Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Andrew Rosindell Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Sir Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)]

I start my speech by saying that there are some good parts of this Bill. The banning of disposable vapes and preventing children from starting smoking or vaping is something that anyone with a brain—there are perhaps more of them on the Government Benches than on the Opposition Benches—would support. I will address my remarks to whether banning all children who are now 15 from ever smoking is the right way to stop them smoking, as well as talking about whether any Government have a mandate on removing personal liberty.

I am sorry to see the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting) leaving his place, because I was about to address some remarks to him. It is unfortunate for the quality of debate to label someone standing up to ask whether this measure will be effective as someone who wants children to smoke. I am an ex-smoker and I do not want children to smoke; I just want to pass decent laws in this House to ensure that we can reduce the number of young people smoking. That is why, when I look at this ban, I question whether it will work.

I put it to the Secretary of State that 20% of young people say they have tried cannabis. Those are not my statistics, but those of the Office for National Statistics. That is twice as many as the number of young people who say that they have tried tobacco, I think within the past 30 days. If bans worked—cannabis is banned—no child would ever have tried cannabis. It is illegal not just for those who are 15, but for all of us, whatever age we are. I went to Aintree this weekend to enjoy the grand national. I was amazed that people were walking around at one of the most heavily policed events in the UK openly snorting cocaine. It is a class A drug, and the police were doing nothing about it. If bans worked and the police enforced them, no one is this country would take drugs. I therefore question whether banning people who are now 15 from ever starting smoke will work. To me, the answer is no.

I will move on to the mandate for any MP or any Government in this place to seek to bring in such a measure in advance of a general election. If Members go to Washington and have a look at the Korean war memorial, they will walk past thousands of names—it is an extraordinary memorial—and at the end there is a bold statement: “Freedom is not free”. All the freedoms that we enjoy in this country have not been given to us; they have been fought for. People have died to ensure that we keep those freedoms.

What we are really talking about today is removing from a group of people in our society—they may be young now, but do not forget that, at the general election after next, some will be 18 and banned from smoking, while some 19-year-old voters will be able to smoke—the right ever to have the agency to make their own decisions. If we believe in freedom, we must accept that people have to be free to make bad decisions as well as good ones. If we live in a society where the only decisions that we are free to make are those that the Government tell us we are free to make, we might as well live in a socialist society—we may as well live in Russia or China. For me, freedom means the freedom to get things wrong.

[Andrew Rosindell (Romford) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making some extremely valid points. Freedom with responsibility and freedom of choice are surely what the Conservative party should stand for. We can think of all kinds of reasons to ban all kinds of things, but surely the choice of the individual should be paramount. It is not for Government to dictate to individuals.

[Sir Jake Berry]

My hon. Friend is quite right. That is the legal position under the law in this country if we have capacity, no matter how bad the decisions we make. Constituents have contacted me about elderly relatives who are making poor financial decisions, but because they have capacity they are free to make those decisions, albeit bad ones in some cases.

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[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

Everyone would like to see a cessation of smoking. People stopping for good, let alone starting at an early age, would bring long-term health benefits to the nation as a whole. Sadly, the problem is that this Bill will not be the vehicle to achieve such an ambition. It is a Bill written by non-smokers for smokers, and it is so out of touch with the cause that they want to cure that it will miss its target by a very long shot. First of all, the Bill does not ban smoking; it only stops the sale of tobacco to 18-year-olds if they turn 15 this year. We heard today from the Secretary of State that 100,000 children already start smoking every year. The sale of tobacco is already banned for those children.

The Bill is based on the premise that children today still ask their mate’s older brother to buy them some cigarettes from the corner shop, like they did back in the 1980s. They do not. The vast majority of regular smokers today only ever buy their cigarettes from the corner shop when they have run out of illicitly bought cigarettes. If people do not believe me, they should pop into any pub in the UK and ask the smokers whether they buy tax-paid cigarettes from the supermarket and the corner shop. I guarantee that the vast majority do not. In every community there are avenues to buy illicit cigarettes at a fraction of the average price of £15 for a pack of 20 cigarettes from the corner shop.

A recent poll of 12,000 adult smokers found that the illegal tobacco market remains resilient in the UK in spite of the number of overall smokers declining year on year. On that basis alone, the illicit market is increasing. The study found that 76% of those 12,000 smokers bought tobacco in the last year that had not been subject to UK tax, with nearly one in two smokers having no objection to buying non-UK-duty-paid tobacco from family, friends, colleagues or shops. The poll also revealed that 9% of smokers who buy tobacco through social media or websites advertising cheap tobacco do so at least once a month.

