My Lords, I beg to move that the Bill be now read a second time, and it is an honour to do so.
The evidence, despite perhaps some lingering myths and misperceptions, remains stark and compelling: smoking remains unequivocally the number one preventable cause of death, disability and ill health in our nation. Progress has been made, but this is not a problem of the past. Smoking continues to cast a long shadow over our society, remaining a significant public health challenge with persistent rates of prevalence. Every year we witness the loss of approximately 80,000 lives in the UK directly attributed to smoking.
The impact of smoking reverberates throughout lifetimes, increasing the risk of a whole range of conditions from stillbirth through to significantly higher rates of dementia, stroke, heart attacks, lung diseases and many cancers. Smoking also results in a significant loss of productivity in the wider economy and places a considerable burden on our healthcare system. In total it is estimated to cost society approximately £21.3 billion annually.
To correct this course, this Bill will create a smoke-free generation, making it an offence to sell tobacco products to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, meaning those who turn 16 this year, and younger, will never legally be sold tobacco in the UK. This will gradually end the sale of tobacco products across the country, protecting future generations from the well-documented and evidenced harms of smoking.
In turning our attention to vaping, we face a nuanced challenge. Vapes are less harmful than smoking and absolutely have a strong role to play as a cessation aid for adult smokers seeking to quit. In fact, clients of stop smoking services who have used a vape to quit have had the highest success rate of any group. Nevertheless, a concerning increase in youth uptake should not be ignored. In 2023, one in four children aged 11 to 15 tried vaping, often drawn in through appealing sweet-like flavours and colourful packaging.
In response to this challenge, the Bill includes measures which address the rise in youth vaping and other nicotine products. We will ban advertising and sponsorship, and implement regulations concerning the flavours, descriptions, ingredients, packaging and point-of-sale displays of these products. The intention here is clear. We will ensure that the marketing of vapes can no longer target minors. However, it is imperative that the Bill strikes a necessary balance, ensuring that vapes remain an accessible option for adult smokers looking to transition away from dependence on tobacco, while clamping down on youth vaping.
The public understand the importance of this Bill and what it aims to achieve. Some 69% support a smoke-free generation policy, while 82% of adults support banning names of sweets, cartoons and bright colours on vape packaging, and 81% support banning the advertising and promotion of vapes at the point of sale.
My Lords, the House will be grateful to the Minister for the characteristically clear way in which she has opened this debate. As she indicated, the Bill in large measure replicates a Bill introduced in the other place towards the end of the last Parliament. Speaking as someone who helped take through some important anti-smoking legislation during my time in the Department of Health, I begin by saying that the overall aims the Minister has set out for this measure are ones I fully subscribe to.
Some little time has of course passed since I occupied the Minister’s departmental seat and, in the intervening years, we have seen the rise of vaping as an alternative form of nicotine consumption, sometimes as a perfectly valid means of quitting smoking, but increasingly as a habit adopted by non-smokers leading directly to nicotine addiction. I am therefore the first to say that I share the Minister’s acute concern about this trend, which is in part caused by the numbers of young people taking up vaping who have not previously smoked.
The Bill therefore has some laudable aims and some welcome aspects. In the spirit of similarly motivated legislation going back over the past 25 years, it is surely our duty as legislators to look for ways to discourage smoking, to protect those who do not smoke from second-hand smoke and to prevent children accessing tobacco, vapes and other nicotine products as if they were toys or fashion accessories. It is right too, while we are about it, to look at the wider dimensions of the issue, such as the sale of non-nicotine vapes, as well as other nicotine products such as nicotine pouches. The Bill before us takes us into all these areas.
At the same time, there are two crucial tests that legislation of this kind needs to pass. They are tests that Parliament has rightly applied to all previous anti-smoking measures: the tests of proportionality and practicality. Much of what we shall need to debate in Committee and beyond will revolve around those two tests, where there is often a delicate balance to be struck—for example, the balance between personal freedoms and health gain, between health gain and business burdens, and between business burdens and free enterprise. Par excellence, in this particular area, we are dealing with another balance that threads its way through all the others: the balance of probabilities around human behaviour.
My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness for setting out this Bill so clearly. Most of the provisions were introduced by Rishi Sunak when he was Prime Minister and it is excellent that they are now being taken forward by the current Government. We have a long tradition of cross-party working to reduce tobacco harms and I am delighted to follow the noble Earl, Lord Howe, who has a long history as a committed member of that group, although he is always aware of the variety of views on his own Benches.
