Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Craig Whittaker Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

Everyone would like to see a cessation of smoking. People stopping for good, let alone starting at an early age, would bring long-term health benefits to the nation as a whole. Sadly, the problem is that this Bill will not be the vehicle to achieve such an ambition. It is a Bill written by non-smokers for smokers, and it is so out of touch with the cause that they want to cure that it will miss its target by a very long shot. First of all, the Bill does not ban smoking; it only stops the sale of tobacco to 18-year-olds if they turn 15 this year. We heard today from the Secretary of State that 100,000 children already start smoking every year. The sale of tobacco is already banned for those children.

The Bill is based on the premise that children today still ask their mate’s older brother to buy them some cigarettes from the corner shop, like they did back in the 1980s. They do not. The vast majority of regular smokers today only ever buy their cigarettes from the corner shop when they have run out of illicitly bought cigarettes. If people do not believe me, they should pop into any pub in the UK and ask the smokers whether they buy tax-paid cigarettes from the supermarket and the corner shop. I guarantee that the vast majority do not. In every community there are avenues to buy illicit cigarettes at a fraction of the average price of £15 for a pack of 20 cigarettes from the corner shop.

A recent poll of 12,000 adult smokers found that the illegal tobacco market remains resilient in the UK in spite of the number of overall smokers declining year on year. On that basis alone, the illicit market is increasing. The study found that 76% of those 12,000 smokers bought tobacco in the last year that had not been subject to UK tax, with nearly one in two smokers having no objection to buying non-UK-duty-paid tobacco from family, friends, colleagues or shops. The poll also revealed that 9% of smokers who buy tobacco through social media or websites advertising cheap tobacco do so at least once a month.

Evidence from around the world shows that when we put further restrictions on people, smugglers and gangs take over where the Government have left the market. South Africa banned the sale of tobacco during the pandemic and it is now struggling with the gangs and smugglers who cover 93% of the market there. In Australia, as mentioned earlier, there has been a rise in the number of young people smoking, and retailers there have been fire-bombed when corner shops have refused to stock illicit tobacco. Children do not buy £15 packets of cigarettes either; they buy illicit tobacco from the same sources in the community—the smugglers and gangs.

The Secretary of State said that the Bill allocates £30 million to trading standards. That is a drop in the ocean. Trading standards is not just a sick department; it needs life support to come anywhere near to achieving the task it already needs to achieve. That £30 million still leaves it with a shortfall of £78 million on its budget in 2009. Spending on trading standards in 2009 was £213 million. This year it was frozen at £102.5 million, and between 2009 and 2016 the number of trading standards officers fell by 56%. The Chartered Trading Standards Institute has warned that cuts have created a “postcode lottery” of provision and called for an urgent review of how trading standards are resourced.

[Andrew Rosindell]

My right hon. Friend is making some extremely important points. He seems to be saying that, however laudable and well intentioned the Bill is, it is impractical and unenforceable because there is insufficient funding for trading standards to make it happen in reality.

[Craig Whittaker]

That is exactly what I am saying. The Government’s aim to create a generation of smoke-free people as time progresses just will not work. It is not working now when it is already banned for those 100,000 young people who take up smoking every year. In 2021, trading standards seized just over £7.8 million in illicit tobacco. This is from the UK Government’s own guesstimate that illicit tobacco accounts for more than 16% of the market, resulting in a loss of £2.8 billion—billion, not million—in tax and duty.

We have heard that the Bill is based on the New Zealand model. New Zealand does not have an illicit tobacco problem like we do here in the UK. It is 2,500 miles away from the nearest big trader, Australia; the UK is 23 miles away from the continent. The two countries cannot be compared. The New Zealand model has now failed, and it has performed a U-turn, as we have heard. Instead, the New Zealand Government continue to support initiatives to provide people with practical tools and support to help them to quit, including by ensuring the provision of effective services to stop smoking, providing access to alternative products to help smoking cessation, and promoting social media marketing campaigns to stop smoking and vaping.

The Bill provides little guidance or support on cessation to those who already smoke. I myself was one of the 6.4 million smokers here in the UK, but I stopped smoking just over a year ago. I found very little help or support from the Government, despite all the hype around what is being done. In fact, I tried virtually every product on the market to give up smoking—even hypnosis—and the only one that eventually made me give up was heated tobacco. That product, however, is not included in the Bill as a cessation tool. Instead, its sale to young people is to be banned. Even the Kiwis recognised what a great cessation tool it is and did not include it in their ban. Instead, they put it in their arsenal of tools and recognised its benefits for cessation. In Japan, where 18.6 million people smoke, 25% of ex-smokers quit using heated tobacco, and Japan is already seeing the health benefits through its health system.

Similarly, more than half of the ex-smokers in the country with the lowest smoking rate in the world, Sweden, have quit using something called snus, which is already banned here in the UK. Ironically, the Government have put all their eggs into the vaping scene for cessation but 30% of those people who vape still smoke cigarettes. Not only that, but although Public Health England refers to alternative nicotine delivery devices, such as vaping products, the Bill does not include heated tobacco, which is delivered via just such a device.

To summarise, the Bill is not cut out for the Government’s ambitions. It follows a failed model that was devised in New Zealand, which does not have the UK’s issue with illicit tobacco. We will depend on a morsel of cash going to an incredibly stretched trading standards, which is operating on a budget that is half what it was 15 years ago, to police and enforce the policies in the Bill. The legislation underestimates the scale of the illicit tobacco trade already in the UK and will promote it even more in future. It also fails to promote cessation to the current 6.4 million smokers in the UK, and fails to recognise the many more products for people to use to quit that are better than cigarettes, such as heated tobacco. It fails on every level.

Finally, if the Government, and indeed this House, were serious about stopping people smoking, why not just set an arbitrary date in the future when smoking, in respect of either partaking or selling, will be banned completely? That will give us time for serious investment in cessation and will also give a serious amount of time to invest in stopping the illegal gangs and smugglers.

[Several hon. Members rose—]