Smoking in the Workplace

Since July 1st 2007, new legislation was introduced to ensure all enclosed public places and workplaces were smoke free.  This user friendly module provides the key points of the legislation and the essential requirements to ensure that as an employer your staff are fully aware of the law and their own responsibilities.

Some 114,000 people die every year in Britain as a direct result of smoking. The deaths are spread roughly equally between smoking-induced cancers, cardiovascular disease and chronic lung diseases such as emphysema.

That means that in excess of 300 people, many of them young, die every day from the effects of smoking. It is estimated that smoking one cigarette will shorten your life by around 11 minutes. That means, all things else being equal, that a lifetime smoker can expect to have his or her life shortened by around 8 years.

If you stop smoking, the risk of lung cancer does fall away. However, it takes some 15 years after you stop smoking for the risk of contracting lung cancer to become the same as that of a non smoker.

Smoking a single cigarette can lower the rate of blood being supplied to your skin. This effect can last for an hour or more. Smoking can cause damage to blood vessels. This can become so severe in some cases that men of middle age run a 50% increased risk of erectile dysfunction.

This of course can not only have a serious impact on a marriage or a relationship, but it can also be an early indication of damage to blood vessels in other parts of the body, such as those leading to the heart.

Smoking can stain teeth and gums, cause bad eyesight, cause bad breath, cause breathing problems, cause high blood pressure, increase facial wrinkles, and of course, kill you.

Smoking in any workplace in the United Kingdom is now an illegal act. This also applies to any enclosed public place. Having a smoke free policy in the workplace ensures that non smokers do not have to breathe in and suffer the insidious effects of second hand smoke that is emitted by their smoking colleagues.

In this way everyone can enjoy the right to breathe clean air while they work. Workers no longer need to worry about the possible health risk effects of having to work in a place where tobacco smoke is circulating freely, and where there is no escape. Smokers can of course go to designated outside smoking areas during break times if they choose.