When I first came into this House in 2000—I was a health spokesperson and, much later on, deputised for the noble Earl, Lord Howe, in the coalition—there were a number of people who took the industry briefings, sometimes unaware that these were what they were. Front groups, lobby groups, commercial groups led to be anxious when this was not merited, think tanks, and now social media, were all active. They resisted all kinds of tobacco controls that we now take for granted. The ban on smoking in public places, for example, was castigated as being nanny-state, anti-libertarian, about to destroy all sorts of institutions, disproportionate and so on. Many later said that it felt wrong when they encountered smoking in public places in other countries. And so we moved forward, step by step.
Opponents of action dropped in number, almost to a single voice, although I think the opponents have grown in number now. The industry had for so long denied that it knew what Professor Sir Richard Doll proved through research with the cancer registries—that smoking caused cancer and killed.
It is essential to consider public health and how we best protect children from developing an addiction that is likely to blight their life and their health. The noble Baroness mentioned stillbirths, cancer, heart disease and dementia. Passive smoking, too, causes significant harm. Most smokers wish that they had never started. Tobacco kills about two-thirds of its long-term users.
My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Cancer Research UK, and it will not be surprising to learn that CRUK and I strongly support the Bill.
Fundamentally, the tobacco industry has a structural problem, which is that it kills 80,000 of its most loyal customers every year and therefore has to restock annually to keep its coffers full—those people being now, sadly, in their coffins. The point of the Bill is fundamentally to do something about that. As the Minister said, it was very gratifying to see the wide support across all parties in the House of Commons, and I hope we will see that repeated here. However, I suspect there will be some objections during the passage of the Bill—some legitimate and well-intentioned criticisms, but potentially some that bear a strange family resemblance to the arguments that the tobacco industry and its proxies also advance.
One of those objections is that the Bill is not actually needed because smoking is on its way out anyway. I am sure that we can appreciate the irony of the argument that the industry advances that the very measures that it has previously so vigorously opposed on the grounds that they would be ineffective are now allegedly so supremely effective that further regulation is not required. Leaving aside the irony, the fact is simply that 6 million people are still smoking. The rate of progress is nowhere near sufficient to get us to the previous and current Governments’ target of being de facto smoke-free by 2030. In the poorest parts of the country, that is not going to be until 2050, and, since the general election, it is estimated that 100,000 more young people have taken up smoking.
Therefore, it is not true that further action is not needed; nor is it true that we should not take action in the absence of “real-world evidence”, because, of course, that is an entirely circular argument. You will not get real-world evidence until you do it and see the effects. The subtlety of the Bill is that the annual rise by one year in the age of sale will give us that evidence as we see the successive, cumulative effect that these measures bring about.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Stevens. I rise to support this important Bill and to express the support of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, who sends her apologies that she cannot be here today. I thank the Minister for her very clear introduction, and other noble Lords for their principled and non-partisan support.
This is an extremely important and effective public health measure that prioritises preventive health at a time when demands on acute services are so significant. Stark inequalities in health remain one of the most persistent and negative health outcomes of modern times. Smoking falls clearly along this line of inequality. Action on Smoking and Health goes so far as to say that smoking is the leading cause of
“the gap in healthy life expectancy”.
The Government have already committed to being smoke-free by 2030 and although the most well-off parts of the country may be on track for that, Cancer Research UK reports, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, has said, that the most deprived areas are not likely to meet that target until 2050 at current rates.
We know from the evidence given by Professors Javed Khan and Chris Whitty to the Health and Social Care Select Committee that the tobacco industry continues to target the young and vulnerable and relies, as we have heard, on them becoming addicted. This leads to a highly profitable outcome for the industry and a highly harmful outcome for the individual and the family. In England, 352,000 years of life are lost in this exchange every year. Though unintentional, the inhalation of second-hand smoke is also harmful. The “smoke-free generation” element of the Bill, which raises the age of sale by one year every year, is controversial for some because it is about choice. However, it recognises that our choices are made not in a vacuum but with consequences for others.
My Lords, I would like to thank my noble friend the Minister for her very clear introduction to this Bill. I also thank many people for the briefings we have been sent, particularly ASH, of whom I am very fond, because it supported me at various times as we have dealt with this issue over many years.
