Cigarettes

We spent Christmas and the New Year in the Antipodes - Australia with the two older boys who now live there, and then New Zealand. (As both Andy and Simon are in Australia, it's easy to think they live about 700km from each other... and for Australia that's just next door!)

Having heard about it from the UK, I was interested to see how the ban on branded cigarette sales was working in practice. I was genuinely impressed – it seemed to me that the incidence of public smoking was less than I'd seen it before, and there was a complete absence of any sort of tobacco advertising including in shops. While in the UK you can still find cigarettes openly displayed in even quite large shops – our local Cooperative, for example – in Australia there are no visible cigarette packages at all. If you want to purchase cigarettes you have to know the brand you want. And once you get the packet it is entirely unbranded except for a small label, and there are really gruesome images on every packet.

While all this won't impact on the already-addicted, I do believe that it will have an impact on children and young people, and, over time, as the existing users either give up or (unfortunately) die, the use of cigarettes will reduce, and the health of the whole population will improve, starting with children and young people. Of the various things Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has achieved with her wafer-thin majority, this will have by far the largest and most long-term effect. I wish the UK government would go further and faster to build on existing achievements - the ban on smoking in public buildings, and the limitations on advertising.

When I came home I read of one of the more bizarre manifestations of EU policy – apparently, while the EU spends many millions of Euros on anti-smoking, it is now considering subsidising the Bulgarian tobacco industry under the agricultural subsidy system, with the sales of the tobacco into the Far East. I hope that sense prevails, and that Bulgarian farmers are encouraged to grow something more productive.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant