Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016

Lord Faulkner of Worcester Excerpts

Monday 4th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Cathain (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a very interesting debate so far; it has been good-humoured and full of humour. I was glad to hear the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, talk about the seriousness of this situation.

I and at least two other people whom I see in the Chamber at the moment fought like tigers to make sure that smoking was banned in public places. We did it because all the evidence suggested that it was a terrible scourge on people who were addicted to tobacco and smoking and just could not break the link. From a personal point of view, I come from a family of five, of whom four died prematurely from either smoking or the effects of tobacco. I know of friends who have similarly died and those have not been very pleasant deaths either. I am not saying that vaping will cause that problem, but why do we need it? They say, “Okay, it’s part of a smoking cessation thing”. I really do not believe it; I think that e-cigarettes should be banned totally and more money put into helping smoking cessation programmes. Such programmes have worked, so why not carry on with them?

I should not say this, but I am going to: nobody knows just how manipulative the tobacco industry was during the period when we were fighting it. It was quite disgraceful—I see my fellow in arms, the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, looking at me and agreeing. I am concerned that, with our having gone through all this and now reducing the amount of money spent on smoking cessation programmes, we will find in another 20 or 30 years—well, I will not be around—that we are doing it all again and people will be smoking. So I just say: please take care.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for referring to me and the part that a number of us played in making the United Kingdom a leader in attempting to reduce the prevalence of tobacco smoking. As your Lordships will recall, it was this House which passed the amendments to the then Children and Families Bill which led to the UK being the first country in Europe to introduce standardised packaging in 2014. Incidentally, it is my understanding that, if the regulations being debated today were annulled, that legislation on standardised packaging would be badly damaged. I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, the regulations are an important part of the way in which the United Kingdom should meet its obligations to the international tobacco treaty, one requirement of which is that we take continuing action to cut smoking prevalence through “comprehensive tobacco control” strategies. The regulations include other important measures such as the prohibition of flavours in cigarettes, including menthol, designed to attract young people to start to smoke. There are new reporting obligations on the tobacco industry, and rules on notifying new tobacco products. These provisions are important and should not be lost by way of some attempt to make the climate easier for vaping.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

Surely the tobacco industry looked around the world and saw—like Kodak looking at digital photography coming along—a huge threat to it. Of course it is now trying to muscle in on the act, but this is a good thing. If it starts making electronic cigarettes and becoming more profitable, it will give up on other cigarettes. The reason it got into this industry was because it saw it as a threat.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

My Lords, I would be a little more convinced if the tobacco industry took its responsibilities seriously in countries where the restrictions on smoking were not the same as in the western democracies. The attempt to promote, advertise and sponsor tobacco smoking, particularly in the Far East, is utterly deplorable. The industry views the whole tobacco and vaping market in a very cynical way, so I am afraid I do not agree with the noble Viscount.

[Viscount Ridley]

In South America, vaping is banned altogether. Why? Because the tobacco industry is big and powerful in that part of the world.

[Lord Faulkner of Worcester]

It is very interesting, because in countries which take tobacco cessation seriously, the tobacco industry is switching to vaping, as it knows its traditional market is largely lost. Only last month, in this country, it attempted to undermine public health by trying to overturn the standardised packaging regulations. It cannot be trusted.

Finally, I share my noble friend Lord Hunt’s call for continued funding for stop smoking services, making them accessible and available to all smokers, and for such services to work with electronic cigarettes. It is wrong that these services are being cut back while the regulations are being introduced.

Our aim must be to be as ambitious as the most committed nations are in achieving a tobacco-free society over the next few decades. Over the last 10 years, we have already come a huge distance in changing public attitudes towards smoking, which is now largely seen as a socially unacceptable behaviour. My concern over vaping is that it must not in any way renormalise the smoking habit.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, from my point of view, my noble friend Lord Callanan chose to talk very selectively about the record of the Conservative Party and the coalition Government in relation to tobacco control. I think he should bear in mind that Conservatives—myself, my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham—worked hard from the Opposition Benches in another place, and succeeded in securing the ban on smoking in public places. When we came into the coalition Government together, we implemented the ban on sales through vending machines and a progressive ban on displays in shops. I also initiated the consultation on standardised packaging, following discussions with Nicola Roxon, who was then Health Minister in Australia, which my successors have taken forward. The product of all that is that we have not only secured continuing reductions in the overall prevalence of smoking—albeit I could wish this rate was faster—but we secured, I think three years ago, recognition that we had among the toughest tobacco-control regimes anywhere in the world. That is right and we should strive to make that the case.

I know it would not be the effect of the Motion in the name of my noble friend Lord Callanan, but were it passed it would indicate your Lordships’ desire to withdraw the regulations if they could. That would be an entirely retrograde step. I will not go through all the ways in which the tobacco products directive helps to strengthen the tobacco control regime other than in relation to e-cigarettes, but it certainly does.

I will isolate one important point which has not yet been mentioned. Much of what we have done in recent years, from my point of view and that of my colleagues—Anne Milton when she was Public Health Minister, and I believe it was among Anna Soubry’s and Jane Ellison’s objectives subsequently—was to focus on reducing the initiation of smoking among young people. We have some 200,000 young people a year initiating smoking. That is what we have to bring down. We want to arrive at the point where the initiation of smoking is minimised. As part of that, we have to look frankly and critically at how electronic cigarettes and vaping can contribute to the reduction of smoking, through access to smoking cessation services. It is absolutely right and I do not have any brief against e-cigarettes in that respect. But, to pick up the final point made by the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, we have to understand what the social and behavioural impacts of large numbers of people continuing to smoke e-cigarettes in the long term look like. I am not sure that promoting it through advertising is necessarily the right way to go.

We should enable smokers to access e-cigarettes and vaping, and do everything we can through the public health budget. Noble Lords will know—I will go into it on another day when more time allows—that my objective in creating a separate public health budget with local authorities was to maximise and protect our preventive activity, not to see it subsequently reduced. I deplore that fact because we were making considerable progress with smoking cessation services, as we should. But we also have to ensure, in addition to the use of e-cigarettes in a way that reduces smoking, that we do not create a new mechanism which might entrench in young people an expectation that they should initiate any kind of smoking, be it through vaping and using e-cigarettes or, even worse, through smoking tobacco. For that reason I agree entirely with many other speakers that it would be undesirable to support my noble friend’s Motion, and I hope that the Minister will agree that we should reject it.