I have to confess to a feeling of déjà vu; indeed, my noble friend the Minister and others, including the noble Earl, may also have feelings of déjà vu, because today we start the next stage to allow our children, and certainly our grandchildren, to live in a tobacco and smoke-free world. I thought it might take longer to get to this point, so I am delighted. I also register the importance of taking powers to deal with vaping, because I agree with many noble Lords that we need to recognise that nicotine is an addictive poison too and one about which we do not know as much as we need to.
I was a Back-Bencher supporting the ground-breaking legislation in 2006 to make all workplaces and enclosed public places smoke-free. I confess I was proud when England went smoke-free in 2007. Early results showed that, within the first two weeks of the smoke-free law, compliance rates were 97%. I was the Health Minister when the Health Act 2009 received Royal Assent: from April 2012, large shops in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were prevented from displaying tobacco products, and cigarette sales from vending machines were also prohibited; and, in 2015, small shops had to do likewise. I supported the noble Earl, Lord Howe, as the new Health Minister, in carrying through the necessary regulations.
I have had the great privilege of working with many noble Lords across the House to deliver these crucial public health reforms. I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Patel, is not with us today because I know his wise words would have helped us take this Bill through the House over the next few months. There has developed a cross-party support, which saw this legislation start its life during the last Government. That signals to me that there is broad recognition that smoking is addictive and not a choice. It is not a result of freedom of choice, except perhaps for the first cigarette. There is no freedom in addiction. Most smokers want to quit but cannot, and it takes an average of 30 attempts to stay smoke-free. Often the choice to start is made at a young age, therefore locking smokers in for a lifetime, leading to early disability and death.
My Lords, I am very glad to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and indeed to join her in saying how important it is that this is a further step in the process of strengthening our tobacco control regime and that we should do that on a cross-party basis. I agree with her that we should certainly put this, as I think the Front-Bench speeches did, in the context of a range of measures over a substantial period of time.
I was part of the health team—with my noble friend Lord Howe and, indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover—back in 2010, when in the coalition Government we took the measures to which the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, just referred and implemented those regulations. My noble friend Lord Howe was quite right to stress the importance of understanding how such powers are to be used, and in the passage of this legislation I hope we will understand very well and, if necessary, challenge the powers that are to be given and how they are going to be used, all the while, I hope, as my noble friend Lord Howe was doing, supporting the principles and trying to ensure that they are carried through with effective enforcement and a lack of unintended consequences.
We had supported the 2006 ban on smoking in public places from the Front Bench, but gave, as I think the Labour Party did at the time, a free vote on that measure, which helped, I think, to ensure that it was pursued without some of the complex exemptions which the Government were considering. I think that led us to the conclusion that, where some of these public health measures are concerned, as Horatio Nelson said, the boldest measures are the safest, and we were bold in 2010. As the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, said, that boldness was very rapidly proved successful, so I think we may once again be bold. We set out, after 2010, with the ban on vending machine sales, the display ban and the consultation, which I initiated, on standardised packaging that was completed in 2015. All of this was very much focused on trying to ensure that we did not have a constant re-creation of a cohort of young people who went on to spend much of their lives trying and failing to quit smoking. The reduction of the initiation of smoking is a central part of this.
My Lords, I am firmly in favour of legislation to reduce the harmful effects of smoking. More than 2,000 people in Northern Ireland die every year from illnesses associated with smoking. More than 1,000 die each year from lung cancer, accounting for 23% of all cancer-related deaths. I cite these figures in relation to the suffering they represent in Northern Ireland to demonstrate that we need measures in this legislation that will apply right across our United Kingdom. I am concerned that they may not do so, for reasons I will elaborate on in a few moments. We also need proposals that are workable, evidence-based and capable of addressing the harm caused by smoking.
The main practical problem, as we know, is enforcement. The main burden of enforcement will fall on retailers, particularly small shopkeepers. Many retailers—we have listened to their evidence and heard their representations—work long hours providing a service to their communities. They and their staff, some of whom will be young people, are going to have to differentiate between people in middle age. There is a real fear among many of them about the effects on their security and safety and that it risks criminalising shopkeepers rather than those seeking to purchase tobacco illegally. I am sure that these issues can be addressed in Committee.
As has been mentioned, the significant level of illicit trade in cigarettes and tobacco is already a particular problem in Northern Ireland because of the involvement of criminal gangs and paramilitaries on both sides. What assurances can the Government give that they will continue to drive down the illegal trade in tobacco at the same time as this legislation?
