Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strathcarron (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest, in that a minority investor in one of my companies also manufactures vapes, although my concerns for this Bill have nothing to do with vapes but relate to its treatment of cigars and pipes, and the fact that a generational ban is, in practice, unenforceable and therefore unworkable.

It is an unfortunate part of this Bill that, as drafted, pipe tobacco and cigars are lumped together with cigarettes and hand-rolling tobacco where they do not need or deserve to be. In fact, cigar smokers are such a vanishingly rare breed that the ONS stopped collecting data on them in 2018, at which point it was recording that one cigar is smoked per 22 adults in a year. Looking around your Lordships’ House, with about 25 noble Lords attending, this means that, between us all here right now, we smoke one cigar a year.

The noble Lord smoking that one imaginary cigar—probably me—will know that it is made from pure tobacco leaves, without any of the added chemicals found in cigarettes or their filters; that the cigar smoke is not inhaled, and therefore the health risk relative to cigarette smoking is non-existent; and that, as a result, cigars are not addictive and there is no evidence at all that they are a gateway to other forms of smoking—in fact, it is quite the opposite, as smokers migrate from harmful cigarettes to harmless cigars and pipes as part of the quitting process. Cigars are such a non-existent problem that they are referenced only three times in the entire 294-page impact assessment report.

There are also drastic implications for shops and SMEs, especially related to the unintended consequences of the new packaging requirements, which we will have time to explore more in Committee.

My second concern with this Bill is more fundamental: a generational ban is unworkable and unenforceable, and surely we should not be passing legislation that we know is doomed to fail before it even starts. It is almost as if the whole idea was thought up by someone who has never smoked, drunk, gambled or smuggled. Versions of a generational ban have been tried twice before: first, in New Zealand, from where the idea came, where it was abandoned as soon as it became clear that it would not work; and, secondly, in Australia, where they now have contraband wars, with tobacconists being firebombed, as the regulated market is taken over by smuggler gang activities.

As anyone even passingly familiar with drugs policy or prohibitions will know, it is one thing to ban something but quite another to prevent people ignoring the ban. Of course, when they ignore the ban, they are, by definition, breaking the law, which begs the question: do we really want to classify as criminals whole swathes of people who are law-abiding in every other way?

As drafted, the Bill will require shopkeepers to be its enforcers. But really, how realistic is it to ask a shopkeeper to tell whether someone who comes in to buy a pack of cigarettes was born in this year or that year? A moment’s thought, or time spent in a busy shop, will confirm that it is impossible and unreasonable to expect it to be otherwise. As the designated enforcers of this unworkable scheme, shopkeepers are, rightly, up in arms about it. They do, however, offer a solution which is enforceable and which will work: that is to make the sale of any tobacco product illegal to anyone under 21. Just as it is very difficult for any of us to tell the precise age of a teenager, it is comparatively easy for us to tell whether or not someone is an adult. To reinforce this common-sense solution, all the evidence suggests that hardly anybody starts smoking over the age of 21.

Finally, it is worth bearing in mind that smoking is already dying out among the young—dramatically so—because they are choosing not to smoke, not because they are banned from doing so. Over 21 is an obvious and simple solution, supported by its enforcers, and more likely to make the Bill succeed in the way in which it was originally intended than the way it is currently drafted.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a non-executive director of a company, one of the minority shareholders of which is a vape manufacturer.

We all start off on common ground. We all want to discourage young people from starting to smoke. What we are debating here is the best way of making this happen. I am speaking to amendments in my name and the name of the noble Lord, Lord Murray, to understand why the Government think that the complexities and unintended consequences of a generational ban are a better way of achieving this than the simplicities of an age limit, such as the challenge schemes that already exist and are well understood and working.

As a non-affiliated Member of your Lordships’ House, I find it surprising that the Government would not take the opportunity to improve on the previous Prime Minister’s pet project, which this was. As I know from personal experiences, he is almost professionally abstemious and does not really cater for the rest of us who are not. His generational ban stems from this outlook. For some reason—I hope it will be explained—in spite of all the evidence against it, which I will come to, the Government persist with his legacy scheme.

My first question is: why, when prohibition has never worked anywhere in the world throughout history without unintended consequences—all of them bad—do the Government think this de facto prohibition will work here now? Do the Government not understand that if you try to prevent someone buying something easily available legally, they will simply buy it illegally as they have always done and will always do? Why, when the DSHE’s own research and analysis modelling in preparation for the Bill showed that increasing the age to 21 would result in exactly the same outcome as the generational ban, do the Government ignore their own advice and everyone else’s common sense?

