Reports predicting the demise of the cigarette vending machine may have been premature.
A ban on traditional vending machines was introduced on October 1. However Rod Bullough, director of R Duckworth Ltd, a Blackpool-based vending machine company, has designed a back bar cigarette dispenser and the good news is, it appears to be legal.
The tobacco control industry claimed that 52,000 children a year in England were able to access cigarettes via vending machines but there was never any proof of this. As ever, the figure was based on estimates and the word of teenagers, who are never the most reliable sources of information.
Banning tobacco vending machines was merely the next stage in the denormalisation of smoking. Unfortunately there was very little opposition from the consumer because cigarettes bought from vending machines are even more expensive than usual with the result that they represented less than one per cent of the market.
Nevertheless, it's good to see at least one man fighting back and I hope bar owners and consumers will support Rod's initiative.
I first met him in 2003 and he's always struck me as one of life's good guys. We met at a meeting of vending machine company representatives at a hotel near Manchester Airport and I was struck immediately by how many of the companies were family firms.
I was also struck by how complacent most of them were about the threat of a public smoking ban. "It'll never happen here," one speaker said.
Rod Bullough took the issue seriously and in 2004 set up a website called Freedom To Choose (no relation to another group that adopted the same name in 2006).
Rod employs about 30 people. Thanks however to New Labour's obsession with tobacco control, and the Coalition government's refusal to abandon this wholly unnecessary piece of legislation, R Duckworth Ltd was faced with closure.
Hopefully Rod's new machines will catch on and his business will survive and prosper. But he and others like him shouldn't have been placed in this position. So much for the Tories being the party of small business and free enterprise.