As I said, I want to highlight a potentially significant failing in the Bill as drafted. As your Lordships will know, the EU continues to have full authority in Northern Ireland over 300 areas of the economy and other matters, and the relevant laws concerning many aspects of our day-to-day life. One specific provision that applies in Northern Ireland is the EU’s second tobacco products directive. Its purpose is to set out the various requirements that must be met for tobacco and vape products to be sold in the EU. It requires that there should be free movement within the EU of tobacco products that satisfy its requirements.
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This Bill is the product of the combined effort of Members of both Houses and many outside Parliament over the course of many years. A key manifesto commitment of this Government is to create a smoke-free generation, and this Bill has rightly received support from across the political parties. I express my thanks to many—over, as I said, many years—but I particularly thank the former Prime Minister, the right honourable Rishi Sunak MP, who committed to the original form of this Bill. I also thank my ministerial colleague, Ashley Dalton MP, and the members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health. Many others have also informed and motivated the action by this Government.
As we turn our attention to the substance of the Bill, I want to highlight its core aims. At its heart, the Bill is about safeguarding the health of our population. Its fundamental principle is to address the cycle of addiction and societal disadvantage. It is a key component of our broader health mission: a commitment to shift from treatment to prevention. Under our Plan for Change, the Government are committed to ensuring a sustainable health system that moves healthcare from hospital to the community, from analogue to digital and from sickness to prevention.
The Bill incorporates a UK-wide approach, reflecting the need for change across our four nations. Health is a devolved matter, so the Bill has been developed in close partnership and collaboration with the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and the Northern Ireland Executive. This ensures not only greater consistency across the nations but a more enforceable regime across the UK.
In addition to creating a smoke-free generation, the Bill will amend the existing powers to designate certain outdoor settings as smoke free. This will offer greater protections to those at risk from the harms of second-hand smoke. Any such extension will be carefully considered and subject to consultation. In England, the Government will consult on banning smoking outside locations frequented by children and vulnerable people, such as schools, hospitals and playgrounds, but not outdoor hospitality or wider open spaces. Private outdoor spaces are out of scope of the powers in the Bill.
In addition, the Bill provides regulation-making powers to address the entire life cycle of tobacco, vaping and nicotine products, enabling the Government to set appropriate product standards to protect consumers. The introduction of a pre-market registration scheme will provide comprehensive oversight of manufacturers and the products they introduce to our stores. Retail licensing provisions then facilitate ongoing monitoring and modification of retailer practices, strengthening enforcement and ensuring adherence to the measures we put in place.
It is important to acknowledge, as I know many noble Lords do, the dynamic nature of the products we are discussing and the fact that our scientific understanding of their long-term impact continues to evolve. Therefore, the Bill allows for the highly technical details of the regulatory regime to be set out in subsequent regulations that are well placed to adapt to emerging evidence and market innovations.
This is not just about the Bill. The Bill is part of a wider effort across government to address the challenges of smoking and youth vaping. The Government are actively supporting current smokers who wish to quit. We are increasing funding for local stop smoking services by an additional £70 million in 2025-26 and delivering national action, such as the national smoke-free pregnancy incentives scheme and the vaping Swap to Stop scheme.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has laid legislation that will see the ban of single-use vapes from 1 June this year, addressing a key factor in youth vaping as well as environmental concerns. Moreover, to discourage non-smokers and young people from starting vaping, and to generate revenue for public services, the Government will introduce a vaping products duty, which will come into force from 1 October 2026. In order to continue to incentivise smokers to quit and keep the differential in price, duty rates on all tobacco products were increased by 2% above inflation in the Autumn Budget, with further additional increases for hand-rolling tobacco to reduce the gap with cigarettes.
We recognise the importance of robust enforcement of our new laws and regulations, so the Government have announced £10 million of new funding in 2025-26 for Trading Standards to tackle the illicit and underage sale of tobacco and vapes, and to support implementation of the measures in the Bill. In total, we will invest £30 million of new funding in 2025-26 for enforcement agencies, including Trading Standards, Border Force and HMRC.
I extend my gratitude to noble Lords on all sides of the House for their ongoing support for the Bill and for getting it to this stage. The time to act is now, which is why this is priority legislation for this Government and why we have gone further than the previous Government. I look forward to the collegiate and constructive debate that I know will follow from my engagement thus far, and I will seek to respond to the main questions and themes. I beg to move.
