Smokefree 2030 Target

Damien Moore Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Damien Moore (Southport) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. I congratulate the hon. Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) and my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing this important debate. The Department of Health and Social Care’s announcement in response to the Khan smoking review of last year was a positive step to ensure the UK remains a world leader on harm reduction and has a strong chance of reaching the Government’s ambitious Smokefree 2030 target. That said, I worry there is a serious risk that the target will be missed, with an estimated 13.3% of adults in the UK still smoking. The Department’s announcement that a reduction in smoking would also reduce the number of hospital admissions is clearly correct. It would help the Government’s priority of reducing NHS waiting lists.

The Government are taking a harm reduction approach to tackling smoking. As the Minister said, the person who quits today is the person who is not in a hospital bed tomorrow. I therefore welcome the Government’s highly pragmatic approach to vapes, but only by embracing all smoking alternatives—not just vaping, but gum, patches and NHS stop smoking services—can the UK give itself the best chance of hitting its Smokefree 2030 target, with the health benefits that would result from that.

There are 3.3 million vapers in the UK, but vaping does not meet the needs of all smokers looking to stop. Furthermore, because it does not closely mimic smoking, 35% of current vapers use vapes and cigarettes alongside one another, as confirmed by Action on Smoking and Health. Other products, such as “heat not burn”, heat tobacco rather than burning it, and therefore produce substantially fewer harmful and potentially harmful chemicals than cigarettes. They also mimic cigarettes much more closely than vapes, which means that smokers who switch to them are less likely to continue smoking. Importantly, studies have shown that they are less attractive than vapes to younger people who have never smoked.

That said, there are rightly concerns about youth uptake of vaping. Vapes are designed for adult smokers who are trying to quit, not for teenagers to use as a gateway to other nicotine products. There is clearly a balance to be struck between ensuring that vapes do not end up in the hands of young people and not hindering the access of adult smokers to these reduced-risk alternatives.

Tt international forums, the UK should stand up for this positive harm-reduction approach to tackling smoking. Now that it has left the EU, it can speak as a world leader on harm reduction, alongside nations such as Sweden and Japan, to demonstrate the powerful role that support for less harmful alternatives to cigarettes can play in reducing smoking prevalence.

In 2018, when I sat on the Science and Technology Committee, we called for independent research to be commissioned on the relative risks of “heat not burn” tobacco products. The research would fill the gap in knowledge and understanding of the impact of these products and the relative harms compared to other products, such as e-cigarettes, and would ensure that evidence-based policymaking was not solely reliant on the industry for scientific evidence. I stood—and indeed continue to stand—firmly by that call from the Select Committee for proper scientific research to be done. It is only when we have all the facts that we can make the most effective decisions to help us stop smoking by 2030, with all the health benefits that that entails and all the lives it will save.