The prevalence of cigarette smoking fell substantially in the 1970s and the early 1980s – from 45% in 1974 to 35% in 1982. The rate of decline then continued more slowly until the early 1990s since when it has levelled out at 27-28%. In 2001, 27% of people aged 16 and over were smokers.

In the 1970s, men were much more likely than women to be smokers - in 1974, for example, 51% of men, compared with 41% of women, smoked cigarettes. Since then, the difference in smoking prevalence between men and women has reduced, although it has not disappeared completely. In 2001, 28% of men and 26% of women were cigarette smokers.

Throughout the 1990s, the prevalence of cigarette smoking was highest among people aged 20 to 24. Since 2000, however, there has been no statistically significant difference between prevalence levels among this age group and those aged 25 to 34.

The GHS has consistently shown that cigarette smoking is considerably more prevalent among people in manual groups than among those in non-manual groups. In the 1970s and 1980s, the prevalence of cigarette smoking fell more sharply among those in non-manual than in manual groups. In the 1990s there was little further change in the relative proportions smoking cigarettes until 2000, when, compared with 1998, there was a fall of two percentage points in the prevalence of smoking among those in manual socio-economic groups. The new NS-SEC (see Appendix E) does not allow categories to be collapsed into broad non-manual and manual groupings. However, as was the case with the groupings used previously, prevalence was lowest among those in the managerial and professional households (19%) and highest, at 33%, among those in routine or manual households.