This Bill bears the same name as the one introduced by the previous Government and shares many of the same features. It is nevertheless substantially different. It will not therefore surprise the Minister to know that there are aspects to it which we shall wish to explore, to question and, in some cases, to directly challenge.
I mention first the most egregious. The Bill before us contains no fewer than 66 delegated powers, which is double the number present in the previous iteration. This should concern us. Whether one supports the main principles of the Bill or not, it cannot be right to condone a legislative model that leaves large swathes of policy areas with scant detail to be amplified later by ministerial decision.
It is not simply the volume of issues to which the regulation-making powers relate; it is also the nature of those issues. When the Bill was reintroduced, it transpired that the Government had inserted a new Part 7, permitting the Secretary of State and the devolved Ministers to designate, by regulations, anywhere that is open to the public as smoke-free, including outdoor areas, and to designate any smoke-free place as vape and heated tobacco-free, once again by regulations.
I recall the debates that we had in the House in 2006 on the Health Bill, which banned smoking in all indoor settings and on public transport. I supported that ban from the Front Bench on the grounds that there had recently been conclusive evidence that second-hand smoke indoors posed a serious health risk to those who chose not to smoke. That policy has indeed stood the test of time.
What is less clear-cut is whether there is significant health value in removing the proportionality of the Health Act 2006, which requires the Secretary of State to apply the test of the risk to a person of inhaling “significant quantities of smoke” when deciding where to designate as smoke-free. There was a very good reason for that: it struck a balance between the public health concerns associated with second-hand smoke exposure and the rights of people who wish to smoke. It was deemed to be the correct and most proportionate test. The Government have decided to do away with that. I must simply ask: why?
The Bill’s delegated powers extend to other areas. Part 5 grants the Secretary of State significant power to regulate the features, retail packaging and content of not just tobacco products, which the Secretary of State can already regulate, but all vaping and nicotine products. I do not disagree that there are a number of novel products that should see greater regulation. Nicotine pouches, for example, can currently be sold at extraordinarily high strengths of nicotine, with some being sold online containing 30, 50 or even 100 milligrams of nicotine per pouch. This certainly should be regulated. The problem is that we do not know how these extensive powers will be exercised. What do the Government have in mind? Why can we not see some specific proposals in the Bill? The Minister would have been the first to jump on this kind of open-ended drafting when in opposition.
I have a particular concern around packaging, which is one instance where issues of proportionality rear their heads. Clause 89 grants the Secretary of State expanded powers to regulate retail packaging. The packaging of cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco has been heavily regulated for some time, and with good reason. Up to now, though, there have been exemptions for the packaging of cigars and pipe tobacco products. They were exempted from the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015 and the Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016. There were also some exemptions for these products in the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002. Over the years there have been several consultations, all of which have supported the continuation of the exemption. I am not aware of any cogent argument to persuade me that it should now be abandoned. This is certainly something that we shall wish to question at later stages.
The Bill also includes the power to restrict the flavour of nicotine products, and the Government have signalled that they are considering banning certain flavours of vaping liquids. On the face of it, this may seem a reasonable proposal, bearing in mind the troubling rise in youth vaping. The problem here, though, is one of perverse consequences. There is increasingly strong evidence that access to a variety of flavours is a key factor contributing to smokers making the switch to vaping and then not going back to cigarettes. During the Public Bill Committee in the other place, Louise Ross, who launched the world’s first stop smoking service, wrote in her submission:
“Flavours are really important to adult users of the products, whether new users or those who are staying smokefree with a vape”.
She added that those who use vaping products report it is flavours that
“stopped them from going back to cigarettes, which they found tasted terrible after a few weeks of vaping”.
Evidence of that kind should give us pause, before we go hurtling into a ban on what some see as no more than a tempting gimmick to trap unsuspecting teenagers. Once again, we can dig deeper into these questions in Committee.