Evidence from around the world shows that when we put further restrictions on people, smugglers and gangs take over where the Government have left the market. South Africa banned the sale of tobacco during the pandemic and it is now struggling with the gangs and smugglers who cover 93% of the market there. In Australia, as mentioned earlier, there has been a rise in the number of young people smoking, and retailers there have been fire-bombed when corner shops have refused to stock illicit tobacco. Children do not buy £15 packets of cigarettes either; they buy illicit tobacco from the same sources in the community—the smugglers and gangs.

The Secretary of State said that the Bill allocates £30 million to trading standards. That is a drop in the ocean. Trading standards is not just a sick department; it needs life support to come anywhere near to achieving the task it already needs to achieve. That £30 million still leaves it with a shortfall of £78 million on its budget in 2009. Spending on trading standards in 2009 was £213 million. This year it was frozen at £102.5 million, and between 2009 and 2016 the number of trading standards officers fell by 56%. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute has warned that cuts have created a “postcode lottery” of provision and called for an urgent review of how trading standards are resourced.

[Andrew Rosindell]

My right hon. Friend is making some extremely important points. He seems to be saying that, however laudable and well intentioned the Bill is, it is impractical and unenforceable because there is insufficient funding for trading standards to make it happen in reality.

[Craig Whittaker]

That is exactly what I am saying. The Government’s aim to create a generation of smoke-free people as time progresses just will not work. It is not working now when it is already banned for those 100,000 young people who take up smoking every year. In 2021, trading standards seized just over £7.8 million in illicit tobacco. This is from the UK Government’s own guesstimate that illicit tobacco accounts for more than 16% of the market, resulting in a loss of £2.8 billion—billion, not million—in tax and duty.

We have heard that the Bill is based on the New Zealand model. New Zealand does not have an illicit tobacco problem like we do here in the UK. It is 2,500 miles away from the nearest big trader, Australia; the UK is 23 miles away from the continent. The two countries cannot be compared. The New Zealand model has now failed, and it has performed a U-turn, as we have heard. Instead, the New Zealand Government continue to support initiatives to provide people with practical tools and support to help them to quit, including by ensuring the provision of effective services to stop smoking, providing access to alternative products to help smoking cessation, and promoting social media marketing campaigns to stop smoking and vaping.

The Bill provides little guidance or support on cessation to those who already smoke. I myself was one of the 6.4 million smokers here in the UK, but I stopped smoking just over a year ago. I found very little help or support from the Government, despite all the hype around what is being done. In fact, I tried virtually every product on the market to give up smoking—even hypnosis—and the only one that eventually made me give up was heated tobacco. That product, however, is not included in the Bill as a cessation tool. Instead, its sale to young people is to be banned. Even the Kiwis recognised what a great cessation tool it is and did not include it in their ban. Instead, they put it in their arsenal of tools and recognised its benefits for cessation. In Japan, where 18.6 million people smoke, 25% of ex-smokers quit using heated tobacco, and Japan is already seeing the health benefits through its health system.

Similarly, more than half of the ex-smokers in the country with the lowest smoking rate in the world, Sweden, have quit using something called snus, which is already banned here in the UK. Ironically, the Government have put all their eggs into the vaping scene for cessation but 30% of those people who vape still smoke cigarettes. Not only that, but although Public Health England refers to alternative nicotine delivery devices, such as vaping products, the Bill does not include heated tobacco, which is delivered via just such a device.

To summarise, the Bill is not cut out for the Government’s ambitions. It follows a failed model that was devised in New Zealand, which does not have the UK’s issue with illicit tobacco. We will depend on a morsel of cash going to an incredibly stretched trading standards, which is operating on a budget that is half what it was 15 years ago, to police and enforce the policies in the Bill. The legislation underestimates the scale of the illicit tobacco trade already in the UK and will promote it even more in future. It also fails to promote cessation to the current 6.4 million smokers in the UK, and fails to recognise the many more products for people to use to quit that are better than cigarettes, such as heated tobacco. It fails on every level.

Finally, if the Government, and indeed this House, were serious about stopping people smoking, why not just set an arbitrary date in the future when smoking, in respect of either partaking or selling, will be banned completely? That will give us time for serious investment in cessation and will also give a serious amount of time to invest in stopping the illegal gangs and smugglers.

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[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

I would like to point out three things at the outset. First, I used to be a smoker. I was probably one of the earliest adopters of vaping in the UK—certainly I was among them. Secondly, I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group for responsible vaping, whose chair will doubtless speak today. Thirdly, I draw Members’ attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I chair an advisory board to a company that may or may not be doing vapes.

Here in the UK, we have been incredibly successful in our smoking cessation policies thus far. In fact, we are the envy of the world with our rates of smoking cessation. Yes, we are behind target, and yes, according to the Khan review, we might not hit the 2030 mark, but we have been incredibly successful. I have travelled around the world talking about our success. People ask how we have done it, and I explain that the industry did it: it came up with a fantastic device called a vape. Initially it was all a bit dodgy and shaky; people were mixing liquids in Manchester in their baths and it was all very complicated. We got a grip on it, now there is regulation, and provided people are vaping legally, it is safe and usable. Millions of smokers have stopped smoking by using vaping devices. It is a huge success story.