Why do the Government not accept endless research and the evidence of our own eyes that practically nobody starts smoking after 21 and therefore the age limit solves the problem? Equally important in this context, it polices itself. Why do the Government think it in any way sensible or reasonable to pass responsibility for enforcing their law on to retailers, many of them small family businesses, which will have to second-guess a customer’s age, which will change year by year? Surely the Government can see that on the ground in a shop, perhaps late at night with all that entails, this is completely unrealistic—especially when there is a practical age-limit solution to hand, such as the challenge scheme, which the shop will probably already be operating for other products.

Why do the Government ignore the blindingly obvious fact that, while it is quite possible to tell the difference between a 16 year-old and a 21 year-old, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a 56 year-old and a 61 year-old and so on, up and down the age range, as retail staff will now be asked to do? Why do the Government ignore the obvious consequences of proxy purchasing, whereby all adults will be able to buy alcohol but only some will be able to buy tobacco? We will have the irregularity of all adults being allowed to smoke, but only some adults being allowed to buy what is needed to smoke. Anyway, is formalising two-tier justice really a good idea?

Why do the Government ignore the British Retail Consortium? Its members have already reported an increase in violence towards their shop workers in recent years. Its view is that the generational ban will make this violence and abuse even worse.

Why do the Government not take note of the advice of the Association of Convenience Stores? The generational ban will have a disastrous effect on its members’ shops, not just financially but on their health and well-being as they are asked to enforce, on the Government’s behalf, the unenforceable.

Why do the Government ignore the experiences of Australia? A generational ban was tried there and it was found that organised crime moved into the vacuum created by good intentions. It has resulted in tobacco turf wars and an enormous increase in illicit sales.

Why do the Government think there is any point in giving an additional £10 million to trading standards and £100 million over five years to Border Force and HMRC to clamp down on illicit sales, when the ONS figures suggest that illicit sales lose the Government £6 billion a year in tax revenue? The Home Office-funded report by the National Business Crime Centre says that the proposed generational ban means that the demand for illicit tobacco will increase dramatically—I might add, obviously. Has the Treasury been consulted about losing all this revenue?

Lastly, I make a quick point about the use of statistics in this debate. Referring to the illicit trade in tobacco, can we all admit that, by the very nature of illicit trade, none of us knows what the real figures are now or what they will be in the future, only that, by virtue of common sense, they are bound to increase with prohibition, as they always have? All I can contribute is that I know three people who smoke cigarettes and two of them tell me that they buy them by the carton illicitly at £50 a carton. By extrapolation, this does not mean that 66.6% of cigarettes smoked are illicit, but the way that some Members, and the Government, were bandying statistics around at Second Reading was quite surprising. For instance, in answer to some points that I raised, the Minister quoted a statistic and I think that, even as she was reading it, she must have thought to herself, “Hang on, this one’s a bit iffy”:

“There are around five times more people smoking non-cigarette tobacco … than a decade ago”.—[Official Report, 23/4/25; col. 741.]


In a subsequent Answer to a Written Question, she confirmed my findings that there are no statistics at all to back this up. The so-called research comes from an ASH-funded scare project—as we all know, researchers seldom bite the hand that feeds them. Without coming clean about it, they rather conveniently included shisha, some of which contains hardly any tobacco at all, and all of which is freely available on Amazon and elsewhere. The increase is accounted for by the enormous demographic change that we have seen over the past 10 years of people for whom smoking shisha is part of their cultural heritage—toes on which I would have thought the Government would be loath to tread, electorally.

Talking electorally, given that the previous Prime Minister was not always right about everything, I am sure we would all be interested to hear the Government’s response to all the questions that I have asked and about why they think that introducing all the constitutional complexities and practical inefficiencies of a generational ban is a better way to what we all want—preventing young people smoking—than the wonderfully simple, existing, workable, enforceable and Windsor Framework-friendly alternative solution staring us in the face. It would also be the Government’s own policy, not one copied from a regime that they were so quick to vilify in opposition.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th November 2025 Grand Committee

All I am asking the Minister and the Government to consider is a proper fact-based assessment of the difference between cigars and other tobacco products. Only then will we have legitimacy for banning their sale, which, by the way—as we should be aware—will cost many thousands of jobs and destroy an important community of people whose mental health should be a priority. It will end the fabulous tourist attraction of our specialist tobacco and cigar shops and, importantly, reduce my freedom and happiness—ambitions no Government and this House should meet without proper evidence. It is wrong to interfere in someone’s life without good cause. All I ask is that we gather the evidence, publish it, assess it and, if it shows that cigars are not the enemies we think they are, remove them from the proscribed list. That is why I speak to my amendments.

