Under-age Vaping

Debate between Alan Whitehead and Andrew Gwynne

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Gwynne]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and later in my speech I will discuss the fact that vaping is a really important tool to assist people who want to stop smoking—indeed, Javed Khan, in his smoke-free 2030 review, made it clear that vaping has an important role to play in that respect. We certainly do not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but we absolutely should be ensuring that children’s access to vapes is restricted and that the marketing of vapes is not done in way that attracts a new cohort of people who would never have smoked or vaped. While vaping is better for people than smoking, not vaping is better than vaping or smoking, and we do not want to create new problems.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

I am sure my hon. Friend has seen the study by King’s College London and Action on Smoking and Health on the attraction of vaping, which concluded that among teenagers de-branding vapes had a deterrent effect on their purchasing them, whereas it had no effect on adults. Does he agree with that study and does he support action being taken along those lines?

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for succinctly stating the reason for this debate. That study is very clear: for adults, the appearance of the packaging makes no difference, but children and young people are attracted to the bright colours and cartoon characters and so on. The same arguments were made about smoking and led to us moving several years ago to standardised cigarette packaging. The evidence on children vaping is now so overwhelming that Parliament must take the lead. Industry will not act without a nudge from us. We must make sure that vapes are not packaged and advertised in a way that attracts children.

In a recent article penned for The Independent, a teacher in Oxfordshire described having been:

“rostered on to control numbers of students in the toilet block in an attempt to prevent the constant vaping that goes on in there.”

She went on to describe discovering

“a stash of over 50 vapes stored above a ceiling panel in the toilets—a tactic learnt and shared on TikTok.”

Worryingly, ASH estimates that most children who vape make the purchases themselves, despite it being illegal to sell vapes to those under the age of 18.