Tobacco Products (Plain Packaging)

Debate between Bob Blackman and Mark Pawsey

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Westminster Hall

[Bob Blackman]

Clearly, the younger someone starts smoking, the more likely they are to increase their smoking in later life, and the greater harm they will do their health. Evidence indicates that the earlier someone starts, the more heavily they are likely to smoke later in life, increasing their dependency and lowering their chances of quitting. They therefore have a higher chance of premature death from smoking-related disease. The appalling truth is that half of all lifetime smokers will die from illness caused by their addiction.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the concerns of cigarette packaging manufacturers that standardised packaging will be much easier for counterfeiters to copy? There is thus a grave danger that the very people about whom he is concerned are more likely to be smoking more dangerous illicit cigarettes.

[Bob Blackman]

I will come to packaging later in my speech. The key issue is the risk of counterfeiting under the current arrangements, and it has yet to be proven what action can be taken about that. With standardised packaging, measures are possible to make it harder for the illicit trade to continue.

The illnesses are awful—lung cancer, other cancers, emphysema, peripheral vascular disease. Doctors and medical professionals do not support tobacco control measures, including standardisation of packaging, out of some perverse desire to control people and tell them what to do; they support tobacco control because they have seen hundreds of patients dying from terrible and preventable diseases. They want that dreadful waste of life to end, and we should listen to them. I declare a personal interest: both my parents died of cancer when I was young, because of tobacco and no other reason.

Children in poorer communities in particular—high-risk groups, specifically—are more likely to smoke. For example, 45% of smokers in routine and manual occupations report that they began to smoke before the age of 16; 57% of teenage mothers smoked during pregnancy; and in 2002, the Office for National Statistics reported that a truly shocking 69% of children in residential care were smokers. Starting to smoke is associated with a range of key risk factors, including smoking by parents, siblings and friends, and exposure to tobacco marketing. In my judgment, most people start smoking at stressful times in their lives.

Packaging is used by the tobacco industry as a residual form of advertising, since all other forms are now unlawful. Smokers display the branding every time they take their pack out to smoke. The industry understands that well. Helpfully, Philip Morris International’s submission to the Government consultation on the future of tobacco control stated:

“Packaging is…a means of communicating to consumers about what brands are on sale and in particular the goodwill”—

to use the term literally—

“associated with our trademarks, indicating brand value and quality.”

Nowhere else would someone get away with a product that kills people being advertised in such a way.

Peer-reviewed studies, summarised in the systematic review of evidence cited in the Department of Health’s consultation document, have found that standard packaging, compared with branded cigarettes, is less attractive to young people, improves the effectiveness of health warnings, reduces mistaken beliefs that some brands are safer than others and is, therefore, likely to reduce smoking uptake among children and young people. That evidence is from the Department of Health, which is not yet acting on it. More recent evidence from Australia is that smokers using standard packs are more likely to rate quitting as a higher priority in their lives than smokers using brand packs. That is only the early evidence.