Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Baroness Morgan of Drefelin Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to participate in this Second Reading debate. I feel pretty clear about what we are trying to do here. This is a forward-looking Bill. It is about creating opportunities for the future, to have the next generations come through free from the dreadful impacts of tobacco on their lives. The Bill is about reducing the harms associated with tobacco and taking a broad view about that. I can understand why a trip to William Morris would—

[Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Con)]

Philip Morris.

[Baroness Morgan of Drefelin (Lab)]

Philip. I should not say William Morris, I rather like William Morris. I understand why such a trip would prompt these questions, which is what we are trying to do. I think the Bill is forward-looking, focused, proportionate and well balanced.

I want to talk, as the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, did very movingly, about the impact that smoking has had on my family. I do not know whether I would define myself as a smoker. I certainly smoked when I was a rebellious teenager, but my family was terribly affected by the impact of smoking. My father was diagnosed with lung cancer when I was a teenager, which caused immense hardship for my family, propelled me and my sisters on to the free school meals list, queuing up with all the other children in the special school meal queue in the way we used to in the past. Both my parents went on to die prematurely of smoking-related cancer. It has been a terrible blight on my family and many thousands of families in this country. So, I am hugely in favour of the Bill.

I have enjoyed listening to colleagues from all sides of the House looking back at the journey we have been on to get here, the different debates we had in 2006 that looked at advertising and so on. We have come such a long way and it has been in the face of enormous opposition. To add my anecdote to the journey, when I first came into this House in 2004, smoking cigars and pipes in the Peers’ Guest Room was considered absolutely acceptable. As the day went by, you might bring a guest in and gradually the height of the smoke would descend to such a level that by about 5 pm you could not go in there without a gas mask. We have seen such an enormous amount of progress in tackling the blight of tobacco.

People think that tobacco—smoking—just affects the lungs, but I served as the chief executive of a breast cancer charity for a few decades and, over those years, I have seen the evidence building to show that smoking causes breast cancer as well as lung cancer and all the other impacts that we know about. Cancer Research UK now says that it causes around 2,200 breast cancers a year. So, we need to be mindful that evidence is unfolding all the time about the impact of smoking on our health.

We have heard that around four in 10 cancers in the UK are preventable and the biggest step forward we could take to prevent cancers would be to reduce cancers caused by smoking. We know that vaping, as we have heard, provides important assistance to those who want to quit smoking, and it is absolutely right that the Bill takes that into account. We know that a lot of the marketing and so on, as the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, so clearly demonstrated, is targeted at children.

I close by saying that I fully support those aspects of the Bill. I really congratulate the Government on taking seriously the terrible issues around single-use vapes. Only two weeks ago, I was in a children’s playground looking after a great-nephew. He said to me, “Do you know what? You can find a red box that can make smoke come out of your mouth—sweet smoke. It’s really great”. He is six, and he found a single-use vape in the bushes in the park and had a go on it. We do not want to see that as the norm in our society. This Bill is about the future and the kind of future that we want for our young people—I support it wholeheartedly.