Plain English Summary
About one out of every eight people in the UK smokes (11.9%). The chance that a person is a smoker has been going down ever since 1974, when records began in the UK. The number of cigarettes that smokers smoke has also gone down.
Here are some patterns in smoking in Great Britain:
- Smoking is slightly more common in men than women
- People aged 16-24 and people aged 60 and over are less likely to smoke than people aged 25-59. But older people are more likely to be ex-smokers.
- People in lower-paid jobs are much more likely to smoke than people with higher-paid jobs
- Unemployed people are more likely to smoke than employed people
- More than half of smokers aim to quit
- Nearly a quarter of smokers aim to quit in the next 3 months
Smoking is the biggest cause of death and disease that you can control. About half of all life-long smokers will die early, losing on average about 10 years of life. Most smoking-related deaths arise from one of three types of disease: lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and coronary heart disease (CHD).