Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Alexander Stafford Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s support. We understand the level of lobbying that has been undertaken by both the vaping industry and the tobacco industry. We know that the vaping industry has pushed that as one of its lines. In the current vapes market, when walking into a local shop or a newsagent the vape products can be seen on sale next to the till, often next to the sweets—the part of the shop that children will be very attracted to, if my experiences are anything to go by. The industry markets them in very cynical ways. We are saying that it is already unlawful to sell vapes to under-18s, but we want to take the powers in this legislation to consult on flavours, design and so on, to ensure that vapes are sold as they are intended—to help adult smokers to quit, because no child should ever vape.

[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

rose—

[Victoria Atkins]

I am going to make a little progress, if I may, because I want to come to the age of sale.

On the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Sir Jake Berry) about the age of sale and the black market, tobacco industry representatives claim that there will be unintended consequences from raising the age of sale. They assert that the black market will boom. Before the smoking age was increased from 16 to 18, they sang from the same hymn sheet, but the facts showed otherwise. The number of illicit cigarettes consumed fell by 25%, and smoking rates for 16 and 17-year-olds dropped by almost a third. Consumption of illegal tobacco plummeted from 17 billion cigarettes in 2000-01 to 3 billion cigarettes in 2022-23. That is despite the further controls that this House has put in place in the meantime. Our modelling suggests that the measures in this Bill will reduce smoking rates among 14 to 30-year-olds in England to close to zero as soon as 2040. I hope that many of us in the Chamber today will still be here in 2040. This is our opportunity to play that part in history.

Thanks to constructive engagement with colleagues across the devolved Administrations, the measures will apply not just in England but across our entire United Kingdom, saving lives and building a brighter future. Having listened carefully to colleagues’ concerns about enforcement, we are making sure that local authorities will be able to keep every penny of the fixed penalties they bring in to reinvest in rigorous enforcement. In other words, we are looking not just at national enforcement, but at helping our very important and valuable local trading enforcement officers to keep the proceeds from the fixed penalties they hand out.

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[Victoria Atkins]

First of all, I completely reject my hon. Friend’s suggestion that he is a dinosaur. He brings a great energy and effervescence into the Chamber—or indeed any social situation. He articulates really well the struggle of addiction to nicotine and how tough it can be to give up. That is not a judgment on anyone; the substance is designed to addict. That is how the sales pitch is made. What we are trying to do is stop children being ensnared in that way. He is also right that at the moment the evidence suggests that vaping is a good way to help existing smokers to quit. If you do not smoke, please do not vape. Certainly, children should never vape. What we have tried to do with the Bill is build a balance in, so we are taking powers to look at packaging, flavours and so on. There will be a thorough consultation before any regulations are set, because we want to ensure that we are helping adults to quit, but in a way that is considered and well designed. I am extremely grateful to him for raising that point.

[Alexander Stafford]

I am listening very carefully to what my right hon. Friend is saying. She outlined how the consumption of cigarettes has collapsed over the last couple of decades, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) talked about how the young people she reached out to do not want to smoke any more. Is that not the heart of the matter? That is why I think the Bill is fundamentally wrong and misguided. Young people are not smoking. It is not cool to smoke. The Bill should be focused more on the vape side of things: illegal vapes, supercharged vapes, the colour and flavour of vapes. We are debating cigarettes, which are naturally going out of existence anyway, rather than focusing on the dangerous vapes that are addictive for young children. That is where the Government should put their focus, rather than wasting time talking about something that is dying out anyway.

[Victoria Atkins]

Sadly—I say this genuinely—there is nothing inevitable about a decrease in smoking rates. Indeed, in 2020 the United States saw the first increase in tobacco sales in 20 years, and in Australia in 2022 the proportion of teenagers smoking increased for the first time in 25 years. I am reminded by a Minister that here in the United Kingdom 100,000 children and young people take up smoking every year. We must not be lulled into a sense of inevitability and security, mindful as I am of how very clever the tobacco industry is at lobbying its messages because we are threatening its business model. As Conservatives, we must take into account that this is happening today, so we must ensure we tackle it head on.

