Under-age Vaping

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Neil O’Brien)]

Protecting children from the risks of vaping is a key Government priority. We regulate vaping, with a minimum age of sale of 18; advertising restrictions, such as a ban on TV and radio; and a cap on nicotine levels and tank sizes. However, in the past two years there has been an increase in children vaping, which is why we have already taken action and will take further actions.

Despite its effectiveness as a tool for adults to quit smoking, we are concerned about the risks that vapes pose to children and non-smokers. Vapes are not risk-free. Nicotine is highly addictive and can be harmful, and there are unanswered questions on the longer-term use of vaping. As Professor Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer says:

“If you smoke, vaping is much safer; if you don’t smoke, don’t vape”.

So earlier this year, in April, I announced new measures to step up our efforts to stop children getting hooked on vaping. First, I announced a new specialised illicit vapes enforcement squad. It is a dedicated new team to tackle underage vape sales and the illicit products that young people have access to, hold companies to account and enforce the rules. We are providing £3 million of new funding to trading standards, which will help to share knowledge and intelligence across the country; undertake test purchasing; disrupt illicit supply, including by organised crime gangs; remove illegal products from our shelves and at our borders; and undertake more testing to ensure compliance with our rules, bolstering the training capacity of trading standards. We have already made firms withdraw products where they do not comply with the rules. With the new squad, more companies that fail to comply with the law will be held accountable. I am pleased to announce that the National Trading Standards has begun its operation—that directly answers the question asked by the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne)—and is gathering intelligence, training staff and bolstering capacity to begin its fieldwork.

In April, I also launched a call for evidence on youth vaping, to identify opportunities to reduce the number of children accessing and using vape products, and to explore where Government can go further. Our call for evidence explored a range of issues about how we ensure regulatory compliance. It was partly about the appearance and characteristics of vapes, including colours and flavours, and partly about their marketing and promotion, particularly the role of social media. Our call for evidence closed on 6 June and the Government are urgently and carefully examining the response.

[Stella Creasy (Walthamstow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I know that the Minister is committed to closing that loophole that allows vaping companies to give children free samples, but, as we have all discussed, this is about the direct gateway effect between people vaping and then smoking. Parents in Walthamstow they are convinced that more children will end up smoking as a result of being able to access vaping in any form at all. So why are the Government consulting on limiting access to vaping for under-18s, rather than just stopping it altogether?

[Neil O’Brien]

We are trying to stop access to vapes for the under-18s—it is literally illegal. We are trying not only to enforce the law but to reduce demand, as we have been discussing in this debate. We are not in disagreement about what the objective is: we do not want any kids to smoke or to vape—it is as simple as that.

[Daisy Cooper]

The Minister said that this is “literally illegal”. According to the director general of the UK Vaping Industry Association, 40% to 50% of the disposable vapes market is made up of illicit products. So does the Minister agree that as well improving the regulation of vapes within the legal market that we have heard about so far, we must also see improvements to border security, to clamp down on illicit vape sales?

[Neil O’Brien]

I completely agree with the hon. Lady on that point; this is exactly what our enforcement squad is doing, and I completely agree about the importance of doing it.

On the call for evidence, we will be producing our response in early autumn, identifying and outlining areas where the Government will go further. The key point is that we need evidence to take effective action to stop children vaping. While that call for evidence has been running, we have already taken further steps. At the end of May, the Prime Minister announced several new measures to support our efforts to tackle youth and kids’ vaping. That included closing the loophole in our laws that has been allowing companies to give out free samples of vapes to under-18s, which ASH estimates could total as many as 20,000 a year. He also announced that we will overhaul the rules on selling nicotine-free vapes to under-18s and on issuing fines to shops selling vapes to the under-18s.

The Prime Minister also announced that we will update the school curriculum, to emphasise the health risks of vaping within relationships, sex and health education lessons, just as schools currently do for smoking and drinking, so that kids understand the risks of vaping. We will be writing to police forces to ensure dedicated school liaison officers across the country are using the new resources available to keep illegal vapes out of schools.

I want to use this opportunity to outline the work we are doing to successfully reduce smoking, not least because the Opposition Front-Bench spokesperson touched on it. In the 1970s, more than 40% of people smoked, and it was still 21% in 2010. Since then, we have taken a series of steps, including doubling excise duties and introducing a minimum excise tax on the cheapest cigarettes, that have helped to drive down smoking to a record low of just 13% in England.

We have gone from 21% to 13%, but of course we want to go further. In 2019, we announced our ambition for England to go smoke-free by 2030, which is considered to be 5% or less. Over the past decade, we have made significant progress towards making England smoke free. We have continued to invest in local stop-smoking services, to help smokers get the right support for them. We continue to work in support of the NHS. Last year alone, we provided £35 million to the NHS long-term plan commitments on smoking.

