Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Stevens of Birmingham Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Birmingham (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of Cancer Research UK, and it will not be surprising to learn that CRUK and I strongly support the Bill.

Fundamentally, the tobacco industry has a structural problem, which is that it kills 80,000 of its most loyal customers every year and therefore has to restock annually to keep its coffers full—those people being now, sadly, in their coffins. The point of the Bill is fundamentally to do something about that. As the Minister said, it was very gratifying to see the wide support across all parties in the House of Commons, and I hope we will see that repeated here. However, I suspect there will be some objections during the passage of the Bill—some legitimate and well-intentioned criticisms, but potentially some that bear a strange family resemblance to the arguments that the tobacco industry and its proxies also advance.

One of those objections is that the Bill is not actually needed because smoking is on its way out anyway. I am sure that we can appreciate the irony of the argument that the industry advances that the very measures that it has previously so vigorously opposed on the grounds that they would be ineffective are now allegedly so supremely effective that further regulation is not required. Leaving aside the irony, the fact is simply that 6 million people are still smoking. The rate of progress is nowhere near sufficient to get us to the previous and current Governments’ target of being de facto smoke-free by 2030. In the poorest parts of the country, that is not going to be until 2050, and, since the general election, it is estimated that 100,000 more young people have taken up smoking.

Therefore, it is not true that further action is not needed; nor is it true that we should not take action in the absence of “real-world evidence”, because, of course, that is an entirely circular argument. You will not get real-world evidence until you do it and see the effects. The subtlety of the Bill is that the annual rise by one year in the age of sale will give us that evidence as we see the successive, cumulative effect that these measures bring about.

Another argument that we have heard is, “Why not just raise the age of legal sale to 25?” If you do the maths, for the next nine years, between now and 2034, we will be on that journey anyway. That will give us ample time to see whether the measures in this Bill are working as intended.

Then there are the crocodile tears: “This will be bad for the Treasury because of all the tobacco excise duties which are forgone”. If that is your argument, have the courage of your convictions and go into bat for the Government promoting smoking as a way of boosting the coffers of the Treasury. In any event, that is to ignore the wider economic arguments which the noble Baroness set out.

Then there is the zombie argument, that the black market will develop and prosper with each incremental regulatory step we take. As a matter of fact, rather than a debating point, the number of smuggled cigarettes has fallen by over 85% since regulations of this nature to clamp down were introduced 25 years ago. The most recent data from HMRC shows that the forgone duty from smuggled or black market cigarettes as a proportion of the theoretically available total has fallen from about 17% in 2005 to about 7% now. The question of enforcement is independent from the question of regulation. We can do both.

Finally, we get to: “Can we at least leave vapes out?” Here, again as the noble Earl, Lord Howe, and the Minister have set out, there is a balance to be struck. The current scientific consensus is that smokers switching to vaping will reduce the threats to their health, but equally that there is no health benefit from taking up nicotine addiction if you have not previously been a smoker. That is why it is right that there is flexibility in the Bill. I say to anybody who doubts what is going on out there that as I came into Parliament this afternoon, I stopped at a newsagent. I know that visual aids are not allowed, but there were Pokémon cards with cartoons next to vapes with a little cartoon character of a vampire, at kids’ eye height, being sold near this building. The idea that the industry has changed its spots is untrue. There has been no damascene conversion. It is the sword of Damocles that is producing the change. The Bill deserves our support.