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, on the first day of this Committee, there was agreement among all noble Lords that the Bill was about public health. The purpose of these amendments, to which I have added my name, is to show that handmade cigars, pipe tobacco and nasal tobacco pose undetectable threats to public health and that they, through no fault of their own, have been caught up in the net meant for a very different type of tobacco product—mass-produced inhaled cigarettes.

Amendment 106 defines what a handmade cigar is. It is an individual, artisanal product, made entirely of specially grown and cured tobacco leaves, and almost exclusively in friendly Caribbean countries, in what could be thought of as cottage industries—in our terms. By contrast, mass-produced cigarettes contain tobacco that has been treated by a moisture controller such as glycerol or sorbitol, a sugar such as sucrose or an invert sugar, preservatives such as sodium benzoate or potassium sorbate, and reconstituted tobacco binders such as guar gum or carboxymethyl cellulose. All these are then wrapped in paper that has been bleached white with hydrogen peroxide and had added to it potassium or sodium nitrate to make the cigarette burn evenly. All these are inhaled through a filter usually made from cellulose acetate fibres. None of these ingredients can be found in a handmade cigar.

As with the difference in content between a handmade cigar and a mass-produced cigarette, the same extreme differences can be found in the manufacturing process. Whereas modern cigarette-making machines can make up to 100,000 cigarettes a minute, a torcedor or artisan cigar roller can make only between 25 and 100 cigars a day, depending on the length and gauge of the cigars that he or she is rolling that day.

Just as mass-produced cigarettes and handmade cigars are different products made in different ways, so is how they are smoked. The most obvious and significant difference is that mass-produced cigarettes are inhaled, whereas handmade cigars are not inhaled. In fact, the reason cigarettes are so heavily treated with additives and chemicals is to make them inhalable and therefore addictive. That is where and how the damage is done. Again, none of this public health damage applies to handmade cigars.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, another major difference between mass-produced cigarettes and handmade cigars is the quantities consumed. Desktop research shows that the average cigarette smoker smokes 11 cigarettes a day, whereas figures for cigar smokers are impossible to come by because they are such an infinitesimally small group of people. Retail evidence from repeat customers suggests once a month—a bit more in summer and a bit less in winter, as it is largely an outdoor pursuit. Tellingly, cigar smokers feel no need ever to smoke a cigar again because they are not addictive, but they hope they will smoke a cigar again because they are often smoked in celebration of happy events such as weddings or anniversaries.

If the primary purpose of the Bill is to stop young people from starting to smoke, I am pleased to tell the Committee that cigar smokers are comparatively a much more elderly cohort and that there is no evidence at all that someone who has smoked their first cigar at any age then goes on to smoke any type of mass-produced cigarette; in fact, I am sure that the chemicals and additives would make them feel quite sick if they tried to do so. If the purpose of the Bill is to stop young people smoking, handmade cigars should certainly not be one of its targets, as it simply does not apply.

Like many of the amendments in this group, this one calls for an impact assessment on the effect of including handmade cigars in the Bill, as they were totally ignored in the Government’s initial impact assessment, having not been mentioned once in 294 pages. The Bill’s packaging proposals in particular would collapse affected businesses in three to five years, because they would be caught in the cross-fire of a Bill that is aimed at a very different type of tobacco product.

A further objection to the inclusion of cigars is a diplomatic one. The Minister has no doubt seen the letter to the Prime Minister jointly signed by the UK ambassadors of Cuba, Honduras and the Dominican Republic expressing their concerns regarding the Bill, which

“could disproportionately impact cigar-producing countries through measures that are not justified by evidence”.

The letter compares evidence that supports its case, most recently from the US Food and Drug Administration and conducted for it by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, and it compares that with the evidence provided by the Government to support the Bill, which, as the authors say,

“uses a single UCL study, which has been widely criticised for methodological limitations that undermine its reliability as the foundation for sound and solid evidence-based policymaking”.

