Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Young of Cookham

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 9, tabled in my name, would create an offence of selling tobacco products online. This is a probing amendment.

If the generational ban policy is to be effective, or the alternative policy of an age limit of 21, there would be a clear loophole if tobacco could be bought online, as roughly 9% of sales are at the moment, without any form of age verification. Such a policy would be unusual for the UK, as there is not currently a product that is available for sale in a bricks and mortar shop that you cannot legally purchase online. However, we would by no means be the first country in the world to introduce this measure: Brazil, Mexico, Finland, France and Greece, to name a few, have all banned the sale of tobacco products via the internet, so there are some clear international precedents.

Banning the online sale of tobacco was recommended by the Khan review in 2022 and the World Health Organization, which argued that internet sales constitute

“display at points of sale”

and

“inherently involve advertising and promotion”.

Today you can look up tobacco products on any of the major supermarket websites or shopping apps and see reviews, such as:

“Quite nice for relaxing on a summers day, beside a bubbling brook perhaps or at a test match”,


as one purchaser of Pall Mall Flow Red Superkings commented. Last time I went to a test match, smoking was prohibited.

Separately from the point about the delivery of smoking products, are these the messages that we want smokers to see about such a lethal product, given that such advertising was banned on television some 60 years ago? When retailers sell tobacco products, they are not permitted to display them, yet there are pictures of products online. This seems inconsistent. Products such as heated tobacco and cigarillos have colourful packaging, as they are not captured by plain-pack laws, which seems to be a regulatory oversight. I appreciate that the Government may be doing something about this, so perhaps the Minister can give us some details—but it feels like the online world is somewhere where rules are often bent with little repercussion, and the amendment would address that.

At the moment, online sales are not heavily exploited by underage individuals attempting to circumvent the law. However, we should be mindful of that possibility in the future. If the Government are minded to resist the amendment, I hope that the Minister will explain how age verification will be secured at the point of delivery. Someone born after 2009 can order their groceries online and include tobacco, but they could not buy it in the shop. How might this be enforced without the amendment? Does the Minister plan to go down the route that we have taken for the delivery of knives? Since 2022, a retailer has to verify the age of the purchaser before he or she sells a knife and, if that knife is delivered after an online order, it has to be checked at the point of delivery. Does the Minister have that in mind for tobacco sales? Who will be responsible for ensuring the implementation of the policy if tobacco products are available online? I look forward to her reply in due course.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Moylan for introducing this group of amendments, and I agree with his proposals relating to the mechanism by which the House looks at statutory instruments. I also agree with my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham about the desirability of further constraining online sales. However, I do not want to talk at length about those; I want to talk simply about age-verification technology and the potential that it offers.

Crown Estate Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Young of Cookham

Report stage
Tuesday 5th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendment 15 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, which deals with lease extensions from the Crown Estate. I may do so with less republican overtones than we have just heard.

Those who have been following the proceedings of the Bill will know that I have raised the question of what happens to freeholds when they end up in the hands of the Crown Estate under an obscure process known as escheat. When a freeholder of a block of flats disappears or goes bankrupt, by default the freehold goes to the Crown Estate, whose policy is then to dispose of it, getting the best value, as is required by the 1963 Act. I raised the issue as to whether that obligation was trumped by a subsequent undertaking given by the Crown Estate to dispose of freeholds or extend leases in accordance with Acts relating to leasehold reform, when they would get less than market value.

In September I got a letter from the Minister saying that, against this backdrop, the Crown Estate

“does not believe the 1992 parliamentary undertaking applies to escheat”.

That crystallised the problem. On the one hand, clear undertakings had been given to Parliament by the Crown Estate that it would respect the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993, which I happened to put on the statute book, but on the other hand, it would not respect it when disposing of freeholds back to leaseholders.

We then had a meeting with the Minister and the Crown Estate. I am most grateful to the Minister for his role in initiating it. At that meeting it became clear that, contrary to what the letter said, the Crown Estate would abide by the leasehold reform Act. This undertaking is now reproduced in the draft framework agreement, which says that the Crown Estate should comply with

“all public undertakings given on its behalf by ministers in Parliament to follow the law ‘by analogy’ where Crown bodies are not bound by the specific legislation in question”.

While issues remain in the specific case that I raised with the Minister, which I will pursue with him offline, I regard the principle as satisfactorily resolved and am grateful to him for the role he played in securing that agreement.

I end with one final suggestion. The process of escheat brings windfall gains to the Crown Estate. When a freeholder disappears or goes bankrupt, the Crown Estate acquires the freehold but, crucially, under the process of escheat, it does so free of any obligations that may have accrued to the previous freeholder. It then disposes of it, with a fee paid by the purchaser. This income is different from the rest of the income of the Crown Estate and should be shown separately in its accounts. I had a look to see whether this was the case, but could not find it. One could argue that these windfall proceeds are rather like unclaimed bank accounts and should go to charity via the Reclaim Fund, but that is a matter for another day. Does the Minister agree with the accounting change I have proposed?

