Cigarette Stick Health Warnings Bill [HL]

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Young of Cookham]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that we will now move to calmer waters.

I am sanguine about the prospects for this Bill reaching the statute book at this late stage of the Session. However, that is not fatal as its provisions could be implemented by a simple amendment to the Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016—easily done now that we have left the European Union. I have chosen this subject to keep up the pressure on the Government on public health and to help shape the agenda for the forthcoming tobacco plan; perhaps my noble friend the Minister can say when we might expect it. I do so also because the campaign against the harm done by tobacco has been one of my preoccupations since entering Parliament in 1974.

This Bill extends the logic of health warnings on cigarette packs to the cigarettes themselves. If implemented, it would require both cigarettes and cigarette papers to display health warnings such as “Smoking Kills” or “Smoking Causes Cancer”. I first proposed this measure as a Health Minister in 1979 in Margaret Thatcher’s Government. I was told by representatives from the tobacco industry that we could not add health warnings to cigarettes because the ink used to print the warnings could be hazardous to health. Thankfully, the debate around tobacco control has progressed significantly since then, and I am confident that noble Lords will see the compelling case for dissuasive cigarettes. From being an initiative that, I believe, I was one of the first to suggest, it now commands broad support from the Royal College of Physicians, Cancer Research UK, the Health Foundation and the Association of Directors of Public Health—in all, some 71 organisations concerned with reducing the harm done by tobacco.

Smoking remains a leading cause of premature death. The Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, has said that it is likely to have killed more people last year than Covid-19. However, smoking kills on the same scale every year and will go on doing so for years without robust action. In 2019, one in seven of the UK population were smokers. In England alone, around 280 children under 16 start smoking for the first time every day. Smoking is highly addictive: only one in three smokers will be able to quit before they die.

There is evidence that, over time, the responsiveness of smokers to existing warnings declines. New techniques are therefore needed to refresh their interest. Cigarettes are cancer sticks and consumers should be warned on the product, not just on its packaging. There is a growing body of research evidence from around the world supporting the effectiveness of what are known as “dissuasive cigarettes”, particularly in making cigarettes less attractive to younger adolescents and those who have never smoked.

This measure is popular. In a poll conducted by YouGov for Action on Smoking and Health, 70% of those surveyed supported health warnings on cigarettes, two-thirds of them strongly. Only 8% opposed the proposal. This includes majority support from voters from every main political party, including 70% of those who voted for my party in 2019. Adding health warnings to cigarettes and cigarette papers is a simple measure with minimal cost that would help deliver the Government’s Smokefree 2030 ambition. Tobacco manufacturers already print on cigarette papers, so this would be cheap and easy to implement.

This measure was one of several tobacco amendments to the Health and Care Bill tabled in the other place by officers of the APPG on Smoking and Health, of which I am a vice-chairman. As it stands, the Bill fails to include a single mention of smoking or tobacco and represents a significant missed opportunity to introduce key policies for achieving Smokefree 2030. Disappointingly, the Government refused to adopt the recommendations in the Commons, saying that they needed to

“conduct some further research and build a more robust evidence base in support of such additional measures before introducing them.”—[Official Report, Commons, 28/10/21; col. 812.]

However, these warnings are already under consideration in Canada, Australia and Scotland. Here is an opportunity for the UK to be ahead of the curve instead of waiting for others to lead. The robust evidence will be available only if someone does it.

Health warnings such as “Smoking kills” have been shown to be effective on billboards and tobacco packs, so why would they not also be effective on cigarettes? Adding warnings to cigarettes is important, because young people in particular are likely to start with individual cigarettes rather than packs. In addition to all the existing research on the effectiveness of health warnings, there have been at least eight peer-reviewed academic studies published since 2015 which specifically looked at warnings on cigarettes and found them to be effective, particularly in making cigarettes less attractive to younger adolescents and never-smokers.

This is a simple measure with minimal cost that would help deliver the Government’s ambition to make England smoke-free by 2030. This worthy ambition was announced in 2019, yet we are still waiting to hear what steps the Government will take to make it a reality. At the current rate of decline in smoking prevalence, Cancer Research UK has estimated we will miss that ambition by seven years, and double that for the poorest in society.

We will achieve a smoke-free 2030 only by motivating more smokers to make a quit attempt, using the most effective quitting aids, while reducing the number of children and young adults who start smoking each year. Dissuasive cigarettes will contribute to both objectives and reinforce the impact of other measures which require significant investment, such as behaviour change campaigns and stop smoking services.

This measure, along with the other tobacco amendments proposed in the Commons, will be retabled in the Lords after Second Reading next week by myself and colleagues from the All-Party Group on Smoking and Health, some of whom I welcome in today’s debate. I am confident these amendments will have strong cross-party support.

