Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

Committee stage
Monday 3rd November 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

I support this group of amendments. It is absolutely right that we have a thoroughgoing licensing scheme. Many people would be very surprised to find that we do not have a licensing scheme for tobacco, as we do for alcohol. It is unregulated, so I welcome the proposals to have a thoroughgoing licensing scheme. It should be streamlined; we need to recognise that the vast majority, as has been said by my noble friend, comply with the law and are fully responsible.

In developing a licensing scheme, we need to look at the experience of other, diverse countries that have a licensing scheme—Finland, Hungary, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Canada and Singapore, to name some—because there is a lot to be learned from them. I urge the Minister to have a good look at what is happening elsewhere.

A vaping licensing scheme is particularly welcome. Currently, vapes are prolific on our high streets, in markets and at counters in nail salons, and so on. They are unregulated, and that must change to protect people and hold those that are responsible to account. I very much welcome the move to have a licensing scheme here, and I associate myself with what my noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering has just said.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, these amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, from whom we will hear later, address the details of a licensing scheme, which could, I believe, be better worked out during consultation and are better put in regulations than on the face of the Bill.

I think there are problems with the suggestion that there should be a joint alcohol and tobacco products licence—as superficially attractive as that may sound. This is for two reasons. The first is practical; there are plenty of retailers who sell both ranges of products, but there are plenty who do not, including some small shops and specialist vaping retailers. Let us not overcomplicate this by having several kinds of licence: joint and single.

The second reason is even more serious, because the objectives of the two schemes are not the same. The objective of the tobacco and vapes licencing scheme should be public health. Indeed, that is the main justification for the generational ban and other restrictive aspects of this Bill. On the other hand, public health was not the objective of the design of the original alcohol licence, and things are set to get worse—which I will come to. Therefore, there are issues about putting the two together.

On Amendment 35, there is a case for restricting the density of tobacco and vapes licensed premises in a local area on public health grounds. Local authorities already have the powers to limit the density of fast-food outlets in certain areas, such as near schools, on the basis that the food they sell is often high in fat, salt and sugars, and is energy dense. Why should local authorities not have the same powers for the density of shops selling tobacco and its various products? Therefore, I oppose Amendment 35. Density is better decided by the local licensing authority, which knows and understands its own area. It is not something that should be on the face of the Bill but something that should be considered in consultation.

I turn now to Amendments 30 and 42. The Government have recently launched a rapid consultation on alcohol licensing, led by an industry task force that would see “growth” incorporated as an objective of the revised scheme, rather than public health. Its recommendations have been warmly welcomed by the Government, but I would advise caution, especially in the light of calls for joint tobacco and alcohol licences today. It is true that hospitality outlets can be important for people’s well-being and community cohesion and often provide economic benefits to local communities. However, many of them rely nowadays more on the sale of meals than on just alcohol and provide an opportunity for family outings. The implication by the industry in the recommendations of the task force is that people cannot enjoy themselves unless they are consuming alcohol. That is, of course, a nonsense suggestion. By the way, each of the three working groups was led by a senior member of the industry and there was no representation on the task force from the Department of Health and Social Care or public health bodies, despite public health acting as the responsible authority for local licensing committees.

The task force report defines the core purpose of licensing as economic enablement and sets out a series of mechanisms to promote that approach. The foreword in the Government’s response, written by the Minister for Services, Small Business and Exports, not only describes licensed hospitality as “foundational” to the UK economy but as selling “happiness, creating lasting memories”, and providing

“the glue that binds us together as a society”.

This is language that, if used in alcohol marketing, would probably breach the industry’s own code of conduct.

The task force’s recommendations would undermine the powers of elected local authorities in several ways: first, by the creation of a quasi-statutory national licensing policy framework to direct local decision-making; secondly, by the automatic addition of off-sales permissions to all on-sales licences; thirdly, by the enhanced powers for unelected licensing officers to override decisions of elected officers on licensing committees; fourthly, through the

“Requirement to link licensing to economic development and culture policies”;


fifthly, by a blanket “amnesty” on licensing conditions deemed to be

“outdated in the modern world”—

deemed by whom, I ask—and, finally, by the imposition of a higher evidential bar for objections to licence applications, with adherence determined solely by licensing officers.

That is why there should be no attempt to link alcohol licences under such a regime with tobacco retail licences. There are other ways of helping the hospitality industry rather than undermining the very foundation of the alcohol sales licensing regime by attacking local democracy in this way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

My Lords, in supporting this group of amendments, it is clear that the very word “filter” is the most misleading of epithets. It leads many people to believe they make smoking safer. I would take a lot of convincing that people are not led to believe it is safer by the use of that very misleading epithet. It is not the point that filters do not make smoking more dangerous—incidentally, some of the early filters actually contained asbestos, so there were certainly some at an early stage that did make smoking much more dangerous. Leaving that on one side, the whole point is that people are misled into believing that smoking with filters is safer. That is the reason for Amendment 33.

