Join millions hoping to ditch dreaded nicotine

No Smoking Day is an annual health awareness day in the United Kingdom which is intended to help smokers who want to quit the dreaded cigarettes.

Inaugurated on Ash Wednesday 1984, the campaign was intended to raise awareness and highlight the health implications of smoking tobacco.

​As an example, according to new data released by Haypp, 70 per cent of smokers in Doncaster have successfully quit smoking.

The online data, compares all of the cities around the UK based on the success rate for quitting smoking as well as government expenditure and other data splits such as gender and age.

Looking at the gender split, the percentage of successful male quitters is 71 per cent compared to slightly less for females at 69 per cent.

Shockingly, only 68 per cent of pregnant smokers successfully quit!

The research also found that the age group with the best chance of quitting was 45-59.

The top performing authorities, based on the percentage of successful quitters, are Rotherham, Barnsley, Warrington and Dudley.

On the other end of the scale, some of the worst performing authorities were Sutton, West Sussex, Warwickshire and Swindon.

Markus Lindblad, from Haypp, said: “Following UK government guidance, those who reduce the amount they smoke are more likely to stop smoking eventually, particularly if they are using licensed nicotine-containing product alternatives."

He added: “The national harm reduction strategy, where the switch to alternative, less harmful, nicotine products such as nicotine pouches is encouraged, has been key to the UK being one of the most successful countries in Europe in reducing the number of smokers.

“There are several other possible contributing factors to these success rates, but the fact that each of these local authorities is offering support in multiple locations and in many forms across the area is likely to be one of the biggest factors. For example, Rotherham and Warrington have invested heavily in quit smoking resources, with both investing more than £250,000 into their local initiatives. Hopefully these figures will continue to rise as more people quit smoking or use smoking alternatives.”

Proportion of smokers in England has been falling – while 19.8 per cent of the population were smokers in 2011, this had fallen to 13.9 per cent by 2019. Trend expected to continue down to 2.5 per cent by 2050, according to the government.