Youth smoking rates are now at their lowest rates on record. In 2021, just 3.3% of 15-year-olds were regular smokers, although of course we want to reduce that figure even further. Through the new measures I announced in April, the Government will be supporting many more smokers to quit through the tobacco reduction strategy. Some 1 million smokers will be encouraged to Swap to Stop, swapping cigarettes for vapes under a new national scheme that targets those who are most at risk and gives them free vapes. That is first scheme of its kind in the world. It is based on experience from the successful local pilots, and is an evidence-based initiative.

Likewise, we will offer innovative, but evidence-based, financial incentives for all women to stop smoking in pregnancy. Again, this is based on evidence that has been gathered during local pilot schemes and the strategy will be implemented at a national level. Shortly, we will launch a consultation on cigarette pack inserts to provide further information to support smokers to quit, which is something Canada has done successfully.

Further, those who supply tobacco for sale in the UK must be registered for tobacco track and trace, and obtain an economic operator ID. We brought in that scheme to tackle illegal tobacco, but we now want to use the existing system in a new way, to help strengthen enforcement and to target the illicit market. From now on, when people are found selling illicit tobacco, we will not just seize their products but remove their economic operator ID, so they will no longer be able to buy or sell tobacco. We are exploring how to share information with local partners about who is registered on the track and trace system, so that they know who is and who is not legally entitled to sell tobacco in their areas, helping to drive enforcement.

We are committed to doing all we can to prevent children from starting to vape and we are already taking robust action in a range of areas. We are actively working on ways that we can go further, but it is essential that those methods are evidence based and that we have measures that will be effective.

[Barbara Keeley]

The Minister will have heard the figures given earlier: my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) said that 30% of secondary school pupils in Yorkshire and Humberside have tried vaping and I said that the figure for the north-west was 29%. I quoted the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health saying that youth vaping is “fast becoming epidemic”. He is talking about an evidence-based plan, but what is the situation around evidence? My local area still has very high levels of smoking, but we are now seeing the same pattern tracking in vaping among young people as we did in smoking. Does he agree that there needs to be different and further action in those places where the figures are so bad?

[Neil O’Brien]

The theme of my speech is that we have already taken action and we will continue to take action, but that it has to be evidence based. A range of suggestions has been made during the debate, and I am sure there will be more, about different things to do with flavours, packaging, colours and marketing. There needs to be evidence and definition about those things. Some people will probably say that we should ban all flavours; some will say, “Let’s ban all coloured vapes”; some will say that we should have plain packaging or vapes should be hidden from view. We will need to take an evidence-based view on all those issues, rather than just assuming that one knows the answer immediately.

It is not totally obvious to me what the position is of the Opposition Front Bench team on any of those issues—whether they would ban all colours, ban all flavours, demand plain packaging, or want the same kind of restrictions as there are for cigarettes in terms of where they are placed in shops. I am happy to take an intervention if the shadow team have answers to those questions. Is it a yes or a no to those things?

[Andrew Gwynne]

What we are here to talk about today is advertising and packaging. I made it very clear in my contribution that the next Labour Government would act robustly on both those issues.

[Neil O’Brien]

Act robustly? I think we all want to act robustly. The shadow Minister said in his speech that he did not like banana-flavoured vapes, but would they be banned? I am happy to take an intervention if the shadow team have an answer. I do not think that we have an answer. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need to have evidence. We need to have an evidence-based approach, and we need to have not just the evidence about what drives these things, but clear definitions of these things on which we can actually take action. We have to be clear about what we are and are not doing within all these fields.

All I was trying to do is to demonstrate that, while we are committed to taking action—I feel very strongly about taking action on this—and while we have done a whole range of different things on this point, we need evidence to make good policy, which is why we are having a call for evidence.

[Daisy Cooper]

The Minister will know that the Government commissioned the Khan review, which reported on 9 June 2022—a year ago. The Khan review took the evidence. It had the consultation and it made very firm recommendations about certain things that the Government should do. Why are we here again? Why are we consulting? Why can the Government not just follow the recommendations in the Khan review?

[Neil O’Brien]

On driving up support for people to Swap to Stop, we are following the recommendations. On the things that we have been discussing in this debate, a whole set of other questions have been raised, on which our call for evidence explicitly invited evidence, because we want to have an evidence-based policy.

[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, because I want to turn to the evidence. We know that, when we had plain packaging and removed advertising around cigarette sales, we saw a significant decrease in the use of those products, particularly among young people. We also have other evidence: Israel introduced plain packaging in 2020 and Finland in 2022. There is plenty of evidence out there on the implications of plain packaging, so why will the Minister not use that evidence and implement things?

[Neil O’Brien]

We are garnering evidence on every different aspect of this policy question. In my remarks today, I have tried to illustrate some of the questions that we are thinking about at the moment, which I am sure we will hear more of during the debate. I was simply trying to make the point that we need definitions of things and we need evidence before we take action.

In conclusion, we are committed to doing all we can to stop children from vaping—that is a personal priority of mine. We are also committed to stopping youth smoking. In order to meet our smoke-free 2030 ambition, we are committed to doing all we can to stop people from starting to smoke in the first place, and to give people the support that they need to quit and save their lives.