North Northamptonshire Council to get an extra £2.4m to help more people quit smoking

North Northamptonshire is set to get an extra £2.4 million in funding to try and crack down on the number of smokers in the county.

Statistics show that 14.6 per cent of people in North Northants smoke, with the figures rising to 30 per cent - almost triple the national average - in some parts of Corby.

There are, in total, an estimated 50,000 people who smoke across the authority.

The government has put aside £70 million in additional funding per year to go towards councils’ spending on local stop-smoking services and support.

At the same time, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also announced plans to raise the legal age of smoking every year by a year.

This means anyone born after 2009 (currently aged 15) would never be able to buy cigarettes or tobacco legally.

The stop smoking funding for North Northants Council (NNC) will be spread out over a five-year period.

This equates to a £487,696 bonus given to the council every year until 2029.

The first round of funding will begin on April 1, 2024.

This will be on top of NNC’s current £344,850 budget for the service totalling more than £800k for 2024/25.

After that, a minimum budget of £778,289, including the government funding, will be set each year adding up to almost £4m spent over the whole project.

Chris Kenny, the council’s senior public health adviser speaking at a health and well-being meeting, called the funding a ‘golden opportunity’ to increase their capacity in smoking cessation services.

The majority of the funding is intended to be used to develop their services through hiring additional stop-smoking staff and increased spending on initiatives such as nicotine replacement therapy or e-cigarettes.

Some funds will also be used to support wider tobacco and youth vaping control efforts, such as local awareness campaigns.

The number of pregnant women and routine and manual workers smoking and the uptake in young children using vapes were highlighted as key prevention areas for the local authority.

The panel also noted the opportunity to use local area partnerships and family hubs to engage with the community.

Jane Bethea, NNC’s director of public health, said: “We know that in some of our communities in Corby one in three adults still smoke, which is much much higher than the national average and much higher than the average for North Northants overall.

“Clearly, we’re not doing something right - we haven’t got something right for this particular group of people.

"This is the beginning of that work.”