Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 17th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 180 in the name of my noble friend Lord Faulkner, to which I have added my name. Amendment 180 would remove the sampling exemption to smoke-free legislation that currently allows cigar lounges to operate.

This exemption has created a loophole that accommodates smoking indoors in a public place—something that we rightly consigned to history in 2007. The 2007 statutory instrument carved out an exemption for specialist tobacconists, allowing for the sampling of products within the premises. The justification offered then was that cigars, being a niche and luxury product, required a try-before-you-buy approach.

Yet what I see today bears little resemblance to the spirit of that exemption. These venues are no longer retail premises merely offering brief product sampling; they are fully-fledged cigar lounges. They are described by no less an authority than the Daily Telegraph as:

“The last place you can smoke indoors in the UK”


and

“a network of hangouts where smoking is not just permitted, but encouraged”.

That is surely not what Parliament intended.

In some of these lounges, food and drink are served as cigar smoke fills enclosed spaces. Some noble Lords may be enthusiastic supporters of what one nearby cigar lounge’s website describes in the following terms:

“Nestled in a quiet corner of the city lies … a haven for those who seek solace in the timeless ritual of cigar smoking. Step through our doors and be transported to a world of refined tranquility, where every detail is crafted to enchant the senses and soothe the soul”.


Note the absence of any reference to sampling, by the way.

What about those who work in these environments—staff being exposed to second-hand smoke on every shift? I saw the reality of this at first hand just a couple of months ago at a friend’s birthday party in a smart London hotel. As the guests, including myself, wandered from room to room and from snacks and dancing to drink, we were amazed to see that one of our options was a cigar lounge. Although this was indeed an option for us—one that I obviously chose to skip, given my father’s untimely death from lung cancer—it was not an option for the staff, who were working in all parts of the hotel.

The smell of that cigar smoke took me back to my childhood and teens before my father died at 66. He usually smoked cigarettes and a pipe—it was Cut Golden Bar, if any noble Lords are old enough to remember the cheaper brands of tobacco. He would smoke a cigar, purchased as a present or as a treat for himself, once a year at Christmas. I remember the smell of that smoke in the room. I had no idea—I do not know whether he did—of the harm it was doing to his two daughters, who now suffer from asthma.

During the campaign for the smoking ban, trade unions and the hospitality industry made one of the strongest arguments for change: all workers have the right to a safe workplace free of second-hand smoke. Does that principle not equally apply to those working in cigar lounges? We are seeing new lounges open, too. In Sheffield, for example, a new lounge opened earlier this year despite strong objections from the public health team at Sheffield City Council. The team noted that the venue was within 400 metres of a school and that smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the city. It warned that such a venue risked normalising tobacco use for young people, undermining the council’s public health objectives, yet the lounge opened regardless.

The health harms of cigars are clear. Even when not inhaling, cigar and pipe smokers are at increased risk of cancer of the mouth, oesophagus, throat, voice box and lungs. There is no safe form of tobacco. I strongly support the Bill taking action on all tobacco products and look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments regarding indoor smoking in these establishments.

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, on the first day of this Committee, there was wide agreement that this Bill was about public health in general and about preventing young people starting to smoke in particular. Amendment 180, against which I shall speak, addresses neither of these objectives. As we have heard, the amendment is based on the oft-repeated shibboleth that all tobacco is dangerous, but that is as nonsensical and unscientific as saying that all water is drinkable. Neither proposition stands up to even the most basic inquiry: with water, it all depends on where it comes from, and, with tobacco, it all depends on what it is done with.

I am sure that, after reading Hansard on day four of this Committee, the noble Lords who were not here and who support this amendment will have learned that the tobacco used in handmade cigars is a totally different product to the tobacco used in mass-produced cigarettes. It is smoked by a much more elderly cohort of users and is handmade as an artisanal product by cottage industries in friendly, foreign-aid-supported Caribbean countries, which are, in turn, the very opposite of what most people refer to as the tobacco industry. They will also have learned that cigars are not inhaled, are not addictive and are smoked only occasionally at best; and that, as such, there is absolutely no evidence at all that handmade cigars pose any danger to public health. In fact, it is quite the opposite if we refer to the US health studies already mentioned in Committee, there being no UK equivalent.