This leads me to advertising. As noble Lords will know, tobacco advertising has been banned in this country for many years and, although difficult to prove, there seems little doubt that the ban has played its part in bringing about the marked fall in smoking prevalence that we have seen over the past 10 to 15 years. So, if you want to reduce rates of youth vaping—as most right-minded people wish to do—it is only natural to look closely at the idea of extending the advertising ban to vaping products. However, the difficulty with that idea is, once again, the risk of unintended consequences. There is a danger that Part 6, which would ban advertising on all vape and nicotine products in all scenarios, may turn out to work against the valid efforts of the NHS to encourage smokers to give up cigarettes. It is telling that the Government’s own impact assessment for this Bill admits that the ban on vape advertising could lead to more people smoking for longer. It says:
“Whilst smoking prevalence in the UK has been falling for many years, the risk of this policy is that the potential health gains from reduced vaping consumption, could be offset by a slowing of smoking cessation at a societal level”.
So what is the right response? The Government’s manifesto contains a commitment to ban the advertising of vaping products to children, and most of us, I am sure, are deeply uncomfortable with the thought that there are vaping products on the market that have been designed to appeal specifically to young people. Therefore, this is a situation that requires a nuanced and proportionate response. Surely to goodness, adults who use vapes as a smoking-cessation tool should still be able to access information that allows them to make informed decisions on the products they purchase. There could and should be some room for controlled advertising of nicotine products to be permitted in relevant settings within the NHS, in pharmacies, at the point of sale and, potentially, in other retail settings such as specialist vaping shops, in the same way that specialist tobacconists are exempted from tobacco advertising bans. We shall return to this issue in Committee.
This is a further example of how certain aspects of the Bill could hamper the commendable progress we have made in this country on reducing smoking prevalence. It would surely be madness if we allowed this Bill, which is expressly designed to bear down on the incidence of smoking, to unintentionally have the opposite effect. We absolutely must guard against that.
Finally, I turn to the proposal set out in the Bill to introduce a licensing regime for the sale of tobacco and nicotine products. While many have welcomed this as a practical method of dealing with enforcement, many column inches have been devoted to the practicability of an age-verification scheme that will be not just about the need to distinguish a 17 year-old from an 18 year-old; as time passes, it will require retailers to check the ages of people in much older age brackets, so as to distinguish a 37 year-old from a 38 year-old. I do not propose to dwell on this issue now —we can do so, as necessary, at later stages—because there is a much more immediate problem to occupy us.
Once again, the licensing regime is to be established by regulations. This means that we do not yet know any details of what the regime might look like or how it might be implemented. If you are a retailer, this really matters. There is a certain amount of detail in Schedule 1, but the phraseology is, I am afraid, rather vague. The regulations to establish a licensing scheme “may” make
“provision limiting the number of licensed premises”
in a particular area; they
“may make provision about the duration … of licences”;
and they
“may … enable a licensing authority to attach conditions”—
any conditions—“to a licence”. I suppose those are clues, but what will this licensing scheme actually look like? We simply do not know.
The Bill permits the licensing authority to “charge a fee” for an application for a tobacco and nicotine licence. How much might it charge? We do not know. What will be the upper limit that can be charged? Again, we do not know. Will retailers be required to apply for a tobacco licence separately from a nicotine licence or an alcohol licence and be charged for all three? We do not know.
In its written evidence submission to the Public Bill Committee, the Association of Convenience Stores said:
“If the licensing fees replicated the same rates as the alcohol licensing scheme for the convenience sector, we estimate it would result in an additional cost of £11.4 million per year initial sign up and £10.4 million for annual renewal fees for convenience retailers”.
These sums of money represent additional costs at a time when, as I think we all recognise, small retailers simply cannot afford them. The association went on to say that the proposed ID requirements were a major concern and that retailers were already stretched thin trying to manage age verification effectively with current regulations. It said that adding another layer of complexity with the potential for increased fines and penalties would simply make it harder for convenience stores to do their job and increase the likelihood of honest mistakes happening. These are real concerns that retailers have. They are not concerns fed to us from the tobacco industry or the vaping industry; they are concerns relayed to Parliament by the very people that this Bill will impact the most.
In preparing for this Bill, I reread part of our proceedings on the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill, way back in 2001, when I asked the Minister to accept that there was no difference between us on the end we had in view, which was to reduce the prevalence of smoking, particularly among young people. I repeat that assurance today, and I would add an assurance on youth vaping.
It is indeed our duty to protect the health and well-being of everyone in our United Kingdom. However, we must never forget that it is possible for Governments to champion those worthy aims by imposing regulation and burdens that are disproportionate to the good that they will do, or that, in our desire to change the law for the better, we pay too little regard to the law of unintended consequences.
