Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to encourage pregnant women to undertake smoking cessation programmes.

Smoking is the number one entirely preventable cause of ill-health, disability, and death in this country. It is responsible for 80,000 yearly deaths in the United Kingdom, and one in four of all UK cancer deaths. Smoking in pregnancy increases the risk of stillbirth, miscarriage, and sudden infant death.

As set out in Stopping the Start: our new plan to create a smokefree generation, we are establishing a financially incentivised scheme to help pregnant smokers and their partners to quit smoking, with smoking cessation support. This evidence-based intervention will encourage pregnant women to give up smoking, and remain smokefree throughout pregnancy and beyond, helping to improve the health and wellbeing of both mother and baby.

The objective is to have all maternity trusts that wish to participate in the scheme signed up by the end of 2024, so that all pregnant women who smoke in participating areas will be offered the opportunity to join the incentive scheme by December 2024.

This financial incentive scheme builds upon the NHS Long Term Plan’s ambition to ensure that all pregnant smokers can access behavioural support to quit from within maternity services, as well as additional funding for mass marketing campaigns on stopping smoking.