Turning to the second objective of this Bill—to discourage young people from starting to smoke—again, there is absolutely no evidence, either statistical, anecdotal or commonsensical, that young people take up smoking cigarettes after smoking a cigar. So one is left wondering: what is the point of this amendment?

I turn now to its specifics, bearing in mind the call for proportionality here. There are only 25 sampling rooms in the UK. Access to them is usually by appointment and they are certainly open only to the tobacconist’s cigar aficionado customers; under no circumstances are they open to the general public. I know of only one of these places. It is on the roof of a shop that has a tin roof in case it rains but is otherwise open on all four sides; I have heard that others have powerful extractor fans, which is the norm. I cannot see any possible danger to the consenting adults sampling cigars in these circumstances or to anyone passing by, by which time the smoke will have long since disappeared into the greater good.

Sampling cigars is very different to sampling, say, a piece of cheese or a piece of chocolate. A cigar takes half an hour to smoke, and it changes throughout that half hour; therefore, it is necessary for the whole cigar to be smoked. That is in the tobacconist’s interest because, at the end of the sample smoke, the customer may well buy a box of 25 cigars, which could cost, on average, about £750. Methinks that noble Lords supporting this amendment are not familiar with what they hope to ban.

On day four of this Committee, in referring to the question of a health threat from smoking cigars, many noble Lords from all Benches—or, like me, from none—emphasised the need for evidence before legislation and pointed out that, in this case, there is none. Many argued that, ergo, cigars should continue to be exempted from it. Many also referred to the lack of any impact assessment and so to the unintentional, possibly terminal, damage that would be done to the related retail and hospitality sectors. Whether intentionally or unintentionally—it is not clear—this amendment hits right at the heart of these sectors for no evidential benefit. In the absence of any evidence that there is a problem that needs legislation—and in the spirit of, “If no harm’s being done, let us live and let live”—I hope that noble Lords will agree that this amendment is quite simply not needed.

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I rise to speak in favour of the first amendment, proposed by my noble friends, and against the second amendment: Amendment 180.

On actors and their ability to smoke on set, in my view, this is something that needs further refining. I ask the Minister to go back slightly on the previous amendments discussed, but intertwined with those is this question: what is an offence and what is not an offence? If I were to be playing myself, as I may be now, would I be able to light a cigar in an authentic fashion in order to prove that point? Where are we talking about these regulations being relevant and effective? How far do the regulations intend to go when people are posting on social media, which is a far cry from the adverts of the 1970s promoting the joys of smoking? If they put themselves on social media smoking a cigar and talking about its delights, is that advertising the genre, as the Minister said it was? Would that be a criminal offence? If that is the case, we are going to find ourselves in extreme difficulty, aside from the absurd attacks on our liberty.

I am afraid that I will also speak very firmly against Amendment 180, with the greatest of respect to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath. She made a strong case for how she saw these processes, but the reality is that this is an exemption temporarily used by premises to enable people to sample tobacco. The idea that this is something that somehow Parliament should be focusing on is a little bizarre when there is so much going on in the world. The anti-smoking lobby has found somebody somewhere somehow smoking a cigar, and the entire machine has focused its gaze, like the great Eye of Sauron, on this activity that is, at worst, fringe and, at best, quite relevant in ensuring that people can legitimately engage in the trade and sale of occasional cigar smoking, which we have established has no factual health consequences at all, regardless of the desire of many who want to see the end of smoking and a smoke-free generation. I disagree with that fundamentally but can see the point of it; this is contradictory to that point. It is important that, as legislators, we understand the facts and take a fact-based approach to the way we legislate.