Graham Hughes: Calling Time on Pub Smoking

"This is a none smoking establishment," said the sign on the door. Resisting the temptation to grab a pen and correct the vocabulary, I went straight in.

It was late on a Saturday afternoon. After a particularly troublesome shopping session in the hectic city centre (it’s incredible how difficult it can be to buy something as mundane as a funnel these days), I fancied nipping into a pub to catch my breath, read the paper, have a pint and catch the football results, before getting a bus home.

Something occurred to me. One of the pubs that I’d been to on a few similar occasions in the past had recently been featured in a local paper - its new owner had relaunched it with a no-smoking policy, making it the first pub in the city with such a rule.

Being a non-smoker, this wasn’t going to put me off, and in any case I was curious to see what the place was like under the new clean-air regime.

There were only around ten customers - considerably less than I seemed to remember from earlier visits. In the newspaper piece, the pub’s manager had admitted that business had slowed down since the smoking ban was introduced, even though there had been a lot of positive comments from customers.

The atmosphere in the pub was strangely calm and subdued, even sterile. There were low tables, of the type that you would expect to see in a mildly trendy coffee house, not in a pub. Everything looked eerily clean and bright.

Soon, I realised I was the only remaining customer. "Busy, isn’t it?" asked the bored-sounding barmaid. Was it the non-smoking thing? She couldn’t say for sure, as she only worked occasional shifts there, but I persisted with the interrogation and asked her whether the old regulars had stopped turning up.

"Well, yes, but the owner thought some of them weren’t ideal regulars, if you know what I mean." She also suggested that daytime drinkers tend to be smokers, so the smoking ban has a bigger effect in the afternoon than it does in the evenings.

Whether the ex-regulars were ideal or not, the pub was clearly missing their money, and the new attraction of a smoke-free environment wasn’t drawing in enough new customers to compensate for the loss. The pub would soon close for further refurbishment, with designated smoking areas likely to be part of the new set-up.

What does all this tell us about the future of British pubs? Total bans on smoking in bars have recently been introduced in Ireland, and in some parts of North America. Naturally, the debate on whether the UK should follow their example is underway.

As of February 2004, an estimated 30 of the nation’s 60,000 pubs had chosen to ban smoking. Pub owners are understandably going to be wary about losing customers to their rivals, so voluntary bans are unlikely to spread like wildfire.

To the dismay of many of his rivals in the industry, Tim Martin, chairman of the JD Wetherspoon chain, has called for a ban, and will soon meet government officials to talk about it. He argues that most of the public are non-smokers, and that the gains for the industry would outweigh the losses; but also that it would be "commercial suicide" for companies to take the plunge unilaterally.

The reaction to the new law in Ireland has been surprisingly positive. It has prompted many pub customers and staff to give up smoking altogether, which (if they keep it up) has obvious health benefits, and largely vindicates the government’s decision. Many others seem to have just shrugged their shoulders and accepted the ban with the minimum of fuss.

Of course, it isn’t all rosy. Some pub regulars in Ireland have complained about the perceived nannying aspect of the law, even suggesting that it’s an attack on their civil liberties. Some may be reasonably content to pop outside for a smoke, but this isn’t without its practical hitches - freezing weather or torrential rain will make it an uncomfortable experience; and staff have been known to take the customers’ drinks away, thinking they’ve been abandoned.

Across the Atlantic, these laws are said to have had a crippling effect on business for many traditional bars (not on those which serve food) in New York City, and it was reported that 60 bars in Ottawa went out of business soon after a smoking ban came into effect in 2001.

Many Britons have shown their approval of the idea. A MORI poll last year found 61 per cent of respondents agreeing that "bar staff in pubs should be able to work in a smoke-free environment", and only 23 per cent disagreeing. But this raises a crucial question: how many of those people are regular pub-goers?

There’s also the traditionalist argument, that the whiff of tobacco is an integral part of the ambience of a classic British, or Irish, pub. This isn’t particularly convincing, although the difference in the smoke-free pub that I visited was striking (perhaps it was a bit unnecessary for them to change the décor as well as the smoking policy).

Some compromises have been suggested. Pubs could be divided into smoking areas and non-smoking areas. This might please most of the people most of the time, but it wouldn’t tackle the issue of protecting staff against passive smoking - they would still have to venture into the smoking sections to collect glasses. Another idea being mooted is ventilation, which, in many cases, might not be either affordable or effective.

If we want to try to predict how this will all pan out, perhaps the overriding factor is that the general trend in modern society is against smoking in public, or semi-public, enclosed spaces. Compared with just twenty, even ten, years ago, smoking in offices and other shared workplaces has been dramatically curtailed.

A more fanatically health-oriented society would, of course, discourage drinking as well as smoking, making this whole issue pretty insignificant. But with health and safety considerations (and regulations) being heightened in so many walks of life, the matter of passive smoking, for pub workers and fellow customers, provides a powerful case for the anti-smoking lobby. They can argue, convincingly, that drinkers are only harming themselves and not those around them.

If the Irish experience continues to be seen largely as a success, with people giving up the killer weed in droves and without the pub trade suffering heavy losses, it seems only a matter of time before Britain follows suit.