Tobacco and Vapes Bill (Third sitting)

Euan Stainbank Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

The chief medical officer sounded a note of caution about the tobacco industry and the fact that it tends to move quickly to maintain its market when the law is changed. As I understood it from him at the beginning of the week, if we changed the age of sale to 25, people may be less prone to taking up tobacco products and less prone to addiction if they do, but the risk is that the industry would regroup around the new age of 25 and look instead at what advertising and promotion measures would most likely make 24, 25 or 26-year-olds—that generation—smoke or take up tobacco products. In a few years’ time, we would therefore be back saying, “Should we increase the age to 30?” In practice, that is what the Government propose to address by picking a defined date instead.

[Euan Stainbank (Falkirk) (Lab)]

Can we acknowledge that youth initiation often starts before the age of 18? Moving the age to 25, as this amendment proposes, would not automatically shift the dial on when youth initiation starts by seven years. The Bill permanently demarcates a smoke-free generation that we are specifically targeting.

[Dr Johnson]

When Parliament brings in any law of any kind, most people will follow it—the vast majority of the public are law-abiding citizens who want to know what the law is and obey it. However, whatever law we bring in, there will always be people who will disobey it. Even if cigarettes were completely banned, people would buy them. Many products—cocaine and heroin, for example—are banned, but some people still access and purchase them, so the Bill would not eliminate the issue completely.

Perhaps I could answer the hon. Gentleman with a couple of statistics. According to the Government impact assessment, 66% of smokers begin smoking before they are 18, and 83% before they are 20. Yet the research shows that three quarters of those smokers, were they to have their time again, would prefer never to have started smoking.

The hon. Gentleman may be aware that the age of sale for cigarettes was previously 16 and that a previous Government made it 18 instead. The effect was reviewed by scientists at University College London in 2010, and we saw a fall in smoking in all age groups. That is in line with what we have seen across a lot of the western world: smoking rates have declined. Actually, if we look at the difference between the younger and the older people, that fall was 11% in those in the 18 to 24 age group, but 30% in those aged 16 to 17. That meant that the age group targeted by the ban was much more likely not to start smoking. That is the start of the smoke-free generation, and we hope that a similar pattern will be seen and roll forwards.