There is a logic to the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, that I find compelling. The fact that we can do something in relation to the environment as well as to health is not a reason for not acting; it is a reason for acting. The suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the state has no role here or only a qualified role and should not be entering this area, I find staggering. There is every reason we should be doing so in my humble opinion. Therefore, I strongly support Amendments 33 and 34.

On Amendments 141 and 143 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, there is unimpeachable logic in putting a warning on something if you are trying to deter people from using it. I do not think it is sufficient that it is on packets; there are many people who will have a single cigarette proposed to them. They will see the warning there, and there will be publicity given to that warning. It is not just the warning on the cigarettes; the fact the Government are doing that will mean it is more widely known.

There is a great logic, and I urge the Minister to be bold. It is not sufficient that we are having this generational ban, important though that is. There is a reason for moving more quickly and forcefully in relation to the amendments, and an unimpeachable logic to trying to iron out the position on filters, which are indeed a giant fraud.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 34 in the name of my noble friend Lord Russell and Amendments 141 and 143 in the name of my noble friend Lord Rennard. I will also rehearse arguments in favour of Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for the consideration of the Committee. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, suggested there is some confusion about why people might want to ban filters. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, that a ban is about both public health and environmental considerations.

It has been clearly shown that filters of all kinds have no health benefits whatever. Indeed, I maintain that they are actively harmful to health, but I will come to that later. They are also very costly to public authorities and bad for wildlife and the environment. Filters have been called, by a Back-Bench Member of the government party,

“the deadliest fraud in the history of human civilisation”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/3/25; col. 1043.]

because they were formerly advertised—when cigarette advertising was still allowed—as being safer and less harmful to health than cigarettes without filters. This lie has had a long tail because even now only 25% of people understand that they have no health benefits.

As a result of the false perception that the filter—because of its very name as pointed out by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Bourne—removes some of the tar and other harmful tobacco chemicals, evidence shows that smokers of filtered cigarettes inhale deeper and more frequently. Proof that filters were invented to deceive is the fact that they were deliberately made from a white substance which turns brown when heated, adding to the illusion that they were removing some of the harmful elements from the tobacco smoke. This was deliberately to mislead the smoker.

Filters of all kinds are bad for the environment. The plastic ones in particular contain thousands of toxic substances, including microplastics and nanoplastics. They take up to 10 years to break down in the environment, releasing all these microplastics as well as the 7,000 toxic chemicals from the on average five millimetres of tobacco that remains attached to each butt. These are washed into our soils and water systems and damage marine life, other wildlife and our drinking water.

Microplastics are ubiquitous. They have been found from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. They cause cancer, including colorectal, liver, pancreatic, breast and lung cancers, and the levels of them found in human brains—causing who knows what effects—have increased by 50% since 2016, according to pathologists. Even the so-called biodegradable ones contain microplastics in the glue and in any case take a very long time to break down. I deliberately put one in my compost heap, and it was still there a year later. In any case, they, too, always have some tobacco attached. They have zero health benefit and lead to a false sense of security.

The environmental damage is also very costly. We all pay to clean them up when they are discarded through littering; as has been said, local authorities spend £40 million every year, money paid by taxpayers—you and I—which could be better spent on public health and other services. Some 86% of the public and even most smokers believe that manufacturers should switch to fully biodegradable filters rather than plastic ones, but, frankly, I think that is not enough to fix the problem, for the reasons I have outlined.

The killer fact, to coin a phrase, is that there is a strong epidemiological link between the rise in the prevalence of cigarettes containing filters and the proportionate rise of a kind of cancer called adenocarcinoma, while other lung cancers have fallen along with the reduced prevalence of smoking overall. A paper by Min-Ae Song et al published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in America in 2017 analysed 3,284 citations in scientific literature and internal tobacco company documents and concluded thus:

“The analysis strongly suggests that filter ventilation has contributed to the rise in lung adenocarcinomas among smokers. Thus, the FDA should consider regulating its use, up to and including a ban”.


Indeed, such a link had originally been suggested by the surgeon-general as far back as 2014. Therefore, I am inclined to support Amendment 33 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, but at the very least I hope the Government will accept Amendment 34 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Russell.