That is the much-derided study that claims a fivefold increase in the use of non-cigarette tobacco in the last decade but conveniently forgets to mention that it includes sheesha and heated tobacco, makes no mention at all of handmade cigars, pipe or nasal tobacco and has everything to do with the changing demographics of the country.

The letter highlights the socioeconomic and cultural damage that would be done to the sector in their economies:

“Cigars are produced predominantly in small and medium size companies, sustaining the livelihoods of more than 400,000 people, many of them women and smallholder farmers in rural communities. For our countries the industry represents not only a source of dignified employment and economic stability but also a vital element of cultural heritage”.


I am sure the Committee will agree that it seems bizarre that those three countries are recipients of our foreign aid on the one hand, yet what we are proposing with the Bill is to cause them serious economic and socioeconomic damage on the other for, as the letter says, no proper evidence-based reason. The ambassadors’ letter to the Prime Minister finishes with the crux of the matter:

“There is a clear precedent for this approach”—


that is, an exemption—

“in previous tobacco related legislation in the United Kingdom, where the unique characteristics of cigars have been recognised and proportionate exemptions granted. The rationale for these exemptions remains just as relevant today”.

The precedents they refer to relate to packaging and display allowances in specialist tobacconists, where any change to the current regime would be particularly damaging to these small, independent businesses which rely on handmade cigars for the bulk of their income. It would be impossible operationally, and suicidal commercially, for these Caribbean cottage industries to comply with the UK-only proposed plain packaging requirements, designed for multinational, mass-produced cigarette manufacturers. It also shoots the fox which says that the proposed legislation will make no difference to current cigar smokers. Of course, it will, because it means they will have nowhere legal from which to buy them if there are no cigar retailers because the cigar producers cannot comply with this unique UK legislation.

The only similarity between a mass-produced cigarette and a handmade cigar is the word “tobacco”—not the content called tobacco, which is radically different between them. No, we are talking here about a word, not a reality. But Bills are made of words, and, occasionally, reality gets caught in the crossfire—hence the need for defined exemptions for these handmade, artisanal products made in friendly countries and sold by small businesses across the country.

[Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was going to give way to the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, but I will go ahead. I was not intending to speak on this. I also wanted to sign the amendments, but such was the popularity of them that there were too many signatures. I support completely what the noble Earl and the two noble Lords who have spoken have said. I think they have covered practically everything that could be said about this issue. If the Minister is listening—and particularly if her officials in the Department of Health and Social Care, where I expect this has been pushed, are listening—I really cannot see why she would not consider, even at this stage, just dropping the whole thing about cigars.

I am particularly concerned about the issue of cigars and handmade cigars. I really do not understand why this is happening now, after all the years when there has been other legislation about tobacco—cigars have been left out and not included. Parliament has always recognised the unique aspect of this. I would hope that, after this debate in Committee has finished, the Minister will go back and recognise that taking this out now would solve a lot of problems with timing and getting things through quickly, given this whole debate. I would certainly support that.

The Government’s own impact assessment has been mentioned. It does not mention handmade cigars at all, and it mentions cigars very little, so I do not think any of us can really feel that a proper impact assessment has been done on the effects of cigars. I share the concern that has been expressed. I have also seen the letter from the three ambassadors—from the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Cuba—to the Prime Minister. Up until last week, there had not been a response. It was sent on 20 October, and I know that the Prime Minister has been quite busy recently, but I hope that they will get a full response to it, because it is very much going to have an effect. We always say that we care about what is happening to poorer communities across the world, and here we are going to have a situation that, without doubt, will lead to a real effect on smallholder farmers in rural communities. It is also very much a cultural thing in those countries. We should be taking that into account, apart from just the effects.

I have yet to see a 16 year-old, a 14 year-old or a 12 year-old standing around smoking a cigar. Now, maybe I have missed out, and maybe the Minister has seen that. I do not think that this is an issue about age—well, it is, in the sense that it is older people. There is absolutely no doubt about that. Apart from the cost of it, young people do not think of cigars as something that they would want to smoke. So it will make no impact whatever, in my view, on the health situation.

Years ago, in 1968, during my radical student days, I visited Cuba to plant coffee. I never went back to see whether the coffee that we planted actually grew—but we came back from Cuba, and of course in those days I brought lots of Che Guevara T-shirts and Cuban cigars. Sadly, people were more interested in having a present of the Cuban cigars than the Che Guevara T-shirts. So my interest in cigars goes back quite a long way.

