Smoking-Related Diseases

Baroness Gale Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gale (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Faulkner for bringing this important debate before us tonight. Action by successive Governments to reduce the harm caused by tobacco has been highly effective, but much remains to be done. The timely publication of a new comprehensive plan is of vital importance.

I will focus my comments on the need for the plan to contain specific recommendations to further reduce the harm that tobacco causes to children and young people. For many, particularly in deprived communities, the harm of tobacco begins before birth. The ambitions set out in the previous tobacco control plan, including driving down smoking rates among young people and pregnant women, were achieved. However, one in 10 pregnant women still smokes at the time their baby is born, and smoking remains the single biggest modifiable risk factor for poor birth outcomes. Children born to mothers who smoke, and children who live with smokers, are also far more likely to become smokers themselves than those from non-smoking households. Smoking and smoking-related disease is passed down through generations.

The Public Health Minister has recently written to the Smoking in Pregnancy Challenge Group—a partnership of charities, royal colleges and academics—confirming that ambitions on smoking in pregnancy will be renewed in the new tobacco plan. I am delighted by that news and hope that the Minister can confirm today that all the ambitions will be reviewed and renewed in the new plan when it is published.

We have a duty to our children to protect them from an addiction that takes hold of most smokers when they are young. Each day, hundreds of children take up smoking, starting out on a path that will lead to smoking-related disease and premature death. I echo the call from other noble Lords for the Government to publish a new tobacco control plan without delay.