Summer Adjournment

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Thursday 18th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I rise to draw attention to an issue to which I drew attention in the last debate on matters to be raised before the Adjournment, which took place on 26 March. On that occasion I drew the House’s attention to concerns about the consequence of an EU directive on people’s ability to continue to use what was then, and still is, a relatively new product, namely electronic or e-cigarettes. Members will remember that an e-cigarette is an alternative to a conventional tobacco cigarette and consists of an electronic inhaler that vaporises a liquid into an aerosol mist, enabling the user to enjoy nicotine in a far safer form.

I return to this topic because, in addition to the EU legislation, there is a now a proposal by the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency for e-cigarettes to be considered as medicinal products. The EU directive seeks to lay down a legislative framework for the manufacture, presentation and sale of tobacco products. However, e-cigarettes are not tobacco products. Bringing them into line with their more dangerous counter- parts—standard cigarettes—will see the consumption of e-cigarettes drop. That means that people who currently use them safely will no longer be able to do so. If the MHRA’s proposal goes through, e-cigarettes will have to go through an expensive and time-consuming procedure to be approved as medicines. If that procedure makes them more difficult to obtain, smokers will simply continue to smoke tobacco.

It is important to remember that e-cigarettes were not developed as a medicinal product. Indeed, I heard them described at a seminar the other day as simply an “enjoyable consumer product”. However, their regulation as medicinal products would raise costs, reduce the diversity of products available, slow down innovation and inhibit creativity, and, in doing so, make them less appealing to the very people hoping to switch to them. These are by-products of the law of unintended consequences. More people will revert to tobacco.

Beyond that, the MHRA recommendation is for people “not to use”—that is its advice—the current generation of e-cigarettes available on the market. Its group manager of vigilance and risk management of medicines told a press conference held to announce the MHRA’s recommendations:

“We can’t recommend these products because their safety and quality is not assured, and so we will recommend that people don’t use them”.

However, that was despite the MHRA’s impact assessment giving no evidence of any harm caused by the use of e-cigarettes. In fact, Professor Robert West of University college London says that for current e-cigarettes “the risk is negligible”. Indeed, the NHS’s website states that their toxicity is one thousandth that of tobacco cigarettes.

One consequence of the MHRA’s recommendation has been that a major supermarket chain removed e-cigarettes from its pharmacy shelves, while a survey of 700 pharmacists has shown that 99.5% are declining to stock e-cigarettes because of the announcement. There is an emerging industry manufacturing e-cigarettes, which predicts that the reduction in their use caused by the MHRA’s recommendation will cost the NHS £2.5 billion, owing to fewer people giving up smoking tobacco. E-Lites, the largest producer of e-cigarettes, now forecasts a substantial reduction in the growth of the market. On its figures, 390,000 fewer people will be using e-cigarettes by the end of the year, compared with what would have happened without the MHRA’s recommendation.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Someone has to regulate e-cigarettes, but if they are not regulated as a medicine or cigarettes, who will do it?

[Mark Pawsey]

E-cigarettes are currently regulated in the same way as standard consumer products, and are subject to local authorities, trade descriptions and so on.

Users are concerned that it will become harder for them to access e-cigarettes in their bid to wean themselves off smoking, as the alternative of e-cigarettes will simply be more expensive. The directive is also of great concern to a number of small businesses, in particular a business based in my constituency called Smoke No Smoke, to which I referred when I last spoke on this issue. Its entrepreneurial owner, Jim Lacey, is facing a threat to the future of the business that he has worked so hard to build up. The feedback from his customers is that they will be unable to access the product. There is a danger that that will force the e-cigarette trade underground. If e-cigarettes were produced in an illegal market, it would be difficult for people to know where they had come from.

This is not the time to introduce these regulations. I urge the Government to look more closely at what they can do to avoid the implementation of the directive.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to take part in this pre-recess debate. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). I certainly endorse her hope that the Department for International Development will use some of its resources to facilitate more positive communications of the sort that she describes with North Korea. I hope she will forgive me if I do not promise to read the heavy tome that she recommended on my summer holidays, but I thought she made a very interesting and important contribution.

As my intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) indicated, in my speech I shall press the case for more action to support the right of football supporters to have a say in the governance of the football club that they follow, and to call for a higher proportion of television revenues to be directed into grass-roots support. As my hon. Friend made clear in his intervention, Coventry City is just the latest example of a club where supporters’ concerns are being ignored. The particular concern of the supporters’ trust—the Sky Blue Trust—and other supporters of Coventry City more generally is the owners’ desire to shift their club for a number of years some 35 miles away from where it currently plays, with all the difficulties for Coventry City supporters that that will signify.

