Oral Answers to Questions

Bob Blackman Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

P&O is plainly not going to get away with it any more than any other company that treats its employees in that scandalous way. This is a historic moment for this country, actually, because it is now two years to the day since we went into lockdown. That plunged this country into the biggest, deepest loss of output than we have seen in our lifetimes. Thanks to the Chancellor, who protected the economy, jobs and companies, we have now been able to come out faster and more effectively than any other comparable economy. We have unemployment back down to 3.9%, we have 600,000 more people on the payroll and the best assurance we can give workers around the country is that the economy is now bigger than it was before the pandemic began. We will continue to get the big calls right, as we got the big calls right during the pandemic. Labour got the big calls wrong. They would do absolutely nothing to protect workers, let alone P&O workers, because not only would they have kept us in lockdown, but they would have kept those ships in port, unable to move. That is the reality. There has never been a Labour Government that left office with unemployment lower than when they began. That is the reality and that is their record on jobs.

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

Q3. I strongly support the Government’s intention to make England smoke-free by 2030, but on the current trajectory we are going to miss that target. It is vital that we discourage young people from starting to smoke and encourage people who already smoke to give up. So does my right hon. Friend agree that it is now time to raise the age of legal sale of tobacco products from 18 to 21 and impose a levy on the profits of the big tobacco companies, in order to raise £700 million that we can put into smoking cessation services, on the basis that the polluter pays?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend very much, and he is absolutely right about smoking; it is the biggest single cause of preventable death in this country. As he will know, Javed Khan OBE is undertaking an independent review of smoking, and I am sure he will want to take my hon. Friend’s suggestions into account.