The thing that makes me smile the most is the number of children who smoke. Back in 1982, 13% of 11 to 15-year-olds—secondary-school kids—smoked. I remember it, as I was around then—many of us remember it—and everyone used to smoke behind the bike sheds. In 2003, 9% smoked, which was good progress. By 2010, only 5% of schoolchildren smoked. Today, only 1% of schoolchildren smoke. That is a record of success. It is not a huge disaster that suddenly needs a radical change of policy to resolve the issue. In my view, it merely requires upping the ante on enforcement and messaging, rather than a draconian approach.

I welcome the Bill in two ways. First, the measures on vaping are pretty strong and pretty good. Most Members would agree that we need to look at packaging so that it is not marketed to children, and we need to look at flavours. We do not need to look at the flavours themselves; I urge the Secretary of State to look at the descriptors in the relevant part of the Bill rather than the flavours themselves as a regulatory issue. It does not matter to a smoker who wishes to quit whether the flavour is called blueberry or anything else. All that matters is that the flavour exists. It does not matter if it has a reference number and a plain package. What matters is that the flavour exists—for example, mango, which was used by my hon. Friend the Member for Dewsbury (Mark Eastwood); I tended to use blueberry—to encourage smokers to shift, but it does not necessarily need to be named on the pack, which could be marketed to children.

There is another key issue on the vaping measures in the Bill. It is unbelievable, but the entire tobacco industry is ready to open its chequebook to pay for Trading Standards and enforcement. The entire vaping industry, including vaping associations and retailers, is ready to say, “We don’t want these cowboys in the industry. We want to drive them out as much as you, because they give us a bad name and it encourages nanny-state politicians to meddle and interfere, stopping us doing our lawful trade.” A vast sum of money is available from the industry to be used by the Government, hopefully directly through Trading Standards, so that Trading Standards does not just have a few million here and there but has hundreds of millions of pounds and hundreds of new staff who can do their job and drive the cowboys out of the industry, and we can ensure that we see an end to all the practices that have been mentioned today.

Bans do not work. I am not going to make a high-principled speech about freedom, but frankly bans do not work. Bhutan and Malaysia tried it, but it did not work. Australia got close to doing it with some very complicated legislation, but it did not work. Guess what? Smoking rates went up, including smoking rates among kids. New Zealand had a really good stab at it, and then said, “Nah, it’s unconstitutional and it’s probably not going to work as well.” Bans do not work, so the idea that we, in the United Kingdom, would now be at the vanguard of that is ridiculous.

For goodness’ sake, our policy as it stands is working. We just need to do it faster, make more money available for enforcement and get on with changing the descriptors to ensure fewer people are smoking, particularly our children. Nobody wants our children to smoke. Nobody wants people to die. The false argument I have heard today that anybody who does not agree with the generational ban is somehow evil and wants people to die really upsets me. We should not resort to that sort of language.

The main reason why I cannot support the Bill is the generational smoking ban. I would perfectly happily support the rest of the Bill, but I really cannot support that ban. If the Government had been bold enough to say, “Right, we are going to ban smoking below the age of 21”, I would have had huge reluctance but I would have said, “Yeah, fair enough.” Why? Because we would have been treating people the same. The Bill is making a huge constitutional change by saying that two adults will not be treated the same. It is inequality under the law. Even in Malaysia, their Attorney General said, “We can’t do that”, and they are not nearly as civilised as we are here. Several other countries have come to the same conclusion.

I do not know how we have got into this state. It is so unnecessary. There are so many more important things to be doing in the world at the moment, yet now we are in this place. If this Bill somehow gets through with Labour’s support—of course, Labour always love bans; I get that and that is fine. Forgive me for being political, but it is ridiculous to have our Prime Minister, who has enough things to deal with, putting through a Bill, with Labour’s support. Why on earth do that at this stage?

[Andrew Rosindell]

I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. Surely this should be something that should evolve? As he has highlighted, the statistics show that very few young people now smoke, so we should let things gradually evolve rather than impose them. After the New Zealand example, is it not clear that a ban simply will not work?

[Adam Afriyie]

I could not agree more.

To conclude, I cannot vote for a Bill that treats adults unequally in law. The Bill creates a precedent in the United Kingdom of treating people differently—adult human beings; citizens—and of inequality under the law. I cannot support that. We are making a huge political mistake. I hope that even at this late stage we can make some amendments or change the way the legislation works. We could at least say that there is a condition—that we will bring the Bill into law, but that it can be enacted by a future Government only if smoking rates are not, for argument’s sake, below 3% by 2035. In that way we have the political win—we have got the Bill though and it is legislation—but the measures are not actually enacted.