Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Darren Paffey Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 26th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Darren Paffey (Southampton Itchen) (Lab)]

I am proud to be part of a Government who are creating the first smokefree generation and protecting the British public. This Bill will protect my constituents from avoidable illnesses and death, so I very much welcome it.

Like other Members who have spoken throughout the debate, I am one of those people who can only dream of being asked for ID these days. In fact, I am so old that I can remember growing up seeing huge billboards and bus stops with cigarette advertisements on them, and cigarette companies sponsoring entire sporting events. What a different time we live in now, and that is because our knowledge has progressed so much. We now know that there is no safe level of exposure to smoking or even to second-hand passive smoking. As the Secretary of State set out, we know the consequences, which are 75,000 GP appointments attributed to smoking every single month; 80,000 smoking-related deaths each year; and one person admitted to hospital every minute because of smoking. That is all at a cost to the NHS of more than £3 billion a year, adding to the pressure on it when we know it is at breaking point.

There is also the economic cost, with £18 billion of productivity squandered each year—dare I say, £18 billion up in smoke? Phasing out this harmful addiction is not just a health priority but a societal and economic necessity. The urgency is especially clear in Southampton, where we have had 527 emergency hospital admissions per 100,000 people for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a disease from which my mum died, despite never having smoked but being the child of heavy-smoking parents. Compare that rate to the average in England of 326 per 100,000—that represents a 61% higher rate in Southampton. There is clearly an urgent need for the Bill to bring change nationally and in my city. I do not want the children of Southampton Itchen to have to grow up vulnerable to the same smoking-related health issues that my generation and the generations before us did.

This excellent Bill will rewrite the culture around smoking and vaping, freeing our next generation from addiction, from school-age pressures and from harmful trends. Despite the troubling statistics, there is great work going on locally to tackle this issue. Before the election, I visited Professor Kath Woods-Townsend and her team at a research-based project called LifeLab, which is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, University Hospital Southampton and the National Institute for Health and Care Research biomedical research centre. The project is centred around improving the health education of young people through practical visits to its labs at the hospital and involving them in its research processes. One of its recent studies found that some vaping brands are designed to mimic sweets and that some children are persuaded that there is an element of healthiness to fruit-flavoured vapes.

Imagine being a company that plays on that. Imagine being a company that knows about the risks of vaping—knows that it can cause lung-scarring and asthma as well as bringing an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, exposure to chemicals and breathing in metal in the aerosol—and yet wraps its product up in bright colours and fruit flavours and deliberately markets it towards our children, knowing the addictive nature of vapes and knowing the vulnerability of children and the social pressures they face. The job of business is to contribute to the economy, to innovate and to create jobs and wealth, not to run rampant with our children’s health to make a quick buck for shareholders. Effective educational programmes such as LifeLab, working in tandem with the Government’s sensible legislation and action, will promote better understanding and reduce harm.

We have seen before what legislation can do: when smoking under 18, proxy purchasing and advertising on cigarette packaging were banned, all those vital steps drove down the smoking rate. Now, it is time to stub out this habit—forgive me, Madam Deputy Speaker—once and for all.

The Labour Government are doing what is right by the youth of today by prioritising health over profit and ensuring that the next generation can grow up free from this addiction and its preventable diseases. Today, with cross-party support, I hope that we will take another ambitious step towards a future where our children’s wellbeing comes first. I am proud to be part of that.