draft policy becomes reality, its real results will take years to see. 

(The writer is a Research Manager at a leading international auditor in Colombo. He could be reached at 

[email protected])