I end by quoting my honourable friend Bob Blackman MP, chairman of the all-party group, speaking during a recent debate on the Health and Care Bill in the other place:

“if we look back over the years, the measures on smoking in public places, on smoking in vehicles, on smoking when children are present and on standardised packaging of tobacco products were all led from the Back Benches. Governments of all persuasions resisted them, for various reasons … but we on the Back Benches who are determined to improve the health of this country will continue to press on with them, and we will win eventually. It may not be tonight, but those measures will come soon.”—[Official Report, Commons, 22/11/21; col. 74.]

I can assure the Government that, when the Bill comes to the Lords, we in this Chamber will take up the challenge. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has taken part in this debate, starting with the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, whose long-standing commitment to the campaign to reduce the harm done by smoking is well known; he also underlined the all-party commitment. He trailed the broader package of a suite of measures as part of the APPG manifesto published earlier this year, of which this is one component. We look forward to taking that agenda forward on the forthcoming Bill.

My noble friend Lord Naseby and I have been on opposite sides of this debate ever since we both joined the House of Commons on the same day in 1974. I was reading last night a contribution that he made in May 1980, much of which he repeated today, showing consistency. I say to my noble friend that much of his speech was not about the Bill but about raising the age limit, the licensing regime, a potential levy and a tax on profits. I understand that. He described the promoters of the Bill as misguided. I wonder whether he would like to reflect on that, given the wide range of health organisations that I mentioned—for example, the Royal College of Physicians and Cancer Research UK—and whether he also believes that they are misguided in supporting the Bill.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

The misguided bit is that the promoters of the Bill have not taken any advice on communication. It is quite clear to me, as one who has been a professional in that world, that to place a communication, as my noble friend suggested, on a narrow cigarette that is burning away, in red on a white background, is not good communication.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

I will come to that specific point, but he described the promoters of the Bill as misguided and I was making the point that he includes among those misguided people a very wide range of serious health opinion. As I said, I will come to his point.

The noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, put the Bill in personal terms. I am grateful for her contribution. She made the point that we need to move on from the health information on packs, which is now taken for granted, to a new means. On my noble friend’s point, he raised the question of whether it would be easy to read. A cigarette is right under your nose so it is probably easier to read what is on the cigarette than what is on the pack. Also, the pack is not seen by other people, whereas, if you put a message on the cigarette, those in the company of the smokers will also see it. I see that as an added advantage of this move.

I listened with some disbelief to my noble friend Lord Moylan. He started off by saying that he was surprised that I had introduced this Bill in the middle of a pandemic, implying that I should wait until the pandemic is over before introducing what I think would be a very useful health measure. Astonishingly, he described the message that I want to put on the cigarettes—“Smoking kills”—as propaganda. Even the tobacco manufacturers now admit that smoking is bad for your health. I just wonder whether my noble friend has ever read the 1962 report of the Royal College of Physicians—the whole weight of evidence. The health warning that smoking kills, and damages your health, is not propaganda but accepted health fact. He should move on.

My noble friend then described the 2030 target for a smoke-free England as ASH’s target, but it is not; it is a government target to which the Government have committed—I look to my noble friend on the Front Bench. Finally, my noble friend Lord Moylan described what I am doing as patronising. There is the libertarian wing within my party, of which he is clearly a member. I have listened to these arguments about things being patronising for the last 30 or 40 years. When there was a proposal to introduce compulsory crash helmets for motorcyclists, that was described as patronising. Parliament legislated and I do not think there is any question of repealing that. I heard exactly the same argument about seatbelts for drivers and then passengers; people said that was patronising legislation. I heard it about banning sponsorship for sporting events and banning smoking on public transport and then in public places. I am sure I will hear it again during the passage of the Health and Care Bill, which has a provision for adding fluoride to water.

Every single one of those measures has been adopted by Parliament, and I do not think anybody would seriously suggest that any of them should be repealed. In due course, measures such as the one I am promoting today will be accepted as conventional wisdom. I hope that, in a few years’ time, my noble friend will accept that this is the direction in which public opinion is moving. As I pointed out, this is a popular measure; it is popular within my party. I am glad I have got that off my chest.

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Merron, for her support and her predicted support for the other measures that I and other noble Lords will introduce as amendments to the Health and Care Bill, which gets its Second Reading on Tuesday. That is much appreciated, as is her own record as a Minister in the Labour Government.

Finally, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister, whose personal commitment to reducing the damage done by smoking shone through his speech. He put the Bill in the slightly broader context of government policy and recognised the imperative to drive down smoking. He said he had strong support for measures to stop people smoking. I will pick up one or two points from his speech for which I am very grateful. He said that the tobacco control plan would be published next year. “Next year” spans several months, so I wonder whether he could at some point be a little more specific about the timing of this plan, for which we have been waiting for some time, rather than referring just to 2022. He made the point that everyone is waiting for robust evidence. If everybody waits for robust evidence, no one will provide it, so at some point a country has to go first. I was grateful that he said that while he was unable to support this measure at the moment, he would consider it as part of the suite of measures to be looked at as part of the tobacco control plan. I accept what he says. That about sums up everything.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.