CITIZENCARD NEWS

A business guidance leaflet on tobacco and children is now available from the Trading Standards Central Website 

Shops face coughing up £2500 in underage smoking law blitz SHOP owners will face a crackdown on the sale of cigarettes to underage customers from Monday when the legal age for buying tobacco rises from 16 to 18.

Test purchasers - trained teenage volunteers who will try to buy cigarettes despite being underage - will be used by the city council's trading standards officers in the month-long clampdown. Anyone found selling tobacco to people who are underage could face a fine of up to £2500.

Information packs featuring new posters and stickers have been sent to shops across the country and if a shop fails to display the correct signs they could also incur a fine of £1000.

But retail groups say the changes have not been well advertised and could lead to confrontations between young smokers and shop staff. They say there should have been a high-profile television, newspaper and billboard campaign and the Government has so far focused its efforts on the internet.

A survey for CitizenCard, the UK's leading commercial proof of age card, found one in five people aged between 16 and 18 were not aware of the change in the law.

Read the full story (Edinburgh Evening News)

From October 2007 the minimum legal age for purchase of tobacco will rise from 16 to 18 years. Retailers can find further information and download notices and posters from the No ID, No Sale! site

The No ID, No Sale! Campaign held fringe meetings at the party conferences in September. Entitled “Under Age Sales; Who is on the Front Line?”, the lunchtime meetings were attended by guest speakers from The Tobacco Manufacturers Association, The Association of Convenience Stores, Trading Standards and Camelot Group plc. The meetings were chaired by Tory MP Crispin Blunt and Labour MPs Sharon Hodgson and Celia Barrow . For more information please visit the No ID, No Sale! website