Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly respond to these amendments on cigars. It is clear that the parliamentary cigar club is out in force today, and the noble Lords have made their case very well. I will speak on snuff, because every argument made for cigars is undermined by including snuff within the amendments. The arguments around snuff are extremely different. Snuff use among our 16 to 24 year-olds has seen a fourfold increase over recent years. Snuff is easily available; it is flavoured and easy to hide for young people. Frankly, including snuff undermines the group of amendments.

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendments, which I have signed, and I will speak on the separation of cigarettes and vapes from other tobacco products, making the case, I hope, for a much stronger impact assessment. Certainly, the previous contribution made a strong case for trying to review these things in a proper impact assessment, which I think would be welcomed by everybody.

The noble Lord, Lord Strathcarron, made an incredibly forensic case about the separation, and his was an excellent contribution. Of course, I enjoyed the poetry, prose and passion expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston, but the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, made a brilliant case for this. He reminded me of one thing in particular: the issue that we have in making sure that regulation is effective. I remember sitting on the other side of this Room on many occasions, making the case for better regulation, making the case that this had to be based on proportionality and evidence, and usually making the case that an impact assessment was wanting in a particular area. Very often, we were supported by the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, in that case. The present Ministers will be dealing with many of the consequences of things that did not have proper impact assessments and were not assessed correctly, because these things frequently lead to very poor legislation that has terrible consequences and requires a huge amount of government action beyond them.

In this case, there are some issues around justice, whether the actions are proportionate and whether they do away with people’s livelihoods, which is probably unjust on the basis of the evidence. The Minister’s reported comments on the current market conditions for cigars bear no relation to commercially available market assessments, so there is a case for ensuring that we have the right evidence. The current impact assessments are not even a tick-box exercise—there is almost nothing in them apart from the tick in the box. I cannot think of anything we have done that has put on the table any cost-benefit analysis.

The case for the separation is strong. It does not obviate or undermine the core public policy objective or any movements around the central issues of health benefits, protecting children and the like in the other parts of the Bill. There is, of course, a vast difference, as has been said, between the mortality of handmade cigar smokers and cigarette smokers, not least given that cigars are not inhaled and are made from natural tobacco, as opposed to habitually inhaled cigarettes made with many additives and chemicals, as was expressed. I would love to say that I could remember or recite even one example cited—it was a magnificent piece of research—but a considerable number have terrible health consequences.

The impact assessment and Explanatory Notes make clear that the whole Bill is intended to target products that are deliberately branded for, promoted to and advertised to children. It is unclear that OTPs, especially cigars, fall into this category. They are not promoted with cartoons and are not part of an illicit trade on which trading standards are focused; they are specialist, niche and not present on convenience stores’ footprints. Again, all the Bill’s impacts are based on multiple chains and businesses for which these are marginal products.

The point was made that we lack the evidence to make this piece of legislation because DHSC, HMRC and the other relevant public bodies stopped collecting data on OTPs around 2012 because of their low usage, the age profile of the users and the fact that there is no evidence that they are a gateway product for the young. No assessment was required because the significance to public health was negligible. That is important as we balance things here because these products have a distinctive consumption pattern in the volume of people using them; in the mechanisms and types of usage, daily or occasional; and in their negligible youth appeal.

There is already market regulation. The price marketing and regulation are very different for those sorts of products. There is a cultural and economic consequence to this measure in skilled jobs, specialist retailers, hospitality and other areas. I am not so august to know the practices of the investment community when deciding issues with Governments—and whether a Romeo y Julieta seals the deal—but it is certainly clear that important luxury-end hotels, which are a big area for our economy and for the growth of our tourist economy, will be significantly affected by the availability of these sorts of products.

This is not to say that everyone uses them, but it is certainly true that the breadth of appeal in what Britain represents is very much that it caters for that sort of stuff. We need a proper assessment of the impact. There are many precedents for treating cigars differently, including in EU countries that are trying to do the same sort of thing in tourism under the tobacco products directive. It would be foolish of us not to have proper evidence before we put ourselves at a disadvantage.

This all speaks to making sure that enforcement is proportionate, practical and effective. I hope that, in responding to the debate we have had, the Minister will take away the fact not just that there is a very strong case, for those of us who have spent some time looking at this matter, but that the Government’s case probably has more costs than benefits currently. A proper impact assessment should be done in order to make sure that, as they move forward with this legislation, the Government can make proper provision for how we deal with OTPs.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the Committee of my previous declarations of interest: my wife is a non-executive director of both Tesco and Diageo; and I am an alumni member of the Lockeridge Cigar Smoking Society, to which the noble Lord, Lord Johnson, referred.

