Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Lord Patel and Baroness Fox of Buckley

Committee stage
Thursday 30th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. We know that nicotine is highly addictive. In fact, it is one of the most addictive substances there is, even in small quantities. The noble Lord, Lord Kamall, made the point that people use it for cessation of tobacco or cigarette smoking. That is true, but the dosage, even of 20 milligrams, is too high. High doses of nicotine cause serious diseases, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. But apart from that, in older people it causes higher risk of cardiovascular disease, not just by increasing heart rate and blood pressure but by making platelets stickier and leading to higher levels of fibrinogen, which increases the risk of forming a clot. This is a good amendment and there is no reason, to my mind, why the Minister should resist it.

[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.