Illegal Alcohol and Tobacco Sales

Stephen Williams Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) on securing this debate. I want to make some brief remarks as chairman of the all-party group on smoking and health. My hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) is chairman of the all-party group on beer, and I want to make it absolutely clear that my group is against smoking whereas his, I believe, is in favour of the consumption of beer.

[Andrew Griffiths]

The responsible consumption.

[Stephen Williams]

Absolutely. I saw my hon. Friend just last night responsibly consuming beer in the Strangers Bar downstairs.

The UK is a leader in tobacco control, and I want our country and the coalition Government to remain at the forefront in that area. We have seen huge progress over the past couple of decades in the limitation of tobacco companies’ opportunities to market their products. Checking carefully around the room, I think that all of us, perhaps with the exception of the Economic Secretary, remember popular television tobacco advertising, with catchy tunes. They are now a thing of distant memory, and we will see further changes shortly. I am sure that many of us will visit supermarkets in our constituencies during the Easter recess, and we will no longer be able to see displays of tobacco products because all large shops will have to cover them up. Some shops in my constituency have already pressed ahead with doing so, including the Tesco superstore in Eastville on the edge of my constituency.

The next necessary stage in tobacco control is introducing what has been called plain packaging for cigarettes, although that is to some extent a misnomer. The design of plain packs shows that they are anything but plain, but they would be of a standardised design in order to remove what is essentially the last opportunity available to tobacco companies to promote their products: the design of packs, of packaging within the cardboard pack and of cigarettes, which now come in many shapes, sizes and colours to attract the next generation of gullible young people attracted by glitzy products that they think it is cool to consume. Of course, it is anything but.

I am sure that tobacco companies will fight tooth and nail to prevent standardised packaging from being introduced in the United Kingdom. The Department of Health is about to start a consultation exercise on plain packaging on behalf not only of central Government but of the devolved Administrations. I am sure that tobacco companies will come up with all sorts of reasons why plain and standardised packaging should not be introduced. One reason will be that it could increase the opportunity for the sale of illicit and counterfeit cigarettes, which is the topic of this welcome debate.

I doubt whether the introduction of plain packaging will increase the opportunity for counterfeiting. If it does, it will only do so because the tobacco industry inflicts that problem on itself. Most or all tobacco companies already put covert markings on their packs to protect their legal sales from illicit sales in a market where their brands are clearly visible. Their brands will no longer be clearly visible on packs if plain packaging is introduced, as I hope it is. Instead, the packs will have prominent health warnings and standardised colours and fonts. The fact that they will still have covert markings, bar codes and other measures to counteract the best efforts of those who wish to smuggle cigarettes into our country should mean that moving from branded packs to standardised plain packs will not increase the opportunity for illicit sales.

[Brandon Lewis]

I am not a cigarette smoker, but surely one potential problem with plain packaging is not whether experts and officials can check a code to see whether the product is illegal but whether the public who buy the packs can spot it easily. With plain packaging, the codes will be less easy for the public to spot. Therefore, it will be less easy for them to report counterfeit packs, increasing the opportunities for illegal and counterfeit sales.

[Stephen Williams]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. As I mentioned, the Government are about to embark on a consultation exercise about the various issues that must be considered before we move ahead to a plain packaging regime for the sale of cigarettes. I am sure that that point will be tested with all the current enforcement agencies to see whether it is indeed a legitimate worry and concern. If so, we will have to take measures to ensure that the design of standardised packs makes it easy for the public to distinguish a bona fide, legally sold product of a tobacco company from a bootleg or imported product that does not meet UK standards.

I have just thought of a direct answer to my hon. Friend’s point. At the moment, there are few regimes in the world where plain packaging is the norm. To the extent that the UK follows Australia’s lead, we will be the first in the European Union to adopt it. People who currently import lorry loads or white van loads of tobacco and other products, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire mentioned, and who make enormous profits as a result, will not be able to import branded products from the rest of the European Union, because those products will not be legally saleable in this country unless they have a standardised pack design. It could be argued that standardised packaging will limit the opportunities for people to import van loads of material supposedly for their own personal consumption, much of which we must suspect is diverted into the illicit market.

It would be wrong of us to assume that the trade is rampant at the moment. It is certainly highly profitable, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire said, but the various Government agencies, working together, have driven down the share of illicit tobacco over the past decade. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs estimates that 10 years ago, in 2000-01, the share of tobacco packs sold on the illicit market was just over one fifth, at 21%, but by 2009-10, that market share had been halved to 10%. Unfortunately, the market share of hand-rolling tobacco, which is easier to counterfeit, is still shocking. Some 46% is sold on the illicit market, without any control and at a tax revenue loss to the Treasury.

