Illegal Alcohol and Tobacco Sales

Ian Paisley Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on securing this important and timely debate.

The House should face up to the reality that the smuggling of and trade in illicit cigarettes, tobacco and alcohol is a multi-million-pound criminal enterprise. It is not some car boot sale nonsense; it is a significant endeavour. The House will have its head in the sand if it does not recognise that fact. It loses the Treasury tens of millions of pounds in revenue, which could be spent on our schools, roads, hospitals and other areas, and we must recognise that.

I serve on the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs, which recently took evidence on the trade in smuggled tobacco and alcohol. One company supplied evidence to show that, in Northern Ireland alone, 170 million illegally gotten cigarettes are smoked every year. That loses the Treasury £42 million every year and has lost the company whose product has been counterfeited £12.5 million. That is a staggering loss in one little part of the United Kingdom.

I thought that it was significantly bad that 17% of all cigarettes smoked in Northern Ireland had been illicitly traded, but in parts of England and the border counties the figure is 24%. In Devon and Cornwall, it is 13%, and in London, it is 20%. This is a massive criminal endeavour and some of the people who make money out of it are the worst, most cantankerous, nasty and evil people imaginable: as quick as they would sell people cigarettes, they would slit their throats. The House has to wake up to the fact that they are engaged in a serious, criminal endeavour. The Government should exercise the most serious measures against them, and we should encourage the Treasury and the Government in that regard.

As I have said, the timing of the hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire in securing the debate could not be better. The Northern Ireland Affairs Committee today published its report on the smuggling of counterfeit cigarettes, tobacco products and alcohol and on the illicit fuel trade. This massive trade is central, so we need to take off our gloves and get stuck into countering it.

[Brandon Lewis]

I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that evidence from around the world shows that increasing regulation, whether via plain packaging or by putting up duty on cigarettes and tobacco, can simply increase the illegal trade? Ireland’s budget of 2010 recognised that by not putting up duty. Rather than increase duty or introduce plain packaging, the Government should follow the model suggested by my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire and use the UK Border Agency and other agencies to crack down properly on the illicit trade itself.

[Ian Paisley]

The hon. Gentleman will find that I am not arguing against his views—he is right—but we need to set out clearly how significant the problem is. Do we tax the product to the extent that it makes the smuggler’s job all the more easy, or do we recognise that there are things that the Government and we as a nation can do to address the problem?

The problem is not helped by the fact that I can drive my car to France or Belgium, fill it to the gills with cigarettes or alcohol and bring it back to this island and sell those products illegally. There should be a complete stop on a person being able to bring back a boot full of wine, alcohol and cigarettes and claim, “These are for me.” That is utter nonsense. Everyone knows that they are being brought back to be sold either on the street illegally or to their friends and neighbours. We have to make sure that such activity is stamped out.

The Government should be rigorous and ensure that, if people buy cigarettes and alcohol, they should buy them in this nation, pay tax on them in this nation and smoke and drink them in this nation, rather than allowing them to circumvent tax policies. It makes sense that I can probably buy twice as much legally in every other part of Europe than I can buy here because our tax policies are so severe. If they are severe, we need to make them work on this island.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I apologise, Ms Dorries, for my late arrival—cable theft means that the railways are in chaos.

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that, if hundreds more staff were employed by Customs to seal our borders properly and ensure that such smuggling did not take place, they would not just stop criminality, but make many times their own salary for the Treasury?

[Ian Paisley]

I would have no difficulty with the deployment of more people in the worthwhile work of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and other customs and border agencies, but our Committee took evidence from HMRC officials who said that they were satisfied with the money given to them by the Treasury and that they probably have enough people. If HMRC wants more people, it can argue its case, and it will not lack any support from me.

Some people argue that the plain or uniform packaging of cigarettes would solve the problem, but that is utter, total baloney. If people think that by simply uniformly packaging all cigarettes they will suddenly meet a public health objective, they are losing the plot. Plain or uniform packaging will not affect the problem. Every survey tells us that adults do not care if the package is gold, has a camel on it, or if it is red, white and blue. They care about price and taste. A person will smoke Camel lights because they prefer their taste to that of Marlboro. The colour of the stupid package does not matter—that goes in the bin. A person will smoke Benson and Hedges not because the box is beautifully gold with a pair of lungs on it, but because of the product’s taste and availability.

