KIRKLEES Council today backed a campaign for cigarettes to be sold in plain packaging.

The council joined other authorities and health groups in backing the campaign for standardised packaging on tobacco products for World No Tobacco Day.

Standardised packaging would mean that tobacco packaging would be a plain brown colour, with coloured picture warnings and brand names appearing in a standardised form.

At present cigarette brands use colourful packaging geared at winning the attention of young smokers.

Now Dr Judith Hooper, director of public health, has urged change.

She said: “Smoking is an addiction of childhood with two thirds of smokers taking up the habit before the age of 18.

“Children are more likely to be attracted to the colourful, glitzy tobacco packaging that gives misleading messages to youth and adult smokers.

“If we are to halt the smoking epidemic, robust measures are necessary and putting tobacco in standardised packaging will go a long way towards achieving this goal.”

The Irish government has recently announced that it has had approval to begin the process of introducing standardised tobacco products in Ireland.

The UK’s consultation on legislation to standardise packaging for tobacco closed over nine months ago and the Government is yet to produce its response.

This year’s theme for World No Tobacco Day is “ban tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship”.

On the international stage the UK has been one of the world leaders in acting to prohibit the harmful promotion of tobacco and has the opportunity again to lead the way and implement this policy to protect children.

The tobacco industry has opposed this measure arguing that it is not in the public’s interest as it would increase the trade in illicit tobacco.

David Lodge, from West Yorkshire Trading Standards , has found no evidence of this.

He said: “Illegal tobacco is a problem in many of our communities in Yorkshire, but the size of the market has halved over the last decade due to tough regulation of the supply of tobacco and massive improvements in detection.

“There is no evidence standardised packs will fuel illegal tobacco. Criminals can already copy the most complicated design of cigarettes, hair straighteners or trainers and have them on the market within weeks.

“Packs will still have coded identifiers so enforcement teams can tell legal from illegal tobacco. Increasingly we have seen seizures of smuggled cigarettes which are mass manufactured openly in Russia and Eastern Europe and distributed around Europe for the illegal market, rather than fakes.”