But seriously, this proposal is really not sensible. It is not necessary and is not going to affect the health of one single person, but it will really affect those lovely, niche, small tobacco shops. There is one in Belfast, in Church Lane, called Miss Morans, which is visited by tourists because it is tiny and historic—I think it was started in 1870. Those are the kinds of shops that are going to be affected. People will be put out of jobs, not just in the handmade cigar places but in those kinds of shops. It is just not necessary. Although I recognise that the Minister perhaps cannot withdraw the whole clause today and take cigars right out of this, I hope that she will reflect on what has been said today, which is a very strong case for why cigars should not be part of this Bill.

Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Strathcarron Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 17th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 180 in the name of my noble friend Lord Faulkner, to which I have added my name. Amendment 180 would remove the sampling exemption to smoke-free legislation that currently allows cigar lounges to operate.

This exemption has created a loophole that accommodates smoking indoors in a public place—something that we rightly consigned to history in 2007. The 2007 statutory instrument carved out an exemption for specialist tobacconists, allowing for the sampling of products within the premises. The justification offered then was that cigars, being a niche and luxury product, required a try-before-you-buy approach.

Yet what I see today bears little resemblance to the spirit of that exemption. These venues are no longer retail premises merely offering brief product sampling; they are fully-fledged cigar lounges. They are described by no less an authority than the Daily Telegraph as:

“The last place you can smoke indoors in the UK”


and

“a network of hangouts where smoking is not just permitted, but encouraged”.

That is surely not what Parliament intended.

In some of these lounges, food and drink are served as cigar smoke fills enclosed spaces. Some noble Lords may be enthusiastic supporters of what one nearby cigar lounge’s website describes in the following terms:

“Nestled in a quiet corner of the city lies … a haven for those who seek solace in the timeless ritual of cigar smoking. Step through our doors and be transported to a world of refined tranquility, where every detail is crafted to enchant the senses and soothe the soul”.


Note the absence of any reference to sampling, by the way.

What about those who work in these environments—staff being exposed to second-hand smoke on every shift? I saw the reality of this at first hand just a couple of months ago at a friend’s birthday party in a smart London hotel. As the guests, including myself, wandered from room to room and from snacks and dancing to drink, we were amazed to see that one of our options was a cigar lounge. Although this was indeed an option for us—one that I obviously chose to skip, given my father’s untimely death from lung cancer—it was not an option for the staff, who were working in all parts of the hotel.

The smell of that cigar smoke took me back to my childhood and teens before my father died at 66. He usually smoked cigarettes and a pipe—it was Cut Golden Bar, if any noble Lords are old enough to remember the cheaper brands of tobacco. He would smoke a cigar, purchased as a present or as a treat for himself, once a year at Christmas. I remember the smell of that smoke in the room. I had no idea—I do not know whether he did—of the harm it was doing to his two daughters, who now suffer from asthma.

During the campaign for the smoking ban, trade unions and the hospitality industry made one of the strongest arguments for change: all workers have the right to a safe workplace free of second-hand smoke. Does that principle not equally apply to those working in cigar lounges? We are seeing new lounges open, too. In Sheffield, for example, a new lounge opened earlier this year despite strong objections from the public health team at Sheffield City Council. The team noted that the venue was within 400 metres of a school and that smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the city. It warned that such a venue risked normalising tobacco use for young people, undermining the council’s public health objectives, yet the lounge opened regardless.

The health harms of cigars are clear. Even when not inhaling, cigar and pipe smokers are at increased risk of cancer of the mouth, oesophagus, throat, voice box and lungs. There is no safe form of tobacco. I strongly support the Bill taking action on all tobacco products and look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments regarding indoor smoking in these establishments.

[Lord Strathcarron (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, on the first day of this Committee, there was wide agreement that this Bill was about public health in general and about preventing young people starting to smoke in particular. Amendment 180, against which I shall speak, addresses neither of these objectives. As we have heard, the amendment is based on the oft-repeated shibboleth that all tobacco is dangerous, but that is as nonsensical and unscientific as saying that all water is drinkable. Neither proposition stands up to even the most basic inquiry: with water, it all depends on where it comes from, and, with tobacco, it all depends on what it is done with.