I am a huge and passionate supporter of this Bill. My motivations are largely because of the devastating costs to society and to our economy of cigarette smoking: the tens of thousands of deaths; the pressure on the NHS and our welfare system; and the devastating effect on families and communities. But, like the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I think that these amendments are very important, because if we are going to deploy the clunking fist of the nanny state to smoking roll-up cigarettes in our society, we should recognise that our legislation sometimes has unintended consequences, and we should do what we can, when we can, to mitigate the effects on those who are not the targets of our legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

Forgive me, but this is exactly why we need a proper impact study. In 2023, a different deal was done to supply cigars, and the prices have gone up significantly. Numbers and actual overall sales volumes are totally different, so it is misleading to introduce the idea that, just because the sales have gone up, the numbers have gone up. It is a directly inverse correlation because all of the prices have gone up. The UCL study shows that the big products that are moving are not tobacco products. Snus is a nicotine-based product, and shisha has gone up hugely, but that is not the same. It is important to be clear about these things. I urge the Minister to be very clear about the granularity of these figures because, otherwise, we end up in the wrong place.

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

It is a very interesting statistic that 2.4% of 14 to 16 year-olds have tried cigars in the last 30 days. That does not sound quite right; maybe it did not come out right. I would be grateful if we could have clarification on that piece of data.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Mendelsohn Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in this group. If there is to be a retail licensing scheme, it needs to be more robust, fairer and more enforceable than currently envisaged. It needs to respect and reward retailers who are already complying with the law, which is the point behind Amendments 23, 30, 43, 45, 114 and 115 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, and other noble Lords, and identify and punish those who are operating illicitly and illegally, which is the point behind Amendments 31 and 34 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister.

The amendment from the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, proposes that existing, compliant and currently exempted specialist tobacconists selling handmade Caribbean cigars be automatically included in the new retail licensing scheme. This tiny number of about 120 micro-businesses, many of them multigenerational, already face the prospect of the damage done to their business by the proposed packaging regulations, and, albeit in many years to come, as their customers are almost exclusively into early or late middle age, the prospect of competing with illicit sales as a consequence of the generational ban part of the Bill.

As they are the very model of compliant, law-abiding specialist retailers, would it not be only fair at least to give them the certainty that they would automatically be included in the retail licensing scheme? Would it not lessen the burden and cost of the new licensing regime itself if it automatically granted licences to those 120 responsible businesses with a proven track record of being good actors in the tobacco area? The Minister has already said that she is not in the business of putting small businesses out of business, so I hope the Government look favourably on these amendments, which would give them an easy way of keeping at least some of these businesses in business.

Amendments 31 and 44 recognise the reality that many tobacco products are sold from premises that not only sell alcohol but derive most of their business from it. As drafted, there would be two separate licensing regimes—one for alcohol and the other for tobacco products. Would alcohol retailers not be far more circumspect about selling illicit tobacco products if, by doing so, they risked losing their alcohol licence and therefore their main source of income? Would trading standards officers and local authorities not find it much easier to enforce one combined licence than two separate ones? Would illicit products’ supply chains not be more easily disrupted if they lost their sales outlets through an unrelated alcohol penalty? Finally on these amendments—here I cross over to the previous amendments—would it not be fairer for existing specialist tobacconists if the bad actors were discouraged from unfairly competing with the good actors by having their alcohol licence removed and thus their businesses seriously affected?

[Lord Mendelsohn (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of the amendments standing in my name together with those from the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, and the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston. As referenced by many of the previous speakers, they deal with the grandfathering rights that we would hope to get for the particularly small businesses in this sector. I thank the Minister for her engagement on these issues and her willingness to take meetings and have discussions.

It has been said, but it is worth emphasising, that hand-rolled cigars are a distinctive business that has a different health impact and profile—of not having youth adoption. However, I repeat that it has a significant economic benefit for the luxury tourism industry, which is an important component of a country with the tourism profile that we have. Therefore, these businesses—small in number as they are—offer a distinctive service to the nation and should be considered carefully with the impact of the proposed legislation. There are distinct production methods, consumption patterns and market demographics for these products. Therefore, the risk of imposing a regulatory framework designed for industrial-size manufacture on a small-scale, family-orientated and economically sensitive sector requires adequate proportionality.

These amendments are designed to do that for the 120 or so businesses that would be covered by them, where there are huge concerns about economic viability, together with all the other matters that face small businesses. The Government have a strong concern to make sure that we do not always legislate such that we impede the opportunities for small businesses. These are very important principles to which we should adhere, and these amendments offer clear and enforceable definitions to ensure that the legislation can be targeted and proportionate. They would not undermine any of the public health objectives but would define their application to ensure that vulnerable specialist tobacco vendors were granted a retail licence under the new scheme, with the right arrangements to allow flexibility in circumstances around rental increases and other things that are particularly impactful on this size of business.

I hope that the Minister can give some reassurance that these matters have been considered carefully and that the opportunities for these companies to continue to exist are supported by the Government.