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[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her intervention. I think she makes a perfectly sensible point, actually, and I am perfectly open to lobbying from Conservative Members on how a Labour Government will behave after the general election—she seems to think it is a foregone conclusion, but I certainly do not; we will be working hard for every vote. I can reassure her that our concern has been about children becoming addicted to nicotine. In relation to adult use of vapes as a tool for stopping smoking, I think she makes an absolutely reasonable point about flavourless vaping, and of course she is right that we need to ensure that we get the regulation right on that so that we do not unwittingly deter people from stopping smoking. However, as I will come on to talk about when I come to the vaping section of the Bill, there is no excuse whatsoever for the kinds of flavourings and marketing of vapes that we have seen, which I believe have been deliberately and wilfully designed to addict young people to what is, let us not forget, a harmful substance. I make that very clear.

Anyway, back to the Bill—someone has to defend it, and I get the sense that there are not going to be too many on the Government side, so I will have a go at doing what the Prime Minister is too weak to do and take on the arguments of his own party. They say that the progressive ban on smoking is unconservative. Let me tell them what is unconservative: the heaviest tax burden in 70 years, and it will get heavier if we do not act to prevent ill health.

If we continue down the road that the Conservatives have put us on, with more and more people suffering, falling sick and falling out of the workforce, we will not just be letting those people down; we will all be paying a heavy price for it too. The costs of sickness and disability benefits are due to rise on the Government’s watch, from £65 billion this year to over £90 billion by the end of the next Parliament.

The budget for the NHS is £165 billion this year, and the health service is not coping with existing demands. If society continues to get less healthy, those demands will only rise. If the health service and our welfare service are to be made sustainable for the future, then we must act to prevent ill health in the first place. What better way to do that than by wiping out the leading cause of cancer? It is not just our public finances that are held back by ill health; so too is our economy.

[Alexander Stafford]

I am trying to follow the hon. Gentleman’s argument to its logical conclusion. He talks about substances that are bad—addictive and harmful to people’s health—and have a huge impact on the NHS through those costs, but there are so many more things that are in fact worse for health. Sugar and salt are highly addictive. Does this mean that Labour’s plan is to ban foods with high levels of salt or sugar? Logically, that is the next step, and therefore, if we need to protect the NHS and cut costs, we should be banning anything that is slightly bad for us, rather than actually taking a better enjoyment of life and saying, “A little bit of what you fancy every now and again is okay, and good for your mental health.”

[Wes Streeting]

I think that is extraordinary. I do not think that smoking is slightly harmful; I think it is the single biggest cause of cancer, and I think that the costs to people’s health, to our national health service and to our economy are enormous. This sort of argument—that if we ban smoking for young people, we have to ban everything else—is absurd. I think that the Secretary of State just pointed out the absurdity of it when she pointed to a whole range of harmful things in our country that are already banned.

Let me put the question back to the libertarian wing in the corner of the Chamber. Will the new modern Conservative party not ban anything? Will we have a libertarian dystopia in which people are free to do whatever they want in the name of liberty? [Interruption.] I am just trying to help the Secretary of State by taking on the libertarians in the corner. I would be very sad if she wants me to give in to them but, with 187,000 people on the waiting list in the local area of the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford), I think we should do something about it.

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[Alexander Stafford (Rother Valley) (Con)]

I wish to declare almost an opposite interest: I have never smoked a cigarette or a cigar in my life. I have never even put one to my very lips, yet I am against the Bill. That is not because I have any vested interest in the tobacco lobby or because I am a smoker or an ex-smoker; it is because I am a lover of freedom, a lover of choice and a lover of information. To me, that is vital.

I am neither one of the older Members nor one of the younger Members of the House, but I remember that throughout my time at school the evils of smoking were drummed into us. I do not think that any Member of the House, or any person in this country, does not know the evil of smoking, including health degradation and damage to lives and families, because it is drummed in every single step of the way—as I think it should be, because smoking is wrong.

