SAGA VOICES
Each month our insight team conducts a poll of Saga customers to find out what you’re thinking. This month: who still smokes?
Given we’re of an age to have spent the majority of our working and social lives squinting through billowing clouds of tobacco smoke, it seems scarcely believable we’ve come to this: only 4% of Saga customers smoke.
In 1974, when my grandmother was lighting one cigarette off the other and you had to watch out for ash in your salad, 46% of adults smoked. In our survey of almost 3,000 over-50s, 36% of respondents used to smoke but gave up, while another 25% tried it but didn’t like it, and 33% claimed never to have smoked, not even once.
‘It’s an enormous generational change and Saga customers have lived through it,’ says Hazel Cheeseman, deputy chief executive at Ash, the anti-smoking group set up by doctors in 1971. ‘My parents didn’t smoke but we had an ashtray in our house for visitors. Nobody would walk into someone else’s house today and expect to light up a cigarette.’
National smoking rates are now just below 13% – and 8.3% among the over-65s. So even by today’s standards, Saga customers are a healthy bunch. It’s probably explained by their higher socio-economic backgrounds, says Cheeseman. After early studies linked smoking to lung cancer in the mid-1950s and 60s, more educated people began giving up. That divide has intensified: now 8% in professional occupations smoke, compared with 23% in manual/routine jobs.
57% of smokers are men
82% are glad smoking is now less acceptable
13 cigarettes smoked a day on average
40 is the average age to give up
The 2007 ban on smoking in public indoor spaces and workplaces was a crucial turning point, she says. ‘There was a shift in the narrative from the rights of smokers – who were 20% of the population in 2007 – to non-smokers, who have a right not to breathe in other people’s toxic smoke. Today, the expectation, even among smokers, is that people are not exposed to harm.’
If anything, public opinion is ahead of politicians, she says, and that was reflected in our survey: across our age groups, 57% wanted to see smoking banned in outdoor hospitality, and 61% supported government ambitions for a ‘Smokefree’ future in 2030. Plans are already underway to ban cigarette sales to those born after 1 January 2009. In our survey, 23% wanted to go further, with an immediate ban on all sales.
However, there’s a hard core of smokers who enjoy it and don’t
