Tobacco Control Plan

Debate between Martyn Day and Bob Blackman

Thursday 19th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Martyn Day (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) for securing this important debate on the tobacco control plan for England. I congratulate him on his work over the years and, as a testament to that, on the general consensus today.

Scotland has its own strong tobacco control strategy. The Scottish Government have implemented and overseen a number of progressive actions on smoking, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Stirling (Stephen Kerr) for listing many of them, which shows the strength of the consensus in the Chamber to which I referred. Record investment in NHS Scotland on smoking cessation services has helped hundreds of thousands of people to quit smoking, and our aim is to create a tobacco-free generation by 2034. Last year, the Scottish Parliament celebrated the 10-year anniversary of the smoking ban and welcomed comments from the World Health Organisation praising our excellent example of global public health leadership.

Not everything that we want to achieve can be done in isolation, however. A good example of something that required UK-wide co-operation was the introduction of standardised packaging for tobacco products. However, I want to focus on another area that requires co-ordination across the jurisdictions of the UK, and indeed of Europe and the world: the illicit tobacco trade. I press the Minister to report on progress to secure a Europe-wide traceability system, which is still being discussed at the European Commission, and to confirm that the UK Government will rapidly ratify the illicit trade protocol, the first subsidiary treaty under the WHO framework convention on tobacco control.

Illicit tobacco undermines public health policy because it makes tobacco products available at a low price and often in branded packaging. It damages public revenue because it reduces the take from tobacco taxation. Figures from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for 2015-16 estimated that the illicit market share in the UK for cigarettes was 13%, with the figure for hand-rolling tobacco 32%. The tobacco tax gap in that period was estimated at £2.4 billion, so clearly the illicit trade undermines our tobacco control strategy.

The involvement of the major tobacco manufacturers in the illicit trade is a major concern. Their involvement is evidenced by the fact that their genuine products—not counterfeit ones, or so-called cheap whites—form the largest share of the illicit market. The Scottish Government have committed to continue to support strong national and local alliances to tackle illicit tobacco. In 2009, the enhanced tobacco sales enforcement programme was introduced to enable the Scottish Government and trading standards officers throughout Scotland to work with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to tackle the availability of illicit cigarettes and their sale to people under 18.

As we all know, there is an open border between England and Scotland, and if the amount of illicit tobacco rises in England, it will affect Scotland, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland needs a commitment from the UK Government that they will ensure that local authorities in England are adequately resourced to conduct the fight against the illicit trade. At present, that is absolutely not what we appear to have.

[Bob Blackman]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. Does he concede that the tobacco companies themselves deliberately overproduce products for certain countries, knowing that they will be brought into the UK by illicit means and sold as illicit products? The tobacco companies themselves have a key role in this.

[Martyn Day]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The tobacco companies are indeed the villains in this scenario.

For the last 20 years, the UK has had an effective and well-resourced anti-smuggling strategy, and HMRC’s tax gap estimates have fallen by about a half since the peak in 2000, but there is every reason to fear that that success is under serious threat and that the progressive reductions in the market share of illicit tobacco may soon go into reverse. That is already suggested by recent small upticks in HMRC’s figures.

There is a specific problem for local authorities. Figures from the Chartered Trading Standards Institute published at the end of last year showed that the total budget for trading standards across Great Britain had fallen from £213 million in 2009 to only £124 million in 2016, and that the number of trading standards staff had fallen by more than half. That means that the chance of catching someone selling illicit tobacco or supplying it to an unscrupulous retailer or local consumers is significantly reduced. Information from local enforcement action can be used to help to track the supply chain, and less information means less tracking and intelligence, which cannot be in the interests of either public health or the public finances.

I urge the UK Government to make rapid further progress at the European and international level. The EU’s revised tobacco products directive establishes a new traceability system for all tobacco packaging, and that requires a coding system that can be accessed by enforcement officers to give information about the movement of products through the supply chain from manufacturer to retailer—this addresses the point made by the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman). The system also requires security features to prevent tampering and ensure that products are genuine.

The European Commission has been carrying out consultations and research on the system’s specifications. While I consider its current proposals to be largely constructive and sensible, there are tobacco industry systems that the manufacturers are desperate to see states adopt to implement the directive requirements. The coding system developed by the four major manufacturers is known as Codentify, although it has now been hived off to a nominally independent company. In my opinion, it does not fulfil the requirement for independence in the protocol to eliminate illicit trade in tobacco products. That protocol explicitly requires Governments to take responsibility for control measures, rather than relying on industry self-regulation, which has clearly failed to deliver in the past. I therefore ask the Minister to confirm that the UK Government intend to participate in the European traceability system, and also to state clearly that they will work to ensure that its specifications include robust requirements for independence from the tobacco industry. The industry must not control the traceability system, either directly or indirectly through proxies.

A global tracking and tracing system is offered by the World Health Organisation’s illicit trade protocol, which was rightly negotiated as the first subsidiary treaty under the framework convention on tobacco control. The EU system will have to be consistent with the protocol, but it is obvious that a working global system would be even more effective than one that is confined to the EU. The protocol also contains other important provisions on control of the tobacco supply chain, including the requirement for manufacturers to conduct due diligence with their customers and to keep proper records of their transactions.

The UK Government have stated that they will become a party to the protocol on numerous occasions, including in their new tobacco control plan, and I welcome those statements, but they are yet to do so. I ask the Minister to give a clear commitment that the UK Government will move rapidly to ratify the protocol. A date for ratification would be excellent. It certainly needs to happen before 10 July 2018, which is the deadline if the UK is to be able to participate in the first meeting of the parties in October 2018 in Geneva.

Like others who have spoken, I welcome the tobacco control plan for England. It is not perfect, but it does represent a real commitment to tackling the smoking epidemic. I trust that it will also strengthen continuing co-operation with the Scottish Government, as well as the Welsh and Northern Ireland Governments, in addressing this No. 1 public health priority. However, the approach still needs to be strengthened and supplemented, and action against illicit trade is at the top of my “to do” list.

I very much hope that the Minister will be able to make the commitments that I have called for today, along with other Members on both sides of the House, and I look forward to the arrival of the first truly smoke-free generation throughout the United Kingdom.