Vaping Products: Usage by Children

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 2nd September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I have no direct involvement in this industry but it is fair to say that, back in the early 1960s, I was a director of an advertising agency responsible for Gallaher products. In my 50 years of work, both here and in the other place, I have taken a continual interest in the industry and the challenges it has faced. At this time, those challenges are quite clear. Sadly, the situation in that industry is one of good, responsible manufacturers and illicit marketing by others—mainly from abroad, but not entirely.

The industrialists who are marketing here responsibly have recently called for more regulation—not less—to tackle the worrying rise in youth vaping. As I understand it, they have called for a ban on packaging with youth appeal, reform of the flavour names to get products such as “gummy bear” and “unicorn” off the shelves, and the creation of a retailer licensing scheme. The latter would not only prevent irresponsible retailers selling to underage customers but help to stop the sale of illicit vapes by shopkeepers.

That is on the one hand. On the other, we have to recognise that vaping has helped reduce consumption of cigarettes. That is a tribute to our Governments over the years and the work between, usually, the Department of Health and the relevant manufacturers. It is a success. We are now down to 12.9% of the nation smoking. Not so long ago, 50% of the nation smoked. That advance is a tribute to our Governments; indeed, my noble friend Lord Bethell was one of the Ministers who helped to achieve that. We are getting between 50,000 and 70,000 people to quit thanks to the availability of vaping, because those smokers try vaping, the majority of them find it helps and they stop smoking. A very significant sum of money is saved, certainly in terms of the cost to the National Health Service.

Yes, the statistics among the young are going up—or they have been, to be more accurate; it appears from the latest ASH report that they have stabilised. Yes, nearly 20% of 11 to 17 year-olds have tried vaping, but that leaves 80% who have not. Of those who have tried, a third are now vaping, but that means two-thirds have rejected it. It should not be terribly difficult to get a handle on that. That is the challenge that we face.

For me, this is the key point as far as the smoking side is concerned: whoever is involved must remember very carefully that if anybody was to ban single-use vapes, alongside other restrictions such as on flavours, display and packaging, 58% of current smokers who vape said they would either continue to purchase single-use vapes from illegal sources or switch back to tobacco. We do not want that to happen. That seems fundamental to the way forward.

The last Government had the Swap to Stop scheme, which had some success. It delivered many tens of thousands of refillable vapes to adult smokers, as evidenced by a recent survey by the IBVTA, where more than 57% of e-liquid supplies were fruit flavoured. That is good news. Also, a code of conduct is now in place with the leading manufacturers, which was not there until relatively recently. They have embraced ensuring that product flavours are responsibly marketed and state that the use of emotional flavour names has no place in a legitimate market. The regulation of flavours must be carefully considered, given their clear importance to adults quitting smoking and preventing adult vapers switching back.

For me, the key to all this is that, as a nation, we have a compliant sector that—as far as I can see, as someone who tracks it a bit—has invested significant resources to meet environmental compliance targets through producer compliance schemes and retail take-back. If we were tempted to go down the route of prohibiting a whole class of products, we would undermine the points I made about the effect on existing people who want to quit.

I hope that before His Majesty’s Government take any further action they look at what has happened in Australia and the US recently. There are some reports out from both those countries, where there were unintended consequences. Those are well worth looking at.

At the end of the day, a third of the market comprises illicit vapes. That is a huge percentage, and those illicit vapes are unregulated, untested and a material threat to consumer safety. We have to deal with that situation. We need a comprehensive and collaborative enforcement strategy, with resources for trading standards and related enforcement. It may well be that we need a retail licensing scheme on top of that as a key to that policy. If we went down that route we would, in my judgment, make good continuing progress on helping smokers to get off smoking and put a cap on what has been happening among an element of our young people.