Tobacco Products (Plain Packaging)
Debate between Chris Ruane and David Nuttall(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I have managed to constrain the urge to intervene, in accordance with your exhortation to us this morning, so I will be reluctant to accept any interventions myself, on the basis, as you said, that we want to have as many speakers as we can.
I am, as most people in the room know, I suspect, on the side of my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mark Field) and the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) in this matter. I take the view that plenty of measures are already in place to protect children from smoking. Let us face it: it is already illegal to sell cigarettes to children.
The principal point that I want to make to start with is that we ought to be taking more measures to enforce the laws that we have already. There is already a ban on advertising, a ban on the display of cigarettes in large supermarkets, which is shortly to be extended to all shops, and a ban on smoking in public places. We already have extensive education measures.
What really starts children smoking is peer pressure. We have seen that, as a result of all the measures in place already, the numbers of people smoking are falling. Government figures from the general lifestyle survey show a national fall in the number of smokers, from 39% in 1980 to 21% in 2011—19% in England and 24% in Scotland and Wales. I have never met anyone who, when I asked why they smoked, said, “I took up smoking because I was attracted by the colour or style of the packet and I wanted to have one in my pocket.”
Mr Nuttall
It is all very well saying that, but the Minister said in a previous debate that the new packs were not going to be plain packaged at all, but were going to have lots of glamorous, glitzy holograms on them in different colours. [Interruption.] The Minister did not say “glamorous”, but she did mention different colours and holograms. The point is that I never met anyone who said that it was the packet that made them want to take up smoking.