The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Dame Andrea Leadsom)
Today, the UK Government with the devolved Administrations have published our response to the UK-wide consultation, “Creating a smokefree generation and tackling youth vaping”.
Tobacco is the single most important entirely preventable cause of ill health, disability and death in this country. It is responsible for 80,000 deaths in the UK a year and one in four of all UK cancer deaths. Smoking is one of the biggest drivers of health inequalities across the country. The majority of smokers know about the risks of smoking and want to quit but are unable to due to the addictive nature of tobacco. Four in five smokers start before the age of 20 and are then addicted for life.
Smoking costs the country £17 billion a year, including the £14 billion cost to productivity, which is equivalent to 6.9p in every £1 of income tax received. In comparison, the tax raised in duty revenue is only around £10.2 billion per year. Smoking puts a significant pressure on the NHS and wider health and social care services.
Moreover, while the evidence is clear that vapes can be an effective tool to help smokers to quit, we are incredibly worried about the alarming levels of illicit youth vaping—rates have tripled in the last three years with around one in five 11 to 17-year-olds in Great Britain now having tried vaping. Vaping carries the risk of future harms and nicotine addiction and, therefore, is never recommended for children. Despite this, it is clear that vapes are being deliberately targeted and marketed at them.
It is essential that we take action to protect future generations from the harms of smoking and stop youth vaping. That is why on 12 October, the Department of Health and Social Care published a Command Paper, “Stopping the start: our new plan to create a smokefree generation”. Following this, we published a consultation, together with the devolved Administrations to gather evidence and views to inform future legislative measures and next steps.
The consultation ran for eight weeks from 12 October 2023 to 6 December 2023. We received nearly 28,000 valid responses to the consultation from a wide range of stakeholders across the UK. A clear majority of responders, 63.2%, supported the ambitious proposal to create the first smokefree generation—one of the most significant public health measures in a generation.
The UK Government and devolved Administrations’ response to the consultation therefore sets out our plan to introduce legislation as soon as possible. Legislation will introduce measures to:
Change the age of sale for all tobacco products, cigarette papers and herbal smoking products whereby anyone born on or after 1 January 2009 will never legally be sold tobacco products alongside prohibiting proxy sales and changing warning notices in retail premises.
Stop vapes from being deliberately targeted at children, while continuing to support adult smokers to quit using vapes to help. It will introduce new regulatory-making powers to restrict flavours, point of sale and packaging for vaping products—nicotine and non-nicotine—as well as other consumer nicotine products. Any restrictions will be taken forward in subsequent secondary legislation, which will be subject to further consultation.
Introduce new fixed-penalty notices for England and Wales to the value of £100 for underage sale, proxy sale and free distribution of tobacco and vapes—nicotine and non-nicotine—and regulate to extend these provisions to other consumer nicotine products.
Additionally, the consultation confirms that the UK Government, the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government intend to introduce legislation to implement a ban on the sale and supply of disposable vapes. The UK Government will work with the devolved Administrations to explore an import ban. Northern Ireland officials acknowledge the issues raised during the consultation and will consider potential legislation in future.
These legislative measures sit alongside a package of support to help current smokers quit—including doubling the funding for local authority stop smoking services. They also sit alongside additional enforcement funding. HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and Border Force have published a new illicit tobacco strategy, “Stubbing out the problem”, setting out their continued commitment to reduce the trade in, and demand for, illicit tobacco, and to tackle and disrupt the organised crime groups behind the illicit tobacco trade. The strategy sets out the new root and branch approach, which targets the demand for illicit trade—the consumers that criminals seek to exploit—as well as the supply—the criminals themselves. It is supported by new funding over the next five years which will be used to boost HMRC and Border Force enforcement capability. The strategy also establishes a new, cross-Government illicit tobacco taskforce, combining the operational, investigative and intelligence expertise of various agencies, and enhancing HMRC’s ability to disrupt organised crime.
I am grateful to the many people who took time to respond to the consultation which helped us accurately consider this policy. The consultation response has been published on www.gov.uk.
[HCWS219]