Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Baroness Watkins of Tavistock and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Thursday 30th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, have made some interesting cases probing the issue of the high nicotine content of pouches. However, it is worth noting that Cancer Research does not support these amendments. It says that there may well be a need for a deeper dive into the evidence, but it stresses something that has been missed in some of the debates we have had so far, certainly at Second Reading: it is tobacco that is the cancer-causing ingredient in cigarettes.

Nicotine patches do not contain tobacco. Nicotine is addictive, but the overall evidence does not support a direct causal link between nicotine and cancer: it is not carcinogenic. That is what the scientific evidence seems to show, and it comes from anti-tobacco lobbying groups and people whom I would not necessarily usually cite. It is noted that nicotine products and pouches are being used as recreational products, but they are also helpful for smoking cessation.

We have to consider what we are doing with the Bill. The NHS itself calls nicotine “relatively harmless”, and, in his 2022 review, Dr Javed Khan said that

“the government must facilitate access to the various already available safer alternative nicotine products such as nicotine pouches”.

We therefore have to be careful about demonising these things, because it is not straightforward.

There is a danger throughout the Bill—it will come up in other groups—of a constant slippage between tobacco and nicotine. Sometimes that occurs through a discussion around addiction. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks about this—she talked about the problems of addiction on our first day in Committee—because the Bill is not necessarily tackling addiction; it is tackling harms. There is a danger that we get confused between that addiction, which, as I say, many people in the health professions do not see as a problem per se, and what we are targeting. I am worried that that slippage between nicotine and tobacco, between vapes and smoking cigarettes, leads to an unscientific mishmash of misinformation that, ironically, can damage public health.

In relation to young people using pouches until they vomit, young people use lots of things until they vomit. They can overuse a range of things, not helpfully, but it does not necessarily mean that the product itself is always the problem: sometimes, it can be youthful lack of restraint, which one might want to intervene in but not necessarily through the law.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I broadly support these amendments but also agree with my noble friend Lord Patel that there is probably no reason to have oral pouches at all. It is something that we could carefully consider deleting from our society. If you are trying to withdraw from tobacco, nicotine patches are just as effective as pouches and do not cause the problems that have been so readily described today. While the debate has been going on, I looked back, and it was 1950 when Sir Richard Doll proved the relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. It has therefore taken us 75 years to get to this point, with the Bill. There is sufficient evidence in relation to pouches for us not to decide that we need a 75-year prospective trial to show their damage.

Mental Health Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Watkins of Tavistock and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Monday 24th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly and on a slightly related topic. I want to talk about a different group of people who are in long-term segregation who are not sectioned and often do not get mentioned—prisoners. Long-term segregation is used when very mentally ill people in prison are not transferred to hospital and nobody knows what to do with them. They are put into isolation and left there, psychotic, delusional and forgotten—dumped, in effect.

The noble Baroness, Lady Browning, alluded to prisons, but even prisoners should not be treated like prisoners sometimes. The confusion and conflation of punishment and treatment outside prison is no less shocking when it is inside prison. You are not meant to punish somebody doubly because they are in prison and happen to get ill.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor, has made the point that the segregation units are completely unsuitable for people who are severely unwell. They are also a significant drain on the hard-pressed staff, because very often the restraints are of people literally going out of their mind. They are not getting any medical intervention at all. According to the chief inspector, it requires multiple officers to unlock the cells even just to deliver meals.

Is it possible for the Minister to give any thoughts on that? Also, in a way, this is an appeal to the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins—if she takes this amendment forward—to bring that into the situation, even though I know I am slightly squeezing it in because I have Amendment 160A on reviewing prisons.

On Amendment 146 and the use of force, I absolutely agree with the mover of the amendment in relation to the need to keep records. That is obvious. I suppose the nightmare for us all is the misuse of force. It is horrifying—the stuff of nightmares—when people are ill.

I do not want to be naive. I know that when people are very ill and very psychotic, sometimes appropriate force is necessary; I just think it needs to be recorded. When I say force, I obviously do not mean violence or anything not within the realms of professional intervention. Sometimes I think we forget how ill people can be and how violent and how difficult it is for the people who work with them. We should record every instance of the use of force but be wary of demonising or damning every use of it, because it is not quite as simple as that.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I support all three amendments in this group but make the point that a lot of NHS care is now commissioned into the independent and charitable sectors. It is vital that records are kept in any care setting that is paid for by the NHS, not just by NHS facilities. I also believe that recording will reduce these kinds of behaviours because it will make people think much more carefully, particularly in long-term segregation. As you get to 10 days, people will be thinking, “How can we change the care we are delivering to avoid that 15-day reporting sanction?”. It really is imperative that we do this. We are treating some of the people who have the greatest needs in our society really badly.