As the Chief Medical Officer points out, the industry first makes addicts of people; then they are trapped and the industry frames “It can’t be taken away” as freedom of choice. Many ingenious arguments are used to combat changes. I was a development Minister and I saw how the industry gave out cigarettes to build new markets in developing countries as they were squeezed elsewhere.
Of course, people will point to challenges—as we have just heard—in the yearly increase in age. If in a few years the age limit is, say, 35, an 18 year-old will not easily pass as that. So we should focus on the main aim and seek ways to help deliver this. As was said the other day by a former Conservative Minister, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. Of course there is push-back; there always is.
Now I come to vaping. If the industry had provided vapes simply as a means to enable people to stop smoking, that would have been fine. But it did not. It made vapes attractive to young people, with flavours and bright covers. It targeted them with nicotine levels that got them hooked. Vapes should never have been sold to those who do not smoke. I have seen this with close young relatives. It is cool to use vapes. You see this on the bus, at the school gates, everywhere. We have a difficult balance here of allowing vapes as smoking cessation but doing our best to prevent the take-up among children.
I welcome the Government’s proposals that branding on vapes that might appeal to children should be banned, that free vapes should never be handed out to children, and that vape contents and flavours should be controlled and displays regulated. We have to do our best to ensure that the Bill is as watertight as possible, given the industry’s inventiveness. I understand why the Government have sought flexibility, given the history of foot-dragging in every instance of tobacco control. I understand their frustration.
I am glad that the Government wish to extend smoke-free arrangements in public places. Working cross-party, we had secured in the pandemic that pubs and restaurants should be smoke-free outside, as they were inside, but the industry was effective at pushing back on that—not through the Department of Health, but through the local government department. I hope we can make further progress here.
There is no doubt now about the harm that tobacco causes to users and those around them. We know the cost to the NHS and the economy. We know that most smokers wish that they had never started. I therefore strongly support this Second Reading.
Another argument that we have heard is, “Why not just raise the age of legal sale to 25?” If you do the maths, for the next nine years, between now and 2034, we will be on that journey anyway. That will give us ample time to see whether the measures in this Bill are working as intended.
Then there are the crocodile tears: “This will be bad for the Treasury because of all the tobacco excise duties which are forgone”. If that is your argument, have the courage of your convictions and go into bat for the Government promoting smoking as a way of boosting the coffers of the Treasury. In any event, that is to ignore the wider economic arguments which the noble Baroness set out.
Then there is the zombie argument, that the black market will develop and prosper with each incremental regulatory step we take. As a matter of fact, rather than a debating point, the number of smuggled cigarettes has fallen by over 85% since regulations of this nature to clamp down were introduced 25 years ago. The most recent data from HMRC shows that the forgone duty from smuggled or black market cigarettes as a proportion of the theoretically available total has fallen from about 17% in 2005 to about 7% now. The question of enforcement is independent from the question of regulation. We can do both.
Finally, we get to: “Can we at least leave vapes out?” Here, again as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the Minister have set out, there is a balance to be struck. The current scientific consensus is that smokers switching to vaping will reduce the threats to their health, but equally that there is no health benefit from taking up nicotine addiction if you have not previously been a smoker. That is why it is right that there is flexibility in the Bill. I say to anybody who doubts what is going on out there that as I came into Parliament this afternoon, I stopped at a newsagent. I know that visual aids are not allowed, but there were Pokémon cards with cartoons next to vapes with a little cartoon character of a vampire, at kids’ eye height, being sold near this building. The idea that the industry has changed its spots is untrue. There has been no damascene conversion. It is the sword of Damocles that is producing the change. The Bill deserves our support.
We all submit to the law and exercise limited rights for the good and protection of our neighbours. We are called to love our neighbours and seek their good; indeed, what is profoundly Christian is that this may be at the expense of ourselves and our own choices and preferences.
We agree on the need to reduce health inequalities and to reduce the overall smoking rate in line with the Government’s smoke-free commitments. Much of the onus for these tasks is on integrated care boards, so I ask the Minister: what will the impact of the announced 50% cuts to operational costs be on stop-smoking services and, more widely, on the reduction of health inequalities? In the midst of such pressure on the health service, and in such a time of transition for the NHS, a change like this is required to reduce this enduring inequality in health outcomes. It also seems clear that a “polluter pays” levy should be considered to support these and other stop-smoking services.
