Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this legislation and am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for outlining the rationale for the Bill. I support the principles, which I believe we should all embrace. We have had a very interesting debate this evening, ebbing and flowing between those who totally embrace those principles and the libertarians who have certain reservations. I think people are generally united on the viewpoint that there should be some way to deal with smoking and the side-effects of smoking and vaping.

I am also grateful to Asthma + Lung UK and the BMA for their briefings. I come with a personal testimony as well. Both my late mum and my late cousin had lung cancer. Neither of them smoked, but they were exposed to passive smoking because in all public arenas—some 40, 30, 20 and even 15 years ago—there was a lot of public smoking.

As this legislation extends to all of the UK, I want to give a Northern Ireland-specific viewpoint. This legislation was given consent by the Northern Ireland Assembly on 10 February. To ensure that the legislation is meaningful and given its best chance, I urge my noble friend the Minister to encourage the Minister for Health in Northern Ireland to introduce lung screening. It does not exist on a scheduled basis in Northern Ireland but is vital, as it can look for a cancer or other lung-related disease in a person long before they have developed all the various symptoms. There is growing evidence supporting the benefits of early detection. Although screening and research projects are under way, a fully funded and implemented programme has yet to be established. I therefore urge my noble friend to make contact with the Northern Ireland Minister, urging him to move from thinking about the issue to actually doing something about it. I have talked to consultant oncologists who deal specifically with lung cancer in Northern Ireland and they urgently want to see this lung screening implemented, because they believe that if it is implemented, they can deal with the disease in patients before it has reached such an advanced stage, when they have restricted means of dealing with it.

The statistics are there as evidence. Around 2,400 people die every year in Northern Ireland as a result of smoking-related conditions, and there are around 35,000 smoking-related hospital admissions in Northern Ireland annually. I join my friends from Northern Ireland, the noble Lords, Lord Weir and Lord Dodds, in asking to ensure that the enforcement measures in the Bill are made effective and capable of implementation, because in Clause 81 it is up to district councils. There are 11 district councils in Northern Ireland, and I would like to think that they were all on the same page and did not operate a variety of implementation enforcement schemes. It is important that the legislation is sufficiently mandatory to ensure that happens, because we want to eradicate disease and to ensure that everybody is on the same page and that the impact of smoking and of using tobacco and vapes is mitigated.

Finally, I ask that drastic funding cuts for smoking cessation services be reversed. Also like my friends from Northern Ireland, I suggest that not only enforcement but other measures to do with money laundering must be ensured. There must be work between all the law enforcement agencies, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department of Health in Northern Ireland to ensure that it does not happen. If people can purchase vapes and tobacco under the counter or by some other means, that will not help in dealing with disease eradication in the various cancers and emphysemas that are prevalent in Northern Ireland.