Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Earl of Lindsay Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley.

I declare two somewhat different interests. One is as president of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, in which role I welcome the additional £10 million for enforcement that the Minister mentioned. The other, though, is as a cigar lover, and it is in the latter capacity that I am speaking today.

I support any and all efforts to discourage young people from taking up cigarette smoking, but I am disappointed about the inclusion in the Bill of cigars and pipe tobacco, which the Government themselves do not consider to be a significant public health concern. These products differ markedly from cigarettes and rolling tobacco in their consumer base, their usage patterns and their risk profiles. Representing less than 2% of the UK tobacco market, the consumption of handmade cigars is statistically insignificant, leading the ONS to cease data collection in 2016 and the DHSC to ignore it in its 2023 adult smoking habits report.

More pertinently, cigar usage is not prevalent among the 18 to 24 age group, primarily due to its higher cost. The evidence indicates that cigars and tobacco are predominantly used by an older demographic, with 78% of cigar smokers being 35 or older and the average age of a cigar smoker being 52. Usage patterns also diverge significantly, with cigar consumption being occasional, driven by appreciation rather than by nicotine addiction and limited by price and availability.

The most compelling fact is that there is no evidence suggesting that cigars act as a gateway product to cigarette smoking. The lack of data linking cigars to youth uptake of tobacco products, addiction or significant public health harms explains why previous legislation has consistently differentiated cigars from cigarettes in respect of packaging and other requirements. The inclusion of cigars and pipe tobacco in this Bill is therefore at odds with the principles of evidence-based and proportionate regulation. This echoes the concern expressed by my noble friend Lord Howe about proportionality and the balance between personal freedom and health gain.

The Regulatory Policy Committee, among others, raised concerns about the impact assessment, which relies almost entirely on cigarette-related studies, with cigars hardly mentioned and their distinctively different consumer profiles, demographics and levels of risk completely ignored.

The IA also fails to adequately assess the Bill’s impact on businesses specialising in cigars and pipe tobacco. The specialist tobacco sector is composed of over 130 enterprises, supporting 794 jobs. They are mostly small or micro family-run retail businesses, with generations of experience and expertise in the niche and complex supply chains around handmade cigars. Being small-scale and specialist, and with handmade cigars constituting up to 70% of their turnover, these businesses will be facing closure if their primary revenue from cigars begins to dry up.

A considerably more urgent concern for them with the Bill, however, is the proposed power to extend standardised packaging to handmade cigars. Handmade cigars and their packaging are artisan products produced by small manufacturers, mostly in developing countries, with low-volume runs of diverse product lines that are packaged manually. Unlike the highly automated cigarette industry, with a high volume production of limited product variations, the handmade cigar sector has over 2,000 distinct products, with unique packaging for each one. This makes it impossible for producers to accommodate specific packaging for one small market, such as the UK, and extending standardised packaging to handmade cigars would require importers to develop packaging in the UK and repack each cigar manually. That is financially unviable, and a disproportionate requirement compared to other mass-produced tobacco products.

As importers will not be able to meet plain-packaging requirements, choice and supply to retailers and consumers will be dramatically reduced. Consumers will choose to purchase from other markets, leading to the closure of all specialist tobacconists in the UK and the likely loss of nearly 800 jobs within an estimated two to three years. That sounds alarmist but it is based on evidence: in the Republic of Ireland, similar measures in 2017 resulted in specialist tobacconists seeing their sales of boxes of handmade cigars drop from around 70% to zero.

The Bill’s one-size-fits-all approach to tobacco products is, as I have said, at odds with the Government’s own better regulation principles when it comes to cigars and pipe tobacco. There is no clear evidence that they contribute to youth cigarette uptake or to public health issues. It will endanger jobs and businesses without achieving corresponding health benefits. A more intelligent, proportionate and evidence-based approach would be to exempt cigars and pipe tobacco from the Bill and to exempt handmade cigars from plain packaging. Other options that might be considered alongside exemptions could be raising the minimum purchase age of cigars and pipe tobacco to 25 or introducing a five-year post-implementation review to assess the consequences of such exemptions.