I am glad to see the introduction of this Bill and commend the Government and the previous Government for their courageous action on the issue.
For many of us, this is not just a huge public health prevention initiative with savings for our NHS, but it is also a rather personal matter too. My mother, Jean Thornton, spent the last 10 years or so of her life with COPD. It was only after severe illness, and when she was initially diagnosed, that she actually ceased smoking, which she had started at the age of 14. She was the eldest of 11 children; all those working-class men and women were smokers; all of them ended their lives with smoking-related disease. That is why this is personal to me indeed.
The smoke-free generation is a long-term investment in the good health of our nation. This Government have an explicit aim at the heart of the health mission to halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and the poorest. Smoking is responsible for half of that gap. According to government modelling, gradually raising the age of sale year by year could prevent nearly 500,000 cases of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer and other serious illnesses by the end of the century. This is not only a public health victory; it is also a major economic victory, with total societal benefits projected at £77.3 billion.
There are those who will undoubtedly seek to amend this Bill, as happened in the other place, to remove the rising age of sale and replace it with a static age of sale. We must resist that. By increasing the age of sale every year, we prevent the tobacco industry targeting new audiences and recruiting the next generation of smokers. Two out of three people who try cigarettes become daily smokers, regardless of when they start. I look forward to working across the House to make sure this Bill gets on to the statute book.
It is a less attractive habit to quote oneself, but back in March 2012, as Secretary of State, I said:
“My objective is to achieve smoke-free communities”.
That was over 13 years ago now. It was pretty controversial at the time, but I think it is now much less controversial and much more of a widely shared objective. The question was always how to achieve it, and I reinforce the credit to Prime Minister Sunak and my friend the then Secretary of State Sajid Javid for asking Dr Javed Khan, in his review back in 2022, to propose that bold step of an incremental rise in the age bar on cigarette sales. I very much support that, because it was not clear how we were going to achieve it and I think this now shows us the path to achieving it.
I support the Bill. I want to look at it constructively to ensure that it delivers what we are aiming for, including such practical measures as securing that trading standards officers have the powers and resources needed to secure compliance. Many noble Lords will talk about why we need to achieve this. From my point of view, it is not just that so many smokers suffer so much from their addiction to cigarette smoking; it is how it contributes so dramatically in society to the inequalities between parts of the country. We have to reduce those.
I have one point on vaping: I hope we will also look to take an evidence-led approach, think about what the long-term consequences may be and give ourselves the powers to respond to that over time rather than necessarily making all the judgments that we need to make now. I hope we will look at how we can make the enforcement procedures more effective as well. With all those thoughts yet to come, I very much support the Bill.
The Government have described this as a four-nation Bill, but it appears to me and many commentators that the Bill is incompatible with the tobacco directive as far as Northern Ireland is concerned, since the Bill purports to introduce a restriction on the placing of tobacco products on the market in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republic, subject to exactly the same directive, did not pursue a generational smoking ban explicitly because of the directive, instead introducing legislation to raise the minimum age for the sale of tobacco products to 21. Denmark also considered introducing a generational smoking ban in 2022, and its Health Minister announced that the tobacco directive prevented the Danish Government introducing the ban. So I fear that, unless there is a provision in the legislation that excludes the application of the tobacco directive in respect of Northern Ireland, it may well be the case that the generational smoking ban that we want to see applied across the United Kingdom cannot apply in part of the United Kingdom.
The Government have stated—and no doubt the Minister will say in response today—that they have considered all their domestic and international obligations. One such obligation is the implementation of the protocol/Windsor Framework, but that very framework requires Northern Ireland to abide by the tobacco directive. The protocol/Windsor Framework, by virtue of Section 7A of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, rules supreme over UK legislation. It takes precedence. That has been decided in court case after court case in Northern Ireland, whether it be on legacy matters, such as the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act, or in respect of immigration matters, such as the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024. In those cases the Government gave the same sort of assurances that they gave in the other place on this issue, yet the courts ruled otherwise, as we predicted they would.
I hope that in response to this debate the Minister can clarify the matter, give a guarantee that the Bill will apply across all parts of the United Kingdom and indicate that the Government are prepared, if necessary, to ensure a four-nation, UK-wide approach to override the application of the tobacco directive. This is an important practical measure that affects the health of everyone across the United Kingdom, with not only constitutional implications but practical health implications.