Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, first, I declare that my wife is a non-executive director of Tesco. Secondly, I spent 10 years working at the Ministry of Sound in south London, where I came face to face with the illicit cigarette trade on a weekly basis. Christopher Upton was the name of the burly character who delivered cigarettes to the club each week; he controlled the London casual cigarette business very tightly indeed. He was a charming, if burly, individual who gave us presents at Christmas and is famous among the legal fraternity for his case, Fagomatic v HMRC, in which he argued that his shiny purple Lamborghini Countach should be deductible for VAT as a business expense, which sadly he lost in 2002. That is the face of illicit cigarette trading in the UK.

Since the days of Christopher Upton, the trade in illicit cigarettes has come down by 90%, from 15 billion sticks a year to 2 billion sticks a year. Those are the statistics that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly gave; they are different from those given by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, which come from the KPMG report for Philip Morris, the cigarette seller, which are not figures that I feel this Committee should lean on. I can source the number, if it is helpful to noble Lords.

May I just say a word about prohibition? I have two points to make about the prohibition of cigarettes for young people. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, rightly and powerfully said, there is now a clear displacement route to vaping for anyone who wishes to take up this kind of activity. In other words, there is an alternative. Prohibitions come when there is no alternative. Secondly, I remind the Committee that, among young people, interest in smoking cigarettes has collapsed: it has gone from 23% of 18 year-olds in 2011 to 10% of 18 year-olds in 2025, and it is heading downwards. We can only encourage this move with this measure.

The amendments suggested in this group would be counterproductive and are, for that reason, extremely regrettable.

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)]

My Lords, I support these amendments in the names of my noble friend Lord Murray and others, which concern substituting the age of 21. I do so not because I think 21 is the perfect age but because it becomes a workable solution in trying to prevent the young smoking.

I am—like many noble Lords in this Room, I suspect—a reformed smoker. It sounds like one of those AA meetings, does it not? I stopped smoking on the occurrence of my illness. I did not stop smoking because I had suddenly turned against them, morally; it is just that I now struggle to pick them up and light them. Of course, we would love to live in a world of nirvana where cigarettes and tobacco had not been invented, but I am afraid that idea is long gone; it went many hundreds of years ago.

I am sorry to say that the Bill gives this Parliament rather a bad name, because we are talking here about the complexity of age-related smoking. One needs only to look out on to today’s streets. It is pretty rare to see people smoking on the street and even rarer to see youngsters smoking on the street. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, and my noble friend Lord Bethell just said, 10% of youngsters smoke and, in the normal population, the number of smokers is collapsing. That is a result of cessation products, of better education and of us all, I think, being a bit more aware—if we needed to be more aware—of the dangers of smoking this smoking product, which is, by its very nature, pretty daft.

Where the public have lost us here, I think, is that they see a lot of evils on the streets of this country. They would rather we were debating banning knives on the street or banning street fentanyl, but here we are talking about banning smoking. I think people would almost laugh at us for discussing such things at length in this Parliament.

Hundreds of millions of pounds have been spent over the years on smoking cessation products via the NHS—whether patches, gums or other such things—yet the only product to have received no public subsidy, despite it being the biggest driver of reducing smoking in this country, is the vape. It has been far more successful than all those expensive products, although I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, about vaping. Perversely, this is where the nanny state gets a weird outcome. We are now seeing more youngsters addicted to nicotine at a young age via a vape than I think we ever would have done had we done nothing except the usual education around how bad smoking is. We now have a generation of nicotine addicts where I do not think we would have done before.

This is not a Second Reading argument about how bad the Bill is, but we need to think carefully about the practicality of banning things. I am concerned about small shops, not so much about the trade they might lose, even though that is a factor, but the reality out there. Too often, we in Parliament try to create a nirvana but do not look at the real world. I had a decorator a few years ago and, every day on the way to my place, he was buying illicit cigarettes. He said that, on his route through the Medway towns, he knew of four shops where there were illicit cigarettes under the counter. Where is HMRC? Where are trading standards? I knew where this was going on; I even used to tell trading standards where they ought to be looking, and there was the odd raid from time to time, but it still continues.

In the same breath in this legislation, we have some ridiculous statements about snus, a Scandinavian product that probably has its place in taking people out of smoking by an alternative supply of nicotine. We are seriously going to have potentially two years’ imprisonment for the selling of snus, yet while illicit cigarettes are banned, or just not legal to be sold, on every street in every town across this country we have illegal, illicit tobacco being sold. To then overlay further a load of new regulation, hoping that it will be enforced, is, frankly, for the birds.

I will take the whole moving-age argument a bit further. We discussed the ages of 31 and 30. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, for saying what he said, which was absolutely right. I take that a bit further. A 70 year-old and a 71 year-old are living next door. The 71 year-old is going to have a very busy shopping list when he pops down to the Co-op in 2080 when he is buying cigarettes for the 70 year-old. To think that the trader is having to ask for some sort of ID, from someone who is obviously of a reasonable age, to buy cigarettes is, frankly, lunacy. That is why I support the age limit of 21 in preference to doing nothing at all.

I also have some sympathy for Amendment 16 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. If we are seriously considering youngsters being able to vote at 16 then why not have 16, or whatever that voting age is, as a sensible measure for doing lots of things? We do not think that 16 year-olds should be using a sunbed, but we suddenly think they should be voting.

I know that this measure was introduced, or thought about, by the outgoing Government and the previous Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak; we had discussions about this very Bill when he came to visit me in—in hospital. I nearly said “in prison”; it felt like that after six months. I gave my thoughts to him quite graphically: “Yes, it begins with a B, Prime Minister”.

There is an international dimension to this, which has been picked up on by a few speakers this afternoon. What will we do with Easyjet when you have the 18 year-old traveller coming back from Malaga or Majorca? I can only imagine, because they will be in international airspace, their complete ability to buy a carton of cigarettes on Easyjet or Ryanair or whatever other plane they are coming on, or at Malaga airport or at Dubai Airport. They will be able to bring them into the country and smoke them.

What will we do about the very real, seemingly invisible, border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland that has been discussed by my noble friend Lord Murray? Will the 18 year-olds living just over the border in Northern Ireland hop over to the tobacconist, literally just over the border, to satisfy their wishes? This just becomes within the realms of lunacy.

We have to look at what has happened elsewhere in the world. In Australia, we have seen an explosion of turf wars and an increase in illicit tobacco. There are two “illicits”: there is completely made-up tobacco, which is potentially truly dangerous, or the merely untaxed tobacco that has been imported to the UK but is the genuine product. There is huge money involved, and wherever there is big money there are turf wars, violence and problems.

It is too late to stop this legislation. I think it is daft, and we really should be addressing more pressing issues in this nation. The age limit of 21 is at least enforceable and has clarity. I have every confidence that the years of smoking in this country, because of the measures of education, peer pressure and the way we are not allowed to smoke in pubs, are being reduced almost to single figures and a diminishing number. On that basis, my noble friend Lord Murray and those amendments have my full support.