Heated Tobacco

Debate between Mark Pritchard and David Jones

Wednesday 26th June 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mr Jones]

Clearly, the ideal is for people to give up smoking altogether, but there are ways of reducing it. I will go into that in my speech. The hon. Gentleman makes a point to which I shall also refer: there is a need for research on the effects of alternatives to combustible tobacco.

E-cigarettes have had a revolutionary effect on efforts to reduce smoking rates in this country, and credit must go to the Government for facilitating that. E-cigarettes have had a highly positive impact on helping smokers to quit. In 2010, a particularly enlightened member of the behavioural insights team, David Halpern, influenced the Government’s decision not only to resist banning e-cigarettes—other countries were poised to do so—but to seek deliberately to make them more widely available. David Halpern advanced the principle of harm reduction: it is more effective to give somebody a reduced risk product than to insist unrealistically on immediate total abstinence. An expert in harm reduction, Professor Gerry Stimson of Imperial College, has supported that argument, pointing out that it is easier to persuade people to do something if that thing is enjoyable rather than a painful chore. He said:

“For those trying to stop smoking, e-cigarettes have profoundly changed the experience. For the first time quitting cigarettes is no longer associated with being a ‘patient’ and personal struggle.”

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for securing this important debate. As a non-smoker, I think there is nothing worse than sitting outside a café in London or Shropshire and having my lungs full of somebody else’s smoke, or indeed trying to walk to Parliament and taking in a street full of smokers’ smoke. Having said that, I am a libertarian—if people want to smoke, they should be free to do so. His substantive point on public health education is absolutely right: the campaign against smoking is not over. In my constituency of The Wrekin, 19,000 people still smoke. Does he agree that public health is important?

[Mr Jones]

I do indeed. I will also comment on my hon. Friend’s point about other people having to endure smokers’ smoke. One point that the Government make in their response to the Science and Technology Committee’s report is that heated cigarettes are far less offensive to other people than combustible cigarettes.

Consumers’ principal reason for using e-cigarettes is to give up smoking. According to Action on Smoking and Health, 62% of ex-smokers use e-cigarettes for that purpose, and the majority of users have successfully quit smoking. However, it might well be that we have now passed the apogee of the e-cigarette effect. According to the Office for National Statistics, the number of new e-cigarette users peaked at 800,000 in 2013-14. Since then, the number has approximately halved every year, down to 100,000 in 2016-17. It is not the case that the remaining smokers do not want to quit; the ONS reports that nearly 60% do. For some, however, the experience of using e-cigarettes does not come sufficiently close to that of smoking to be an adequate substitute. In this context, I urge the Government to consider the alternatives.

In Japan, heated tobacco is proving very successful in helping smokers to quit. Evidence there shows that 70% of heated tobacco users give up smoking altogether. That is a better conversion rate than for any other alternative nicotine-containing product on the market.