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.