Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 30th October 2025 Grand Committee

The amendments would provide the sustainable, ring-fenced resources that the public health system desperately needs to invest in prevention and treatment, where the industry has created the harm. They would bring the tobacco sector in line with the principle recently established for the gambling industry. The amendments do not seem to be punitive but proportionate. They target excessive profits, secure vital public health funding and end a long-standing market failure. They are a prudent financial measure that will help deal with health inequalities.

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con)]

My Lords, in support of the speech we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, there is ample evidence of successful earlier levies, contrary to what the noble Baroness suggested. They include levies on landfill and soft drinks as well as provisions following Grenfell, as my noble friend said. In the gambling industry, there is also a very successful levy. Nor is it a unique matter to require companies to publish data, with the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, correctly naming water and energy as two examples.

I can quite see why the Minister is attracted to the idea of the levy. In this hard-pressed time, we have hard-pressed taxpayers about to be even more hard pressed; they should not have to pay for the gap in public resources for public health. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the public health budget that needs to be filled—and this will fill it. I can therefore see why the Minister is attracted to it. There is also of course the incalculable harm that is caused by the industry—whether one calls it evil or not. As the noble Baroness mentioned, two-thirds of people who smoke will ultimately die from it—that to me can be characterised as evil. It certainly causes harm, and that harm needs to be dealt with.

So I strongly support this group of amendments. Amendment 12 in the name of the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Northover, and Amendment 148 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, concern publishing data. They seem eminently sensible. However, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham’s amendment would provide a means of getting the polluter to pay. That is something we should seek to do because, as noble as the aims of this legislation are, there is a big gap in spending. I do not see why the taxpayer should have to pay for this, but I can quite see why the industry should; I hope, therefore, to hear from the Minister that that is going to happen.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, on behalf of our Benches, I have added my name to my noble friend Lady Northover’s Amendment 12. I also support Amendment 148, of course, although my name is not on it yet; I have a bit of a track record on changing “may” to “must”, so I am very much in favour of that amendment.

As my noble friend said, the tobacco industry sits on a rich source of data that would help public health planners and practitioners to plan and deliver public health smoking cessation services in a granular way. That could help to reduce inequalities, so my noble friend’s Amendments 12 and 148 are no-brainers for the Government in the fight against health inequality, which I know they are in favour of winning. As the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, pointed out, if you have the data, you have a powerful weapon; the industry uses it and the Government should have it.

The data would also shine a light on the massive profits of the tobacco companies, which saw the writing on the wall about the decline of tobacco smoking and shifted part of their business model to hooking young people and existing smokers into being addicted to their nicotine vaping products instead. They then surrounded them with brightly coloured packaging, attractive-sounding flavours and masses of expensive advertising. One has to wonder why they spend so much money on advertising and the attractive displays in my local village shops. Ah, yes—it must be because that enables them to hook people to their profitable products for life.

These profits are addressed in Amendment 192 from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, which is supported by my noble friends Lord Rennard and Lady Finlay of Llandaff, and in my noble friend Lord Russell’s Amendment 194, which I also support. Both amendments propose a levy on the profits of tobacco companies. Tobacco and the nicotine it contains are uniquely harmful products, which is why they should be treated in this way. They are highly addictive for some people from their very first use, by the way; that is sometimes ignored. Tobacco kills more than 76,000 people in England every year—that is almost as many as were killed by Covid in just one year, in 2020—and the four manufacturers that are responsible for most of the UK’s tobacco sales make excessive profits that require regulation. It has been said that they make an estimated profit of £900 million a year in the UK, with an average net operating profit margin of about 50%; as my noble friend Lord Scriven pointed out, most manufacturers of other goods are quite satisfied with an average of 10%. Yet those companies currently pay very little corporation tax in the UK. The tobacco tax of £6.8 billion that they pay does not even scratch the surface of the harm they do; as has been pointed out, that tax is paid by the consumer and not by the producer.

In other areas of society, polluters are required to avoid and minimise pollution and to pay to clean it up. Tobacco companies make no effort to do either. In other monopoly situations, such as energy supply, the Government intervene, yet tobacco companies get away scot free, despite the fact that their products cost the NHS £1.82 billion annually and the ill health caused by them causes major suffering to individuals and families; they also have a major effect on productivity and the economy, costing society in England £43.7 billion a year.

Given this Government’s objectives on growth, I would have thought that a “polluter pays” tobacco levy would be very popular with them, as it is with the general public, 76% of whom support the policy. It could raise up to £700 million per year to fund vital smoking cessation and wider public health activities, as my noble friend Lord Russell suggests in his amendment. It could prevent industry manipulating prices to undermine the health aims of tobacco taxes. A levy would make tobacco less profitable in the UK and reduce industry incentives to lobby against government actions to achieve a smoke-free country. I know that they are very clever lobbyists. Although I trust that this Government will resist such lobbying, this would ensure that the cost burden of taxes is not shifted to consumers because a levy alongside a cap on manufacturer pricing would prevent manufacturers passing the costs on to consumers.

Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the UK, alongside obesity caused by poor diet. Investing in the resources raised by the levy to help smokers quit, as in Amendment 194, will support the Government’s ambitions to halve the difference in healthy life expectancy and shift healthcare from treatment to prevention, an ambition outlined strongly in the Government’s 10-year health plan.

These amendments are very much in line with what the Government want. I hope that they will have the courage to accept them. The key principle is that the revenue to tackle the harms of tobacco should come from the industry, not the poor, addicted and often sick consumer, and the cost of the damage caused by tobacco should certainly not come from the taxpayer.