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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O’Brien)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) and the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) for securing this hugely important debate, and I thank other hon. Members for some excellent speeches. I was haunted by the image, conjured up by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mrs Hamilton), of people with COPD being wheeled outside to have one more gasp—I think we have all seen things like that. It has also been a pleasure to have contributions from all four parts of the UK. I shall try to respond to as many of the questions as possible.
In 2019, the Government produced a Green Paper on preventive health, in which we introduced our ambition for England to become smoke free by 2030. The ambition aims to shift the focus from treating ill health to preventing it in the first place. That means three things: first, discouraging children and adults from starting; secondly, helping smokers to quit; and thirdly, moving smokers to less harmful alternatives, such as vapes.
That is exactly what we have been doing over the last decade, and we have made significant progress. In recent years, the Government have introduced a range of legislation. We have introduced a UK-wide system of track and trace for cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco to deter illicit sales, and from May 2024 that will cover all tobacco products, including shisha and cigars. We have continued to invest in stop smoking services, to help smokers get the right support for them. We continue to support the NHS, and last year alone provided £35 million to the NHS long-term plan commitments on smoking. Of course, we have also doubled duty on cigarettes and introduced a minimum excise tax on the cheapest cigarettes. Between them, those measures have helped to ensure that adult smoking prevalence in England is at its lowest level on record, 13%, and that youth smoking rates are the lowest on record—in 2021, 3.3% of 15-year-olds were regular smokers.
If we are to achieve our 5% ambition by 2030, however, we must move faster and be bolder. That is why on 11 April I introduced a package of new measures to help make more progress. To help smokers quit and move towards less harmful alternatives, we announced funding for a new national “swap to stop” scheme, which is the first of its kind in the world at a national level, to encourage 1 million smokers to swap cigarettes for vapes. We have begun to set up pathfinders, where local authorities can apply for starter kits, and the first shipments of vapes should begin going out later this summer. Local authorities across the country have expressed an interest, and we are also working with social landlords, homelessness charities, jobcentres, food banks and all the other groups that can help smokers to quit.
Despite its effectiveness as a tool to quit smoking, we must be aware of the risks that vaping poses to children and non-smokers, as various Members have pointed out. Over the past couple of years, we have seen an alarming rise in children vaping, and that is why we are taking action. We recently held a call for evidence to look at all the opportunities to reduce the number of children using vape products. It closed on 6 June and we are analysing the responses. We will publish our response within 12 weeks.
To stop children buying vapes, we need to get businesses to comply with our regulations and abide by the standards we have set. Of course, there are retailers out there selling vapes to children. That is why we recently created a new enforcement unit, which has three priorities: to tackle products imported and traded illicitly, to remove illegal products from the market that do not comply with our regulations, and to stop under-age sales to children. The unit will help remove illegal products from shelves, stop them coming through our borders and stop the sale of vapes to children.
Dr Hudson
I thank the Minister for articulating some of the risks around disposable vapes. I want to raise the risks they pose to animals. Just the other day, I was out walking my young dog Poppy and she came out of the undergrowth with a bright pink, melon-flavoured disposable vape in her mouth. I was able to get it out of her mouth, but, as a vet, I shudder to think what would have happened if she had chewed, crunched or swallowed it. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need more public awareness of the risks of vapes to health, the environment and even animals?
Neil O’Brien
That is a fascinating point, and my hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to be aware of the environmental and wider impacts of disposable vapes as we consider our next steps.
At the end of May, the Prime Minister announced several further measures to address youth vaping, including closing the loophole that allowed industry to give out free samples, increasing education and supporting dedicated school police liaison officers to keep illegal vapes out of schools. The measures support our wider approach to tackling youth vaping—not only preventing supply, but reducing demand. We also need to take action against businesses that break the rules and protect businesses that abide by them.
As well as non-compliant vapes, the illicit trade in tobacco undermines our work to protect public health. To answer the question from the hon. Member for Arfon (Hywel Williams), His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs will produce a new strategy to tackle illicit tobacco later this year. The strategy will outline joint efforts to catch and punish those involved in the illegal market and will build on the work we are already doing—my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East alluded to it—to use the registration system as a way to improve enforcement.
Another big priority is to help pregnant women quit smoking. The rate of smoking in pregnancy remains stubbornly high; increasing the number of women who have a smoke-free pregnancy is crucial. To help expectant mothers, we have set up a financial incentive scheme, married with behavioural support. We aim to ensure that every pregnant mother who smokes across England gets help to quit. That work is based on a successful scheme in Greater Manchester, which has seen one of the biggest drops in smoking in pregnancy anywhere in the country.
To help more smokers quit, we need to be more innovative in how we connect with them, with the right type of support and messaging at the right time. To address the question asked by the hon. Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist), we are going further on mental health and are ensuring that everyone who is in mental health treatment is signposted to stop smoking services, because there is a link between the two.
Another potential opportunity that hon. Members have raised is our plan to provide pack inserts in smoked tobacco packets, with positive messages and information to help more smokers quit. We intend to launch a UK-wide consultation shortly and are engaging with devolved Administrations on the matter. To answer the question raised by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), we are absolutely having those conversations.
We are committed to doing all we can to prevent people from starting smoking, to give smokers the support they need to quit, and to tackle the damage from the illicit market. I talked about some of the measures that I recently announced, but we will have more to say in the major conditions strategy in the not-too-distant future. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East and the hon. Member for City of Durham for securing this hugely important debate, and I look forward to making further progress towards our ambition for a smoke-free England and a smoke-free UK by 2030.