On Amendments 141 and 143 in the name of my noble friend Lord Rennard, I hope the Minister will see the sense of consulting on this. Not every cigarette smoked by a child or a young person or an adult smoker comes immediately out of a packet bearing health warnings. Many children, when they start illicit smoking, share a packet among themselves and many never get to see the packet at all. That is why the principle, already accepted by successive Governments, that a health warning on the packet should accompany tobacco-containing products should apply to individual products and not just the packaging. I am aware that the Government plan to make sure that there is an insert in each packet signposting smokers to cessation services and products. This is a welcome positive measure to accompany the deterrent measures of health warnings, but it is not enough. I am sure the first thing many will do is throw away the insert and never read it, as people sometimes do with pills. They cannot throw away the paper that wraps the cigarette. That is why it would be the most effective place to put the warnings.

If you believe that the health warnings on packages work and deter, how much more effective would it be to reinforce that message every time a cigarette is removed from them? A consultation and a review of the evidence of the ban in other countries would be a good idea, and I recommend it to the Minister.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

Committee stage
Thursday 30th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

My Lords, in support of the speech we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, there is ample evidence of successful earlier levies, contrary to what the noble Baroness suggested. They include levies on landfill and soft drinks as well as provisions following Grenfell, as my noble friend said. In the gambling industry, there is also a very successful levy. Nor is it a unique matter to require companies to publish data, with the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, correctly naming water and energy as two examples.

I can quite see why the Minister is attracted to the idea of the levy. In this hard-pressed time, we have hard-pressed taxpayers about to be even more hard pressed; they should not have to pay for the gap in public resources for public health. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the public health budget that needs to be filled—and this will fill it. I can therefore see why the Minister is attracted to it. There is also of course the incalculable harm that is caused by the industry—whether one calls it evil or not. As the noble Baroness mentioned, two-thirds of people who smoke will ultimately die from it—that to me can be characterised as evil. It certainly causes harm, and that harm needs to be dealt with.

So I strongly support this group of amendments. Amendment 12 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Northover, and Amendment 148 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, concern publishing data. They seem eminently sensible. However, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham’s amendment would provide a means of getting the polluter to pay. That is something we should seek to do because, as noble as the aims of this legislation are, there is a big gap in spending. I do not see why the taxpayer should have to pay for this, but I can quite see why the industry should; I hope, therefore, to hear from the Minister that that is going to happen.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, on behalf of our Benches, I have added my name to my noble friend Lady Northover’s Amendment 12. I also support Amendment 148, of course, although my name is not on it yet; I have a bit of a track record on changing “may” to “must”, so I am very much in favour of that amendment.

As my noble friend said, the tobacco industry sits on a rich source of data that would help public health planners and practitioners to plan and deliver public health smoking cessation services in a granular way. That could help to reduce inequalities, so my noble friend’s Amendments 12 and 148 are no-brainers for the Government in the fight against health inequality, which I know they are in favour of winning. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, pointed out, if you have the data, you have a powerful weapon; the industry uses it and the Government should have it.

The data would also shine a light on the massive profits of the tobacco companies, which saw the writing on the wall about the decline of tobacco smoking and shifted part of their business model to hooking young people and existing smokers into being addicted to their nicotine vaping products instead. They then surrounded them with brightly coloured packaging, attractive-sounding flavours and masses of expensive advertising. One has to wonder why they spend so much money on advertising and the attractive displays in my local village shops. Ah, yes—it must be because that enables them to hook people to their profitable products for life.

These profits are addressed in Amendment 192 from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, which is supported by my noble friends Lord Rennard and Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and in my noble friend Lord Russell’s Amendment 194, which I also support. Both amendments propose a levy on the profits of tobacco companies. Tobacco and the nicotine it contains are uniquely harmful products, which is why they should be treated in this way. They are highly addictive for some people from their very first use, by the way; that is sometimes ignored. Tobacco kills more than 76,000 people in England every year—that is almost as many as were killed by Covid in just one year, in 2020—and the four manufacturers that are responsible for most of the UK’s tobacco sales make excessive profits that require regulation. It has been said that they make an estimated profit of £900 million a year in the UK, with an average net operating profit margin of about 50%; as my noble friend Lord Scriven pointed out, most manufacturers of other goods are quite satisfied with an average of 10%. Yet those companies currently pay very little corporation tax in the UK. The tobacco tax of £6.8 billion that they pay does not even scratch the surface of the harm they do; as has been pointed out, that tax is paid by the consumer and not by the producer.

In other areas of society, polluters are required to avoid and minimise pollution and to pay to clean it up. Tobacco companies make no effort to do either. In other monopoly situations, such as energy supply, the Government intervene, yet tobacco companies get away scot free, despite the fact that their products cost the NHS £1.82 billion annually and the ill health caused by them causes major suffering to individuals and families; they also have a major effect on productivity and the economy, costing society in England £43.7 billion a year.

