What progress has been made towards reducing tobacco smoking prevalence below 5 per cent in Wales by 2030, as set out by the Welsh Government's smoke-free Wales strategy?
We have made significant progress in recent years in reducing the number of people smoking in Wales. Data collected from the Annual Population Survey from the Office for National Statistics shows that smoking prevalence in Wales has declined significantly since 2011, when the proportion of all persons aged 18 years and over who were currently smoking was 22.3%, reducing to 14.1% by 2021. The latest smoking prevalence data provided by the National Survey for Wales in 2022/23 shows that 13% of adults smoke. Our strategy A Smoke-free Wales sets out how we are tackling all aspects of smoking and focusing on further reducing smoking prevalence in order to achieve our smoke-free Wales ambition.
Stopping smoking remains one of the best things you can do for your health. To support smokers to quit, we have the integrated NHS Wales Help Me Quit service, which offers smoking cessation support to all smokers in Wales and continues to support increasing numbers of people to quit smoking for good. Since 2017, Help Me Quit has supported over 89,000 smokers and in 2022/23, 4.2% of the estimated smoking population of Wales made a quit attempt via smoking cessation services.