Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Earl Russell Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I support this Bill. This is a once-in-a-multigeneration opportunity to take concerted action to prolong human life. The key to making this legislation successful is making it much harder for young people to start smoking or vaping and working to provide the resources required to enforce this legislation effectively.

I will concentrate my remarks on the use and regulation of vapes, an area which needs further work to make the measures fit for purpose. Vaping was supposed to be a smoking-cessation aid and not a new product for the tobacco-manufacturing industry to exploit, creating a new generations of nicotine addicts to guarantee future profits. It is shameful that we have allowed so many of our young people to become addicted to nicotine through vaping products that have been deliberately targeted at them by big tobacco and sold to them mostly illegally. The scale of the numbers of young people vaping is truly shocking.

Nicotine is more psychologically addictive than heroin. While vaping is less harmful than smoking, we still have very little understanding of the long-term health implications that these products will have on people, particularly when they are very young. I call on the Government to fund further research in these areas. I welcome the fact that, two years ago, legislation was passed to ban single-use vapes, and this legislation comes into force on 1 June. Low-cost vaping products supporting packaging and flavours marketed deliberately at children, combined with a lack of enforcement, mean that they are both desirable and readily available to our young people.

As well as causing addiction, disposable vapes are an environmental disaster, as many Peers have said. It is estimated that 8.2 million vapes are now thrown away—mostly littered—every week. They are impossible to recycle, they waste precious minerals and the batteries have caused untold fires. It is hard to understand why we ever allowed these harmful products to be targeted at our children and to damage our environment.

For this Bill to work, the previous ban on single-use vapes must work, and I am not certain that it will in practice. The previous legislation outlawed any vaping product that was single use, which was defined as not being both rechargeable and refillable with a replacement coil. If the aim of this Bill is to stop young people starting to vape, setting the starting price point of vapes would be a key deterrence. If vapes remain, in effect, disposable and very cheap, more young people will continue to take up vaping.

Manufacturers are already working hard to circumvent the disposable vape restrictions: add a charging point for a few pence and replace a pod with a contained coil for a few more pence and, hey presto, you have a product that is compliant with the new regulations. In everyday use, the cost is the same as disposable vapes, and for the end-user it is still mostly used and discarded once. This is the case in Europe, where these products already exist.

I call on the Government to introduce a minimum pricing point for vaping products and ensure they are genuinely not single use. A genuine reusable vape should cost around £30. If reusable vapes costing less than £10 will still be available, there must be a deposit-and-return scheme to make sure that manufacturers are responsible for the recycling and reprocessing of their waste. Wasteful plastic pods should also be banned.

Turning to other aspects, I welcome the closure of the free products loophole. I support plain packaging and ensuring that these products are not on public display in our convenience stores.

The arguments on flavoured vapes are more nuanced. It is undeniable that the names and flavours have been deliberately targeted at children, but adults also like flavoured vapes. It is important that we look at this carefully, because it could have an impact on smoking cessation measures.

We must address illegal vapes. I welcome the illegal vapes enforcement squad and the £30 million that the Government have said they will provide every year, but these are not enough to deal with the problem. Illegal vapes are part of a huge criminal enterprise and our teenagers are the victims. Their illegality makes them cheap and age-verification free, so the young are the victims. Many of these products contain high levels of dangerous chemicals like cadmium and lead, and they are dangerous and cause harm. I call on the Government to seek additional funds from the industry—big tobacco—for further enforcement measures and research and regular, random sampling to establish the true scale of the illegal vape problem.