I do not like smoking, and I wish people would not do it, but if we believe in freedom of speech, independence of mind and people making informed choices, we should let people do what they want as long as they have the facts before them—and we do provide the facts. The NHS stop-smoking policies have done an amazing job over the past few decades of ensuring that everyone knows the facts, so no one can say when they start smoking or vaping that they do not know the full implications of what they are doing—they do. We know that they do because, as has already been said, the number of young people smoking has absolutely collapsed over the past few decades. My hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) correctly mentioned that only 1% of schoolchildren smoke. That 1% statistic is terrible and represents far too many children, but compared to what it was, it is really good news.

As I said in my earlier interventions, children generally do not smoke anymore, so that is not where the battle is. I believe that the battle against smoking has been won—we are just fighting the last rearguard action—which is why I think the Bill is fundamentally wrong. It is fighting yesterday’s wars, not tomorrow’s wars. The vaping aspect is incredibly important and is what we must focus on. We and the Government need to focus our attention on super-strength vapes and marketing to children. That is incredibly important, and I am glad that the Bill goes some way towards rectifying that. The ban on the free distribution of vaping products to under-18s is also great news.

However, we are dividing our time between that and focusing on a dying industry in a bizarrely puritanical way by stamping out some people’s choice and freedom. Who is to say that, in a few years’ time, a 21-year-old cannot celebrate their graduation with a cigar? If they want to, why not? Why shouldn’t someone celebrate the birth of a child with a cigar, or maybe with a pinch of snuff? Who are we to say that that is not their choice to make? Who are we to say, “You shouldn’t celebrate in this way”?

I have many vices, Madam Deputy Speaker. I like a glass of beer or a pint of wine every now and again. I know in my heart of hearts that they are wrong for me and probably limit my health, but I drink them. I eat burgers and chips, accepting that they are fundamentally life-shortening. But do they make my life better? Do I enjoy doing it? Yes, and I do so in the full knowledge of what I am doing. This is the crux of the matter: we are talking now about cigarettes, cigars, snuff or shisha, but what is to stop us from saying tomorrow or the next day that burgers, red wine and all the little things that people sometimes enjoy in moderation—that make life worth living—are bad for them? Sometimes people want that bit of enjoyment, but we sit here and say, “No, you cannot have that choice; we know better and we are taking that choice away from you.”

As long as everyone has the knowledge about what tobacco products do, we should give them the choice—that is terribly important. I am also confused by the fact that, once again, we are using a sledgehammer to crack a nut by banning all tobacco products. How many people in this country do snuff, say? Not many, so why are we impinging on their liberty? There is not an epidemic of children taking snuff at school, so why are we banning it? Snuff does not represent a massive health risk or have a huge impact on the NHS, yet we are banning it—that is crazy. We are banning things that are not having a huge impact on the economy or the health of our nation, and that concerns me greatly.

A country that has gone through this process is New Zealand, which banned tobacco sales. However, it then overturned the ban. If the policy was such a success, why did New Zealand not double down on it and go further? My biggest issue with the measure is the rolling age of consent, which is fundamentally discriminatory. Adults are adults, and they make their own choices and own their failures. A 28-year-old does not know better than a 29-year-old; someone of 18 years and one day does not know any better than someone of 17 years and 364 days. We are creating cases in which people are unequal before the law, and that is wrong.

Also, let us not kid ourselves: we know that having a rolling age of consent is completely impractical and unworkable, and it will have to be got rid of. Let us be honest: we are not going to have a situation in 10 or 20 years’ time where a 34-year-old is ID’d at a tobacconist or a newsagents and told, “You look 33, sir.” “Oh, thank you very much for flattering me.” It is going to be banned outright, and we know that. This is the thin end of the wedge. It will create inequality in the law, cut down on freedoms and fundamentally make life that bit harder for everyone.

Many years ago, as has been described, this place was a bastion of puritanism. There were so many roundheads fighting the King many years ago in the civil war, but I say that at the moment there are too many roundheads in this Parliament—too many naysayers, too many people banning things. What we need is a few more cavaliers: a few more people trying to enjoy bits of life while making informed choices. For that reason, I oppose the Bill, although it does contain some good bits about vaping. We should be fighting the next battle, which is fully against vapes, rather than wasting our time fighting yesterday’s battles.