I am sure that, after reading Hansard on day four of this Committee, the noble Lords who were not here and who support this amendment will have learned that the tobacco used in handmade cigars is a totally different product to the tobacco used in mass-produced cigarettes. It is smoked by a much more elderly cohort of users and is handmade as an artisanal product by cottage industries in friendly, foreign-aid-supported Caribbean countries, which are, in turn, the very opposite of what most people refer to as the tobacco industry. They will also have learned that cigars are not inhaled, are not addictive and are smoked only occasionally at best; and that, as such, there is absolutely no evidence at all that handmade cigars pose any danger to public health. In fact, it is quite the opposite if we refer to the US health studies already mentioned in Committee, there being no UK equivalent.

Turning to the second objective of this Bill—to discourage young people from starting to smoke—again, there is absolutely no evidence, either statistical, anecdotal or commonsensical, that young people take up smoking cigarettes after smoking a cigar. So one is left wondering: what is the point of this amendment?

I turn now to its specifics, bearing in mind the call for proportionality here. There are only 25 sampling rooms in the UK. Access to them is usually by appointment and they are certainly open only to the tobacconist’s cigar aficionado customers; under no circumstances are they open to the general public. I know of only one of these places. It is on the roof of a shop that has a tin roof in case it rains but is otherwise open on all four sides; I have heard that others have powerful extractor fans, which is the norm. I cannot see any possible danger to the consenting adults sampling cigars in these circumstances or to anyone passing by, by which time the smoke will have long since disappeared into the greater good.

Sampling cigars is very different to sampling, say, a piece of cheese or a piece of chocolate. A cigar takes half an hour to smoke, and it changes throughout that half hour; therefore, it is necessary for the whole cigar to be smoked. That is in the tobacconist’s interest because, at the end of the sample smoke, the customer may well buy a box of 25 cigars, which could cost, on average, about £750. Methinks that noble Lords supporting this amendment are not familiar with what they hope to ban.

On day four of this Committee, in referring to the question of a health threat from smoking cigars, many noble Lords from all Benches—or, like me, from none—emphasised the need for evidence before legislation and pointed out that, in this case, there is none. Many argued that, ergo, cigars should continue to be exempted from it. Many also referred to the lack of any impact assessment and so to the unintentional, possibly terminal, damage that would be done to the related retail and hospitality sectors. Whether intentionally or unintentionally—it is not clear—this amendment hits right at the heart of these sectors for no evidential benefit. In the absence of any evidence that there is a problem that needs legislation—and in the spirit of, “If no harm’s being done, let us live and let live”—I hope that noble Lords will agree that this amendment is quite simply not needed.

[Lord Johnson of Lainston (Con)]

I rise to speak in favour of the first amendment, proposed by my noble friends, and against the second amendment: Amendment 180.

On actors and their ability to smoke on set, in my view, this is something that needs further refining. I ask the Minister to go back slightly on the previous amendments discussed, but intertwined with those is this question: what is an offence and what is not an offence? If I were to be playing myself, as I may be now, would I be able to light a cigar in an authentic fashion in order to prove that point? Where are we talking about these regulations being relevant and effective? How far do the regulations intend to go when people are posting on social media, which is a far cry from the adverts of the 1970s promoting the joys of smoking? If they put themselves on social media smoking a cigar and talking about its delights, is that advertising the genre, as the Minister said it was? Would that be a criminal offence? If that is the case, we are going to find ourselves in extreme difficulty, aside from the absurd attacks on our liberty.

I am afraid that I will also speak very firmly against Amendment 180, with the greatest of respect to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, and the noble Baroness, Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath. She made a strong case for how she saw these processes, but the reality is that this is an exemption temporarily used by premises to enable people to sample tobacco. The idea that this is something that somehow Parliament should be focusing on is a little bizarre when there is so much going on in the world. The anti-smoking lobby has found somebody somewhere somehow smoking a cigar, and the entire machine has focused its gaze, like the great Eye of Sauron, on this activity that is, at worst, fringe and, at best, quite relevant in ensuring that people can legitimately engage in the trade and sale of occasional cigar smoking, which we have established has no factual health consequences at all, regardless of the desire of many who want to see the end of smoking and a smoke-free generation. I disagree with that fundamentally but can see the point of it; this is contradictory to that point. It is important that, as legislators, we understand the facts and take a fact-based approach to the way we legislate.