Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Rennard Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, an argument we have heard over the years from those opposing measures to reduce the prevalence of smoking is that those who smoke are harming only themselves. But, as we have frequently heard today, they are not. When I was 16 and preparing to go to school, I could not wake my mother. She had died suddenly and unexpectedly from hypertensive heart disease, in which her heavy smoking was a factor. It was not her choice to become addicted to tobacco, nor to make her three children orphans.

There are many victims of smoking beyond those who smoke who suffer from the consequences, including ill health, poverty and death. Families suffer and the country suffers. Today smoking is responsible for up to 75,000 GP appointments a year. It costs the country approximately £27.6 billion in lost economic productivity. It costs the NHS almost £2 billion a year and local authorities almost £4 billion a year in social care costs.

The claims about the cost of enforcing measures in this Bill do not stand up when the costs of smoking and the savings made by reducing smoking levels are considered. It is in everyone’s interest to reduce the prevalence of tobacco smoking. Let us create a future in which today’s children will never smoke tobacco and the country will benefit enormously from the habit gradually coming to an end.

From all parts of the House, we have pressed previous Governments to do more to regulate the smoking and vapes industry. It is because of the exceptional deadly deceit by the tobacco industry that we need legislation that can respond flexibly. I tabled amendments during the passage of the recent Health and Care Act that sought to provide health warnings within cigarette packs, so I am very glad that the Government are moving forward on this. Such inserts can highlight routes to smoking cessation services that are effectively targeted at those who need to receive those warnings the most. I hope the Government can be persuaded to go further and put warnings on the cigarettes themselves, as happens in Canada and is soon to be the case in Australia. This will help to deter young people being offered their first cigarette from beginning the addiction.

Raising tobacco taxes has been successful in reducing tobacco consumption. Claims about the proportion of illicit cigarettes should be seen in the context of the vast reduction in the volume of cigarettes sold as a result of cumulative smoking cessation measures. Many of these claims are based on the tobacco industry’s purported concerns about illicit sales. The truth is that the tobacco industry itself has been directly responsible for tobacco smuggling. The claims of its lobbyists about illicit sales have been clearly refuted by National Trading Standards and HMRC.

We should therefore be mindful of the fairness of increasing taxes on many smokers, some of whom are made poor by their habit, while not further increasing taxes on the very rich tobacco companies which have profited from their ill health. Why not make the tobacco industry pay from its vast profits towards the cost of helping its victims to quit? It would make us a healthier nation, with fewer of the costs of smoking passed on to the taxpayer, and help us provide a boost to economic growth as more people will be healthy enough to work.

Integrated care boards have been told to cut running costs by 50%. This financial year is the first in which budgets for smoking cessation services in the NHS are rolled into the baseline budgets of ICBs. Smoking cessation services are being funded on a slow drip feed only, with future funding uncertain. Meanwhile, big tobacco companies reap £900 million a year in profit and pay shockingly little corporation tax. Therefore, it should not be assumed that, with these big profits, an appropriate levy would not raise much money. A tobacco levy could go a little way towards filling the black hole the Government speak frequently about. It will be filled further as smoking rates reduce further.