We have to wipe out the nonsense that plain packaging is the panacea to achieving a public health goal and to preventing smuggling. Plain or uniform packaging will just make it much easier for the smuggler, no matter what people say. Smugglers are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect that someone would be so daft as to uniformly package all cigarettes in the same year as we are implementing a display ban so that we cannot see the daft things. We have to recognise that, if we are to have a display ban, we do not need plain packaging. It would infringe people’s rights and on trade laws, and it would jeopardise many legitimate businesses.

I do not hear the same lobby group arguing for the plain packaging of tins of beer, or for the uniform packaging of bottles of wine or spirits. We should remember that diseases as a result of drinking alcohol cause far more damage and create far more costs for our health system than those that result from smoking cigarettes. Moreover, on antisocial behaviour, there are far more fights on the streets of this city on a Friday night, not because someone has had too many fags, but because they have had too much to drink. We have to recognise that the plain packaging argument is, frankly, nonsense. It is not a panacea to solving the problems of counterfeit crime.

[Stephen Williams]

The hon. Gentleman has made several points that need to be knocked down, but I shall address only one. If he thinks that the introduction of plain, standardised packs is pointless, why does he think that the tobacco industry is going to fight it with all the resources at its disposal, and why does it put so much effort into providing attractive packs, colourful cigarettes, gold wrapping and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the marketing of cigarettes? Surely, it is wasting its money if that has no effect.

[Ian Paisley]

The tobacco industry is able to speak for itself, but one of the reasons why it is annoyed is that this is an infringement on its trading rights, its branding and all the things in which it has invested over the years. It would be wrong to turn around and say that we can just remove those things overnight.

The industry argues that it would damage the actual trade, so let us look at that and what it costs. In my constituency, more than 1,000 people are directly employed in the tobacco industry. In Manchester, another 800 people are directly employed in the manufacturing of cigarettes. If we are not careful, those jobs will go to eastern bloc countries and to Europe—they will move out of this country. Will that affect the number of people who smoke cigarettes? Not one jot. The same number of people will continue to smoke cigarettes, but they will be manufactured elsewhere. We will be the biggest losers, because we will have lost the jobs, the tax and the pay-as-you-earn tax.

[Brandon Lewis]

Again, I fully support what the hon. Gentleman is saying. The point that he has just made is backed up if we consider the packaging issue. A lot of the cigarette packaging around Europe is produced in this country, and therefore a huge number of jobs would be at risk if plain packaging were introduced. One of the reasons why companies are so protective of their packaging is brand protection. Bearing in mind that cigarette sales are legal and it is a legal product, unless the Government make cigarette sales illegal, companies feel that they have a right to protect their brand, as that is what protects sales and jobs. Companies argue that a clear definition of brand prevents some of the illegal trade that we are trying to stop.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Paisley]

The trading issues are very clear. For example, the value of the wage bill paid in my constituency alone to the people who manufacture cigarettes is £60 million a year. That is the figure paid in wages to engineers in the company. People might snigger at that, but if we remove those jobs from the economy, houses will not be sold and people will not buy food in Tesco and Sainsbury’s. The bottom line is that people will move out of the area. I am talking about high-paid, valuable jobs in my constituency that I am delighted about. Anyone would be envious of them and would try to achieve them in their own constituency. We need to recognise the importance of such jobs.

The hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire made some very important points about how we should start to address the matter, and I want to pick up on one of them. He said that a cross-cutting Minister should try to take the lead on this. How should the Government go about doing that? If they have to put in place a specific cross-cutting Minister—I hate the word “tsar”—so be it. That is an excellent idea. There needs to be a joined-up golden thread running through all divisions, and we need to recognise that the issue must be tackled head on.

Although hon. Members from all parties have different views on the matter, the fact is that the problem is damaging our country in terms of loss of trade and loss of revenue. The people who lose out are those we all care most about: the ordinary citizens who could have that tax revenue spent on them and their needs. I am more than happy to support the need to deal with the matter.