I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South and my right hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) have met the Minister. I understand that Coventry City supporters are shortly to take part in a demonstration outside the Football League to demonstrate their concern to the powers that be in the Football League. Given that the Football League’s strap line is “Real football, real fans”, one hopes that it will listen to the concerns of Coventry City fans and intervene.

[Mark Pawsey]

As the MP for a constituency that neighbours Coventry and with many supporters in my constituency, I very much hope that the Coventry City issue will be resolved. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that if Coventry City plays 35 miles away, there might be an opportunity to persuade Coventry City supporters to watch the oval ball game in the city of Coventry at the Butts stadium and see the Coventry rugby club restored to the power in the land that it once was?

[Mr Thomas]

If the hon. Gentleman will allow me, I will stick to the more general point about the need to give football supporters more say in the governance of their club. Nevertheless, he has made his point and I am sure that Coventry rugby club’s supporters will be delighted that he chose to make it.

The successes of Swansea City and Bayern Munich last season emphasise, in their very different ways, the success of clubs where supporters have a very direct and significant role in how their football club is managed. Swansea City is unique in the Premier League in terms of the involvement of fans in the boardroom. I think that it is high time that that situation changed. The Co-operative party, which I am lucky enough to chair, championed in the late 1990s the idea of football supporters’ trusts to help football supporters co-operate to buy stakes in the running of their clubs. Now many Football League clubs and, indeed, many non-league clubs—the famous cases of AFC Wimbledon or FC United through to the likes of Exeter and Chester—are directly run by their supporters through the mechanism of a supporters’ trust.

The involvement of supporters’ trusts on the boards of clubs helps to ensure that that authentic voice of the supporter is heard when the role of the club in the local community is being discussed, when ticket prices are being debated or when players’ wages and contracts are being agreed. Supporters’ trusts help to ensure that longer term thinking about the future of the club and the need for sustainable finances over the long term are being considered. They help to deliver added social value to their localities and, indeed, on occasion they can boost enterprise in the area.

The Football Association has been under pressure for some time from football supporters to bring forward reforms to football rules to give fans more influence. To date, they have resisted any measures that challenge the autonomy of Premier League club owners. The FA Council’s summer meeting took place last Saturday and sadly was no different from previous such meetings. So if the supporters’ voice is really going to be heard, it seems to me that three key measures are required for change.

First, legislation is needed to make it easier for supporters’ trusts to buy their club. There ought to be a right to buy for supporters’ trusts that allows them to purchase a club at the point of a club entering administration and before receivership at a fair market valuation.

Secondly, for most supporters of Premier League clubs, administration is not likely to happen any time soon and there is no obvious sign either that, despite warm words from some Premier League club owners or managers, a stake in the ownership of Premier League clubs is likely to be sold to supporters’ trusts. Legislation is also needed to embed a right to observe in law. In other words, if a proportion—say 10%—of season ticket holders at a Premier League or Championship club belong to the registered supporters’ trust, that trust ought to have a right to attend and observe board meetings at the club, to receive board papers and to be able, as a result, to question and hold to account the club’s owners and senior staff.

Both these measures would help to embed supporters in the heart of decision making about a football club’s future. Such decisions about the future of a football club should not be the sole preserve of wealthy owners. We need to remember that such clubs have been built on the back of ordinary supporters’ money and commitment and they surely have a right to have better access to the key decisions and decision makers in their club.

The third measure to which I draw the House’s attention is the funding of grass-roots sport, and other related football causes. In 2001, the Premier League agreed to give 5% of its total broadcast income to the provision of grass-roots facilities, and to encourage better provision for supporters. It now claims that that was just for one TV deal, and only for domestic broadcasting rights. I wonder whether we need a back-stop legal power to ensure that that 2001 deal continues into the future. Without such a back-stop power, the Premier League and Football Association have been able to reduce the amount of money given each year to the Football Foundation directly from football clubs.

The need for more investment in grass-roots sport, and perhaps for a lever to change the minds of owners and their defenders in Premier League and FA boardrooms, points to a need for a legal power to impose a levy. If such a levy were ever to be used, it must clearly be kept well away from the Treasury. I hope we would never need to use such a power, but perhaps the Minister would consider the possibility of a back-stop statutory power to get the FA and Premier League to be more serious about funding for grass-roots sport in the future. With a £5 billion broadcast deal, it is not unreasonable to expect the Premier League to offer 5% of its income for investment in grass-roots coaching and facilities.