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend on the Front Bench about the desirability of there being some form of prior parliamentary scrutiny over the appointment of a chair of the Crown Estate. My entry in the register of interests shows that I am chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum, of which the Crown Estate is a member. Sir Robin Budenberg has done a very good job but is retiring, so a question will rapidly arise. As we consider the Bill and think that it has been 63 years since the Crown Estate Act 1961, there is a good case for the public interest to be examined through that scrutiny when somebody is appointed whose principal purpose will probably be to represent the public interest in relation to the continuing functions of the Crown Estate.

However, I do not agree with my noble friend about Amendment 14. It probes the question—I hope the Minister will see it in that light—of how the disposal of assets by the Crown Estate is properly scrutinised. Noble Lords will recall that in Committee I referred to the duties of the Crown Estate commissioners under the 1961 Act, which the Minister just referred to. I also referred to their duty under Section 3 of that Act not to dispose of assets other than on

“best consideration in money or money’s worth”.

Given that we are trying to maintain the Crown Estate’s commercial operations, with prudential limits in relation to those assets, the duties in the 1961 Act should suffice.

I hope my noble friend will not press Amendment 14. Given the role of the Crown Estate as a major developer of potentially significant interest in the science parks to the north of Cambridge, for example, its disposals as a major developer may easily and rapidly reach £10 million in the course of a year. The bureaucracy and intervention that would be required thereafter by this amendment would be unreasonable, and I do not want us to impose those kinds of onerous obligations on the Crown Estate commissioners. If they fail to meet their duties, we can see that there are means by which the Treasury can intervene in order to establish that those duties are being met.

Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill

Debate between Lord Lansley and Lord Young of Cookham

Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 34 in my name, which would allow franchises to be led by local authorities. It goes a little further than one of the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lord Moylan, who wanted partnership boards, and is more in line with what the noble Lord, Lord Snape, wants to do with his Amendment 43.

We need to be clear about what new Section 30C does. Basically, it says that the only people who can run a railway in future are a public sector company owned by a Secretary of State. Unless the Minister is going to repeal that in the forthcoming Bill, it means that for ever and a day, as we have heard, we are going to have a central monopoly for all franchised rails.

My noble friend went to the Labour Party document on transport to inspire his speech. I looked at the document published in March this year, Power and Partnership: Labour’s Plan to Power Up Britain, which pledged to devolve new powers over transport, employment support and energy out of Whitehall. That was followed up by the manifesto promising “landmark devolution legislation” to transfer power out of Westminster and into communities across the UK. So we could have expected the first pieces of legislation in the new Parliament to fulfil that ambition of devolving power out of Westminster, particularly in the field of transport, where there has been significant devolution of powers in rail, as we heard in earlier speeches. Like my noble friend, I was surprised to read in the letter from the Minister—and I got a slightly different wording—that:

“The Government has no current plan to devolve responsibility for further services to local authorities”.


As we have heard, Transport for London has taken over services that used to be run by British Rail, and then by South Western Railway and the other TOCs, and it now runs the Overground. I think that has worked well, and it has enabled TfL to integrate the Overground with the Underground and provide a better service to Londoners.

Outside London, many local authorities have successfully introduced light rail lines. There are 11 light rail systems in the UK. Manchester Metrolink is probably the best known, with 99 stops and 64 miles of track, run by Transport for Greater Manchester. We have also heard about the smaller West Midlands Metro, run by Transport for West Midlands. So local authorities are perfectly capable of building, maintaining and running serious rail systems.

The Minister’s statement seems to preclude the sort of arrangement that works well in London from happening anywhere else. All that local authorities are promised in the letter is a statutory role governing, managing, planning and developing the rail network, but not taking it over and integrating it with the system that they already have.

I think the Minister is in some trouble on this issue. We have had a powerful speech from his noble friend Lord Snape, and there is a feeling in the Committee as a whole that the commitment to devolution is simply inconsistent with new Section 30C as it stands. I do not think this is the landmark legislation that we were promised, so I hope the Minister thinks again about the implications of new Section 30C.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 36 in this group, which has exactly the same purpose as the amendments from my noble friend on the Front Bench and my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, who has just spoken. All their points and those made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pidgeon, demonstrate the potential value and benefit of having the legislative opportunity for publicly owned companies responsible to devolved authorities to be able to run rail services. If we do not have this, it can be only a public sector company owned by the Secretary of State. I was going to instance examples, but I think we have had so many that it is very clear.

The only difference between my amendment and others is the kind of authority appropriate to own a company which runs rail services. I fixed on mayoral combined authorities simply because of the relative capacity and their importance in the Government’s devolution agenda, and because it might commend that thought to the Government.

From my own experience, not least from being a Member of Parliament in a mayoral combined authority, I think it is increasingly important for the Government to recognise—which clearly they have put at the front of their argument—that the co-ordination of the railways is of the first importance, including ticketing, timetabling, provision of services and so on. In many of these places, as was amply demonstrated by earlier speeches, the co-ordination of transport services and of transport with planning and spatial development is equally important. If the Government go down the path of central control by the Secretary of State for every aspect of rail services, I am afraid that they will severely impede, in many significant areas of the country, transport and spatial development being conducted in the way that we would prefer it to be.