Fresh was the UK’s first dedicated regional tobacco control programme, set up in the North East in 2005 to tackle the worst rates of smoking-related illness and death in the country. Since then the North East has seen the largest fall in smoking in England, a fall of nearly a third with around 165,000 fewer smokers. While still too high, we also now have the lowest youth smoking rates and rates of women smoking during pregnancy on record for our region.
We are delivering a programme of eight key strands of activity which are all designed to work together to motivate and support current smokers to stop, to reduce the numbers of young people taking up smoking and to provide protection to non-smokers from secondhand smoke harm. For more information from Fresh, please click here.