Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016

Lord Callanan Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, pay tribute to my noble friend for introducing this debate. I have a great sense of déjà vu because I was one of the people in the European Parliament that he referred to, who helped achieve the original decision against this directive’s restrictions on e-cigarettes. I was also the shadow rapporteur for my group and part of the European Parliament negotiating team that sat until about 11.30 pm in the Berlaymont, with the Commission chairing the meeting and the Council on the other side of the table, thrashing out the messy compromise that we see before us now in the tobacco products directive. Again, I have no difficulties with the vast majority of the directive; my concern was with the articles on e-cigarettes.

Before I started working on this, I had no particular knowledge of the subject. But when any dossier is placed before you, the first thing you do is read the various publications available and listen to all the lobbying and advice and you are also contacted by constituents. I was first alerted to the issue when my email inbox started filling up with literally hundreds of emails from people all over the country—and, indeed, Europe—concerned that these magical devices they had used to give up smoking were going to be banned or severely restricted. Together with a number of MEPs from all sides—including members of both the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party in the UK—we started a campaign to improve the directive.

I have to say that we were not particularly helped by Department of Health officials. I tried to speak to Ministers many times to find out who was behind the restrictions and why there was such a campaign against something which so self-evidently provides great public health benefits and harm-reduction measures, but I never got a clear answer. I was pointed to a recording of a former public health Minister appearing in front of the European Scrutiny Committee of the House of Commons. When she was asked why she voted for this directive on behalf of the Government, she turned to her officials and said “I think the e-cigarette provisions were removed from it, weren’t they?”—which showed a worrying lack of understanding of what she was voting for on behalf of the Government.

Nevertheless, we ended up with this directive. It was a messy compromise and it is very badly worded, but it is a lot better than it could have been had we not campaigned on it. My noble friend Lord Ridley is quite right to point out the somewhat murky role of various pharmaceutical interests in the production of the directive. When I asked questions in the Commission and the Council—it seemed to me self-evident that these devices were brilliant for reducing tobacco smoking, which I thought was what we all wanted—I asked why they were even in the directive in the first place, given that it is called a tobacco products directive and e-cigarettes are not tobacco products in any sense of the word. The answer I received many times was that this was argued for by the pharmaceutical industry, which would have an awful lot to lose if e-cigarettes supplanted or replaced nicotine patches and gum. I do not know the truth of that, but it seems that it was very successful in getting what it wanted.

I completely agree with all the points made by my noble friends, but I have two additional points to make. First, on advertising, the Royal College of Physicians has a proud history at the heart of tobacco control. Since its first report, Smoking and Health, in 1962, it has been an intellectual leader in the field and is worth listening to. When the headline on the press release on its latest report states in bold,

“Promote e-cigarettes widely as substitute for smoking”,

one would hope that the Government would get the message that its 21 world-renowned authors are trying to put across. But we would be wrong if we thought that, for the regulations that the department wants us to approve are not about the promotion of e-cigarettes but about the suppression of information about them.

Paragraph 176 of the department’s impact assessment forecasts that the EU rules will reduce e-cigarette advertising by 90%. How are smokers supposed to hear about e-cigarettes? In paragraph 167, the department nonchalantly claims that cutting advertising will in fact not reduce the number of smokers switching to e-cigarettes. We have heard this old argument many times before—not from health officials but from tobacco company executives trying to pretend that advertising smoking would somehow not increase the amount of smoking.

The messages that we give really matter. In the complex decisions that smokers make every day about whether to smoke or consume nicotine through much cleaner forms, their perceptions of the relative risks of these products are crucial. The Royal College of Physicians, Public Health England and Action on Smoking and Health have all raised deep concerns about how smokers perceive e-cigarettes to be much more risky than they actually are. It is very interesting that Action on Smoking and Health should now say that, because I recall that that was not the message that it was giving when we dealt with the directive.

We are certainly not going to give that message by banning 90% of advertising, nor by insisting on e-cigarette packaging carrying big health warnings, which is what the Government are asking us to approve in these regulations. The Royal College of Physicians described the imposition of these warnings as “illogical”, bearing in mind that nicotine patch boxes do not have to warn of the dangers of nicotine.

Much of the problem stems from media reporting of junk science. The worst example was a headline in the Telegraph in December, which screamed:

“E-cigarettes are no safer than smoking tobacco”.

It was a nonsense report based on, as I said, junk science.

The second point that I want to raise concerns novel tobacco products. A number of new products have been introduced in this category, particularly products called “heat-not-burn”. These are very interesting developments, and a range of other alternative products is also in development. Some of the ones coming to market contain tobacco, but they work by heating it and not burning it. The absence of combustion is key. We all know that, as my noble friend Lord Ridley has said, harm from smoking comes primarily through the toxins produced by the burning of tobacco. In 1976, Professor Michael Russell wrote:

“People smoke for the nicotine but they die from the tar”.

That was reflected in the title of the recent study by the Royal College of Physicians on e-cigarettes, Nicotine without Smoke. With such technological developments, and a new regulatory basis with the introduction of the TPD, are the Government looking at the opportunities to be had from the available range of products, in addition to e-cigarettes, as part of a harm reduction agenda in the new tobacco control plan?

This is truly a terrible piece of legislation, and I plead guilty for the part I played in helping to produce it in the first place. However, it is not too late to undo some of that harm and to help encourage the taking up of e-cigarettes and, consequently, a reduction in tobacco consumption. Instead of trying to restrict e-cigarettes, the Government should in fact be trying positively to encourage them.