Council to launch £2.25m anti-smoking scheme

The council’s commitment comes as it races to meet a target of less than 5% adult smokers by 2030, reports Sebastian Mann, Local Democracy Reporter

Waltham Forest Council is set to launch a £2.25million scheme to cut the number of smokers in the borough over the next five years.

Smoking is the primary preventable cause of ill health in the borough, according to a council report published this week.

“To meet the challenge of Smokefree 2030, where less than 5% of adults are smoking, we need to accelerate the progress in supporting our remaining smokers to quit,” the town hall says.

“At the same time we are looking for innovation and new approaches to support all remaining smokers to quit, including those where prevalence is higher and where additional support is needed to successfully quit.”

In line with all upper-tier councils across the country, Waltham Forest is seeking to commission a new stop-smoking service, to run through April 2027 until the end of March 2030, with a view to extending it for a further two years.

It will be the contractor’s responsibility to also “help protect our children and young people” from vaping or smoking, while “maintaining the use of vapes for existing adult smokers as a key stop-smoking aid with proven effectiveness”.

Council evidence shows that a locally commissioned service, providing behaviour support as well as both short- and long-term nicotine replacement treatments, “offers the best chance of a smoker successfully quitting”.

Waltham Forest is currently contracting Queen Mary University of London to help smokers living, working or studying in the borough. So far, the university has cut the percentage of smokers in half, from 16.2% to 8.1%.

However, the rising number of people who vape or use e-cigarettes “presents a paradox”.

Vapes are “an important stop-smoking aid,” the council says, and they are generally less harmful than cigarettes.

“As the long-term health effects of vaping are not fully known, we need to discourage children, young people and non-smokers from vaping and focus on their use purely as a smoking cessation aid,” the council says.

It costs around £937 to help each Waltham Forest smoker quit, which is higher than the median cost of £798 in London.

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