Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of a company, one of the minority shareholders of which is a vape manufacturer.

We all start off on common ground. We all want to discourage young people from starting to smoke. What we are debating here is the best way of making this happen. I am speaking to amendments in my name and the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murray, to understand why the Government think that the complexities and unintended consequences of a generational ban are a better way of achieving this than the simplicities of an age limit, such as the challenge schemes that already exist and are well understood and working.

As a non-affiliated Member of your Lordships’ House, I find it surprising that the Government would not take the opportunity to improve on the previous Prime Minister’s pet project, which this was. As I know from personal experiences, he is almost professionally abstemious and does not really cater for the rest of us who are not. His generational ban stems from this outlook. For some reason—I hope it will be explained—in spite of all the evidence against it, which I will come to, the Government persist with his legacy scheme.

My first question is: why, when prohibition has never worked anywhere in the world throughout history without unintended consequences—all of them bad—do the Government think this de facto prohibition will work here now? Do the Government not understand that if you try to prevent someone buying something easily available legally, they will simply buy it illegally as they have always done and will always do? Why, when the DSHE’s own research and analysis modelling in preparation for the Bill showed that increasing the age to 21 would result in exactly the same outcome as the generational ban, do the Government ignore their own advice and everyone else’s common sense?

Why do the Government not accept endless research and the evidence of our own eyes that practically nobody starts smoking after 21 and therefore the age limit solves the problem? Equally important in this context, it polices itself. Why do the Government think it in any way sensible or reasonable to pass responsibility for enforcing their law on to retailers, many of them small family businesses, which will have to second-guess a customer’s age, which will change year by year? Surely the Government can see that on the ground in a shop, perhaps late at night with all that entails, this is completely unrealistic—especially when there is a practical age-limit solution to hand, such as the challenge scheme, which the shop will probably already be operating for other products.

Why do the Government ignore the blindingly obvious fact that, while it is quite possible to tell the difference between a 16 year-old and a 21 year-old, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a 56 year-old and a 61 year-old and so on, up and down the age range, as retail staff will now be asked to do? Why do the Government ignore the obvious consequences of proxy purchasing, whereby all adults will be able to buy alcohol but only some will be able to buy tobacco? We will have the irregularity of all adults being allowed to smoke, but only some adults being allowed to buy what is needed to smoke. Anyway, is formalising two-tier justice really a good idea?

Why do the Government ignore the British Retail Consortium? Its members have already reported an increase in violence towards their shop workers in recent years. Its view is that the generational ban will make this violence and abuse even worse.

Why do the Government not take note of the advice of the Association of Convenience Stores? The generational ban will have a disastrous effect on its members’ shops, not just financially but on their health and well-being as they are asked to enforce, on the Government’s behalf, the unenforceable.

Why do the Government ignore the experiences of Australia? A generational ban was tried there and it was found that organised crime moved into the vacuum created by good intentions. It has resulted in tobacco turf wars and an enormous increase in illicit sales.

Why do the Government think there is any point in giving an additional £10 million to trading standards and £100 million over five years to Border Force and HMRC to clamp down on illicit sales, when the ONS figures suggest that illicit sales lose the Government £6 billion a year in tax revenue? The Home Office-funded report by the National Business Crime Centre says that the proposed generational ban means that the demand for illicit tobacco will increase dramatically—I might add, obviously. Has the Treasury been consulted about losing all this revenue?

Lastly, I make a quick point about the use of statistics in this debate. Referring to the illicit trade in tobacco, can we all admit that, by the very nature of illicit trade, none of us knows what the real figures are now or what they will be in the future, only that, by virtue of common sense, they are bound to increase with prohibition, as they always have? All I can contribute is that I know three people who smoke cigarettes and two of them tell me that they buy them by the carton illicitly at £50 a carton. By extrapolation, this does not mean that 66.6% of cigarettes smoked are illicit, but the way that some Members, and the Government, were bandying statistics around at Second Reading was quite surprising. For instance, in answer to some points that I raised, the Minister quoted a statistic and I think that, even as she was reading it, she must have thought to herself, “Hang on, this one’s a bit iffy”:

“There are around five times more people smoking non-cigarette tobacco … than a decade ago”.—[Official Report, 23/4/25; col. 741.]


In a subsequent Answer to a Written Question, she confirmed my findings that there are no statistics at all to back this up. The so-called research comes from an ASH-funded scare project—as we all know, researchers seldom bite the hand that feeds them. Without coming clean about it, they rather conveniently included shisha, some of which contains hardly any tobacco at all, and all of which is freely available on Amazon and elsewhere. The increase is accounted for by the enormous demographic change that we have seen over the past 10 years of people for whom smoking shisha is part of their cultural heritage—toes on which I would have thought the Government would be loath to tread, electorally.

Talking electorally, given that the previous Prime Minister was not always right about everything, I am sure we would all be interested to hear the Government’s response to all the questions that I have asked and about why they think that introducing all the constitutional complexities and practical inefficiencies of a generational ban is a better way to what we all want—preventing young people smoking—than the wonderfully simple, existing, workable, enforceable and Windsor Framework-friendly alternative solution staring us in the face. It would also be the Government’s own policy, not one copied from a regime that they were so quick to vilify in opposition.