English county set to introduce nation’s first outdoor smoking ban

The plan aims to make the county smoke-free by 2025

Oxfordshire is set to become the first place in the UK to ban smoking outdoors, as part of a larger plan for the county to be smoke-free by 2025. As reported by the Oxford Mail, a plan agreed by public health officials in February 2020 is now finally 'underway'. The area's strategy to tackle smoking outdoors includes creating more spaces where inhabitants feel 'empowered' not to smoke. As part of the plan, officials would encourage employers to stop people smoking outside of workplaces or by introducing smoke-free areas in new pavement dining areas, the Oxford Mail reported. Speaking last week, Oxfordshire's public health director, Ansaf Azhar, said the new strategy to change smoking culture was a "long game", with the aim that it will preventing deaths from illnesses linked to tobacco. "It is not about telling people not to smoke. It is about moving and creating an environment in which not smoking is encouraged and they are empowered to do so," Azhar told Oxfordshire's health improvement partnership board. "But that is not going to happen overnight," he continued. The public health official leading the strategy, Dr Adam Briggs, said: "We have got a condition that is entirely a commercially driven cause of death and disease. It is impossible to be on the wrong side of history with tobacco consumption." However, pro-smoking campaign groups, including The Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (Forest), have largely criticised the new plans. The director of the smokers' lobby group Forest, Simon Clark, said: "It's no business of local councils if adults choose to smoke, and if they smoke outside during working hours that's a matter for them and their employer not the council."