Cigarette Stick Health Warnings Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is painful for me to find myself in disagreement with my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. It is astonishing that he has brought this Bill forward in the middle of the Covid pandemic, because there are three well-established principal risk factors in relation to the harm you suffer if you contract Covid and fall ill with it. They are age, sex and smoking. To avoid the harmful effects of Covid infection, you overwhelmingly want to be young, moderately want to be female and mildly want to be a smoker—but he does not want to put that fact on cigarettes. I looked in vain in the schedule for a piece of scientific evidence or statement that would derive from that scientific proposition. What he actually wants to put on the cigarettes, as shown by the words in the schedule, is lurid propaganda, not facts or evidence.

We turn first to the evidence. I was confused—and I will give way if my noble friend wants to explain—by what he said about the evidence for the effectiveness of this measure. He said, first, that it had never been tried and that there was therefore no evidence. He went on to say that, since 2015, there had been a number of peer-reviewed studies on the effectiveness of health warnings on cigarettes. Perhaps he meant cigarette packs, but he actually said “on cigarettes”. What is it? Is there evidence that the measure he is proposing is going to work or, since it has never been tried, is there not? My view is that it is likely he is saying that there is no evidence at all. We now have a Bill promoting propaganda with selective statements based on no evidence at all. Why would we want this?

The second reason is that the Bill—and this is a really awful pun—is a smokescreen. It is intended as a provocation on the way to achieving the stated objective of Action on Smoking and Health, which is a smoke-free Britain or UK by 2030. I think that is the target date, but I am happy to be corrected. There is no electoral mandate or evidence of electoral support for this policy. It would be better if those promoting these provocative and regressive measures were more honest and came forward with a Bill that actually criminalises smoking cigarettes, so that we can have that debate.

Finally, it is a patronising Bill because it is based on the assumption that adults are incapable of making an appropriate trade-off between the pleasures of cigarette smoking and the undoubted risks that it brings for the smoker. That is another reason why I think this House should have nothing to do with it. In my limited experience here, some Bills are bad Bills, but this is the first Bill I have come across that I suspect is just designed to provoke. I hope that the Government will not give it their support and that it will not pass.