With next month's change to the legal age for cigarette-buying now imminent, leading retailers have played down concerns that small businesses will lose trade as a result of the legislation.
Trade association the British Retail Consortium (BRC) indicated that losses in sales would be minimal and that shopkeepers will be reluctant to defend the sale of cigarettes to young people, given the widely-acknowledged health risks.
BRC comments even suggested active support for the legislation from shopkeepers, with the increase of minimum age from 16 to 18 promising to boost the health of under-18s, who will be less likely to adopt the habit.
A spokesperson for the BRC said: "It is only a small proportion of sales that go to 16 and 17-year-olds and retailers are not ever going to be making a case that it's important to their business that they go on selling cigarettes."
He added that many shopkeepers and small retailers backed the goals of the ban, because "they hope it will achieve the health gains the Department of Health is aiming to achieve".
The case for preventing young people from smoking is indeed strong enough to win the support of many, with NHS research proving that those who start the habit at the age of 15 are three times more likely to die from cancer than someone who started in their mid-twenties.
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