On 1st February 2010 the Department of Health released 'A Smokefree Future: a comprehensive tobacco control strategy for England'. The document encourages the vision of a smokefree future, where people lead healthier and longer lives.

The report lists three main objectives to encourage progress towards a smoke free society. These are:

 1. To stop the inflow of young people recruited as smokers.

2. To motivate and assist every smoker to quit.

3. To protect families and communities.

The document includes various statistics relating to tobacco including youth smoking rates, number of deaths from smoking by year in England and the diseases that are attributable to smoking.

The DH would like to see various achievements by 2020 including halving the number of adult smokers to one in ten and rapidly reducing the number of children who take up smoking to negligible levels.

Since the report has been published there has been a considerable amount of related media coverage. To see a selection of recent news items and tobacco related articles please see here.

The full version of the 70-page document can be viewed here.