Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015

Lord Warner Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Falkland (CB)]

My Lords, I am a non-smoker but having been in your Lordships’ House for some years one thing that concerns me about this measure is the unintended consequences. One is always worried in this House about them and so we should be. It seems very odd that so few people have expressed the view that tobacco is a legal product. How can you interfere with the marketing and the sales of a legal product? I think the product is undesirable and the arguments of the scientific community about its danger to health are indisputable. However, we have to think rather carefully about what may follow. If you get away with this without too much protest there are all kinds of bien pensants and vigorous politically correct people who will seek to do various things. For example, it could happen quite easily that in some local authority someone of limited life experience might suggest that, with obesity and the compulsion that people have to eat too much, it might be a good idea to prevent restaurants allowing people to eat on the pavement under an awning because that attracts people to sample the restaurant’s delicious wares. Noble Lords may think that this is a trivial, Clarksonesque point, but it bears thinking about.

I am grateful for the efforts that have been made to curb the ill effects of smoking. I am a frequent cinema goer—I have been a film buff since I was a boy. I do not think I would be talking to noble Lords today if they had not banned smoking in cinemas. I may have a husky voice, but I would probably be dead by now, I should think. These are things that have to be considered.

In the speeches so far, there has been scant respect for one thing that is very important to this country, and I hope it will be borne out in the speeches during the election campaign. This is a trading country, and trading countries require freedom in order to encourage the production of goods, to sell them and to market them correctly. If you do not like smoking, then ban it, for heaven’s sake. Do not try to pretend that this is going to deal with it—it is not going to deal with it. We have already seen the unintended consequences on the streets. In some of our best streets in the West End of London you see cigarette ends everywhere because people are smoking at lunchtime in doorways, smoking in the open air and smoking in groups; they are also smoking in their homes because it is unsatisfactory outside so that the smoke filters through badly constructed walls.

There are all kinds of aspects of this whole problem which have not been properly addressed, and I do not think that packaging is the answer. Should the noble Lord who introduced this amendment guide us towards the Lobbies, I shall follow him.

[Lord Warner (Lab)]

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate, but I want to congratulate the Minister and the last speaker has provoked me to take us back to the time when I, as a Minister, was taking through this House the legislation banning smoking in public places and in the workplace. Some of the arguments which we heard from the last speaker and from the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, took me back to those times, the good old days when Parliament was challenged because it had the temerity to introduce legislation in this area to protect people’s health and, in particular, to try to protect children’s health. We heard the same old rubbish, if I may put it that way, on second-hand smoke, which was later proved scientifically to be as dangerous as direct experience of smoke. We can sit through these debates hour after hour, but the science does not change. The science is the same as it always was. It just gets better for those who want to control the consumption of tobacco. The Government are to be congratulated on taking this legislation forward, and I hope the House will support it overwhelmingly.

Before I sit down, I shall ask the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, whether he enjoyed the Eagles concert last July which he experienced as a guest of JTI Gallaher.

[Lord Naseby]

Yes. I declared the interest and went to one concert. I do not imagine the noble Lord has ever been to anything, anywhere, paid for by anybody else. I just hope he has always declared it.

[Lord Warner]

I have not. I pay for my own concert tickets.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I was not planning to speak today, but I have to rise to respond to the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland. If we were to have a logical system in this country for dealing with drugs, tobacco would indeed be illegal. We have lots of drugs that are illegal in this country that are infinitely safer than tobacco, and we all know that, if we were starting today, tobacco would be unlawful. So I simply do not accept the point that, simply because tobacco is lawful, we should allow the market to let rip—very far from it. We know that it is very difficult to make a product such as tobacco unlawful at this stage, but we need to do everything possible to protect the public from the most dangerous drug available in this country today.