Given this Government’s objectives on growth, I would have thought that a “polluter pays” tobacco levy would be very popular with them, as it is with the general public, 76% of whom support the policy. It could raise up to £700 million per year to fund vital smoking cessation and wider public health activities, as my noble friend Lord Russell suggests in his amendment. It could prevent industry manipulating prices to undermine the health aims of tobacco taxes. A levy would make tobacco less profitable in the UK and reduce industry incentives to lobby against government actions to achieve a smoke-free country. I know that they are very clever lobbyists. Although I trust that this Government will resist such lobbying, this would ensure that the cost burden of taxes is not shifted to consumers because a levy alongside a cap on manufacturer pricing would prevent manufacturers passing the costs on to consumers.

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the UK, alongside obesity caused by poor diet. Investing in the resources raised by the levy to help smokers quit, as in Amendment 194, will support the Government’s ambitions to halve the difference in healthy life expectancy and shift healthcare from treatment to prevention, an ambition outlined strongly in the Government’s 10-year health plan.

These amendments are very much in line with what the Government want. I hope that they will have the courage to accept them. The key principle is that the revenue to tackle the harms of tobacco should come from the industry, not the poor, addicted and often sick consumer, and the cost of the damage caused by tobacco should certainly not come from the taxpayer.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lord Moylan on having the affirmative resolution procedure for statutory instruments. That seems wholly sensible.

On age verification, I strongly support the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. Dealing with online sales is a real issue. We have the overseas experience of countries such as France, Mexico, Brazil and so on to look at, but this seems a neat solution to what could otherwise become a very real problem.

On the amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Lansley, considerable work has been done on age gating in relation to vaping sales and, as he said, those who are vaping strongly support having some kind of process. We have the system being developed by IKE Tech in the USA, currently awaiting FDA approval, which provides a very neat and quick method of age verification via a smartphone app. It will enable adults to remain protected—it will take them only 90 seconds for the initial process and six seconds for every subsequent vape, so it will not take long. That seems a very sensible way of proceeding and I am interested to hear what the Minister has to say on that.

In relation to what the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, said about what the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, would have said, there is certainly an issue to be looked at. I strongly support looking at what has been working in Scotland. It seems sensible to look at what they have been doing, learn from their experience and follow it where appropriate. Again, I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on that issue.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think it is fair to ask a courier driver to verify the age of a person, so the noble Lord, Lord Young, has a very good point, and age verification online is very poor. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, spoke about age gating. I can see why it is popular with retailers, because it would take some of the burden away from them.

It has been claimed that the Bill may not currently keep up with technology. Can the Minister say whether the wide powers in the Bill would allow powers to be taken in future to mandate age-gating technology if the evidence indicates that it is needed? Clearly, there is a problem even now with underage children buying vapes. A briefing that I—and I think quite a few other noble Lords—received from something called IKE Tech said that 71% of underage children buying vapes get them from retailers. That indicates that we need a really vigorous enforcement regime. It also said that 76% said they are buying them online, which indicates support for the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Young.

On the whole, when people buy from a retailer, I think that I am in favour of a wide range of means of age verification being acceptable. Both these amendments aim to reduce opportunities to start vaping underage, which is a very good thing, because young people who start vaping may not be killed by tobacco but they will be made addicted and very poor by the addiction to nicotine that they will get hooked on. I look forward to the Minister’s reply on that. I would not want to prevent an adult who could not obtain digital age verification buying an effective quitting tool, so we have to be a bit careful about unexpected consequences.

One thing that I saw in the briefing was interesting. The claim is that similar tech can also prevent circulation of illicit products by embedding low-cost NFC tags into product packaging so that every legal vape can be instantly verified; this stops fakes at the border and on shop shelves. That is something that we should all be concerned about, because drugs could well be inserted into vapes—and I understand that this is happening already—so people are getting things that they do not expect to get. Of course, something like that would not be legal and, if there was a tag on them to identify anything that is legal, you would only want to buy those. I know that teachers have reported problems with children being drugged by things that have been inserted into vapes, so that is something that we should consider.

Local Government

Debate between Baroness Walmsley and Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth

Tuesday 27th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, my noble friend makes a powerful point for an area that he knows well. Sparsity and population density are very much centre stage in the fair funding review and will be taken full account of.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, an important public service that has been and continues to be cut is public health. Directors of public health tell me that they can spend money extremely cost-effectively. Are the Government doing any research into the public health interventions carried out by local authorities, to let everybody know what works?

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth]

My Lords, I can give the noble Baroness the assurance that the public health grant is to be incorporated into local spending by virtue of business rate retention. We are proceeding rather slowly on this because we are keen to ensure that the assurance arrangements are fully recognised to cover the points she makes.