Tobacco Control Plan

Andrew Murrison Excerpts

Tuesday 16th November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the delivery of a new Tobacco Control Plan.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone—I believe for the first time in this place. I speak as, and declare an interest as, the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health. We welcomed the Government’s announcement of the new tobacco control plan, and we welcomed that it would be published this year, to deliver the Government’s smoke-free by 2030 ambition. I do not want to put any pressure on my hon. Friend the Minister, but she does not have long to achieve the first ambition. The Government’s ambition to reduce smoking rates to 5% or below, making smoking obsolete, is one that all of us in the all-party parliamentary group share. I believe that will be endorsed on an all-party basis this morning, because it is clearly a great way to ensure the health of the nation.

For me, this is deeply personal. Both of my parents died of cancer caused by smoking. My late mother was only 47 when she died of lung and throat cancer, as she was a very heavy smoker for most of her life. I do not want to see families go through what my family had to go through during those terrible days. For me, it is a lifetime ambition to ensure that people understand the risks of smoking, the damage to their health and the damage to their families.

The all-party parliamentary group is keen to support the delivery of the ambition of a smoke-free Britain, which is why, in June this year, we published a report setting out our recommendations for the tobacco control plan for England. Those recommendations were endorsed by more than 50 organisations, including the Royal College of Physicians, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation. On behalf of the APPG, I am pleased to welcome my hon. Friend the Public Health Minister to her new post, and indeed to welcome her opposite number; to put our recommendations on the record; and to give the Minister the chance to respond to those views.

The APPG has a long-term track record of acting as a critical friend to the Government on the tobacco control agenda. I am confident that this collaborative and constructive relationship will continue. Although smoking rates in my constituency are lower than the English average, there is no room for complacency. In Harrow, more than one in 10 people still smoke and smoking kills around 250 people a year. That is obviously far too many. In 2018-19, there were 1,566 smoking-attributable hospital admissions and 370 emergency admissions for chronic respiratory disease, which is caused almost entirely by smoking. That is in one constituency, so imagine what smoking does to the national health service up and down the country.

Research presented to the all-party parliamentary group shows that, on average, smokers are likely to need social care a decade earlier than non-smokers, and particularly never-smokers. Smoking-related disease and disability make it hard to carry out normal daily activities such as getting dressed, walking across a room and making a meal. Most of us take these things for granted, but we should not.

The importance of the smoke-free 2030 ambition is clear. As the Minister herself stated recently,

“tobacco continues to account for the biggest share of avoidable premature death in this country. It contributes half the difference in life expectancy between richest and poorest.”—[Official Report, 1 November 2021; Vol. 702, c. 621.]

More than 70,000 people died from smoking last year in England alone. For every person killed by smoking, at least another 30 are living with serious smoking-related illnesses.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing forward this debate. On the point about the 70,000 deaths, is it not important to understand that that is year after year after year? Would he set that in contrast with the awful toll we have had from covid and the terrible restrictions that we have necessarily placed upon the population of this country, and agree with me that getting rid of this horrible substance would be far less of an intrusion on people’s liberties than the sort of things we have seen over the past 18 months? Over time, that would have a far greater impact on health, wellbeing and people’s ability to go about their daily lives. It would reduce the burden on the national health service very substantially indeed, and address the health inequalities that sadly mean the life expectancy of the richest and poorest in this country are currently separated by upwards of 10 years.

[Bob Blackman]

I could not have put it better myself. My right hon. Friend quite clearly makes the comparison between covid-19 and smoking. People cannot help catching covid, but when they smoke they make the choice as to whether they inflict life-changing circumstances on themselves.