Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Baroness Watkins of Tavistock Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 30th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, have made some interesting cases probing the issue of the high nicotine content of pouches. However, it is worth noting that Cancer Research does not support these amendments. It says that there may well be a need for a deeper dive into the evidence, but it stresses something that has been missed in some of the debates we have had so far, certainly at Second Reading: it is tobacco that is the cancer-causing ingredient in cigarettes.

Nicotine patches do not contain tobacco. Nicotine is addictive, but the overall evidence does not support a direct causal link between nicotine and cancer: it is not carcinogenic. That is what the scientific evidence seems to show, and it comes from anti-tobacco lobbying groups and people whom I would not necessarily usually cite. It is noted that nicotine products and pouches are being used as recreational products, but they are also helpful for smoking cessation.

We have to consider what we are doing with the Bill. The NHS itself calls nicotine “relatively harmless”, and, in his 2022 review, Dr Javed Khan said that

“the government must facilitate access to the various already available safer alternative nicotine products such as nicotine pouches”.

We therefore have to be careful about demonising these things, because it is not straightforward.

There is a danger throughout the Bill—it will come up in other groups—of a constant slippage between tobacco and nicotine. Sometimes that occurs through a discussion around addiction. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks about this—she talked about the problems of addiction on our first day in Committee—because the Bill is not necessarily tackling addiction; it is tackling harms. There is a danger that we get confused between that addiction, which, as I say, many people in the health professions do not see as a problem per se, and what we are targeting. I am worried that that slippage between nicotine and tobacco, between vapes and smoking cigarettes, leads to an unscientific mishmash of misinformation that, ironically, can damage public health.

In relation to young people using pouches until they vomit, young people use lots of things until they vomit. They can overuse a range of things, not helpfully, but it does not necessarily mean that the product itself is always the problem: sometimes, it can be youthful lack of restraint, which one might want to intervene in but not necessarily through the law.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I broadly support these amendments but also agree with my noble friend Lord Patel that there is probably no reason to have oral pouches at all. It is something that we could carefully consider deleting from our society. If you are trying to withdraw from tobacco, nicotine patches are just as effective as pouches and do not cause the problems that have been so readily described today. While the debate has been going on, I looked back, and it was 1950 when Sir Richard Doll proved the relationship between tobacco and lung cancer. It has therefore taken us 75 years to get to this point, with the Bill. There is sufficient evidence in relation to pouches for us not to decide that we need a 75-year prospective trial to show their damage.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment, and I have a question for those who have tabled it, which relates to proposed new subsection (2)(b), saying the product is

“not intended to be inhaled or chewed”.

I am afraid that as someone who has been looking at tobacco control measures for many years now, through legislation, I am slightly concerned that, as we get rid of one thing, the nicotine manufacturers will find another way of bringing in a substance that is, in effect, addictive, which is promoted to young people, and is a way to get them started on the inevitable chain of addiction that leads to promotion.

When we look at the evidence around nicotine, we see that, yes, it is highly addictive, but the other thing that happens with an addictive substance is that you become tolerant to the effect, to that boost. Therefore, the addict seeks higher and higher doses to get a greater and greater hit. In the long term, as my noble friend Lord Patel pointed out, it is not only blood pressure and so on; there is a problem with platelet stickiness. We do not know what this will do in the microvasculature in the brain in the long term, because these high-dose nicotine products have not been around long enough and we have not had enough brains that have come to post-mortems—I am sorry to put it so bluntly—of people who have been using them for a long time. The hit that they get is greater than they would get from smoking a cigarette.