In closing, I urge the Government, as well as moving to standardised and plain packs, to adopt some other measures. First, all the various agencies that wish to control illicit tobacco should work effectively together. HMRC has a responsibility. The Economic Secretary to the Treasury, who is with us today, has a direct responsibility to work more closely with the UK Border Agency, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire mentioned, also has a key role.

The Government should also work with local authorities. I am all in favour of localism—I have been an evangelist for localism for a long time, and I am pleased that our coalition Government are pressing ahead with it—but we must make it clear as part of the Government’s national public health strategy that local authorities have a duty to use Government public protection officers more effectively in areas of tobacco control. Of course, the police have a role as well. Police and crime commissioner elections are being held in November, and I will certainly ask all the candidates in Avon and Somerset what they will do to stop the sale of cigarettes to underage people and the sale of illicit cigarettes to anybody.

Secondly, there should be a more effective registration scheme for retailers, so that we can separate rogue from responsible retailers. Thirdly, the Government should work with the World Health Organisation to develop more effective tracing of tobacco packs as they travel around the world. The tobacco industry is now global, and many of the cigarettes sold in this country are manufactured elsewhere.

I thank my hon. Friend again for giving us the opportunity to discuss these important issues. Driving down the smoking rate is good for public health outcomes in our country, and driving down illicit cigarette smoking while a legal trade still exists will be good for the public finances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ian Paisley]

I would have no difficulty with the deployment of more people in the worthwhile work of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and other customs and border agencies, but our Committee took evidence from HMRC officials who said that they were satisfied with the money given to them by the Treasury and that they probably have enough people. If HMRC wants more people, it can argue its case, and it will not lack any support from me.

Some people argue that the plain or uniform packaging of cigarettes would solve the problem, but that is utter, total baloney. If people think that by simply uniformly packaging all cigarettes they will suddenly meet a public health objective, they are losing the plot. Plain or uniform packaging will not affect the problem. Every survey tells us that adults do not care if the package is gold, has a camel on it, or if it is red, white and blue. They care about price and taste. A person will smoke Camel lights because they prefer their taste to that of Marlboro. The colour of the stupid package does not matter—that goes in the bin. A person will smoke Benson and Hedges not because the box is beautifully gold with a pair of lungs on it, but because of the product’s taste and availability.

We have to wipe out the nonsense that plain packaging is the panacea to achieving a public health goal and to preventing smuggling. Plain or uniform packaging will just make it much easier for the smuggler, no matter what people say. Smugglers are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect that someone would be so daft as to uniformly package all cigarettes in the same year as we are implementing a display ban so that we cannot see the daft things. We have to recognise that, if we are to have a display ban, we do not need plain packaging. It would infringe people’s rights and on trade laws, and it would jeopardise many legitimate businesses.

I do not hear the same lobby group arguing for the plain packaging of tins of beer, or for the uniform packaging of bottles of wine or spirits. We should remember that diseases as a result of drinking alcohol cause far more damage and create far more costs for our health system than those that result from smoking cigarettes. Moreover, on antisocial behaviour, there are far more fights on the streets of this city on a Friday night, not because someone has had too many fags, but because they have had too much to drink. We have to recognise that the plain packaging argument is, frankly, nonsense. It is not a panacea to solving the problems of counterfeit crime.

[Stephen Williams]

The hon. Gentleman has made several points that need to be knocked down, but I shall address only one. If he thinks that the introduction of plain, standardised packs is pointless, why does he think that the tobacco industry is going to fight it with all the resources at its disposal, and why does it put so much effort into providing attractive packs, colourful cigarettes, gold wrapping and all the other paraphernalia that goes with the marketing of cigarettes? Surely, it is wasting its money if that has no effect.

[Ian Paisley]

The tobacco industry is able to speak for itself, but one of the reasons why it is annoyed is that this is an infringement on its trading rights, its branding and all the things in which it has invested over the years. It would be wrong to turn around and say that we can just remove those things overnight.

The industry argues that it would damage the actual trade, so let us look at that and what it costs. In my constituency, more than 1,000 people are directly employed in the tobacco industry. In Manchester, another 800 people are directly employed in the manufacturing of cigarettes. If we are not careful, those jobs will go to eastern bloc countries and to Europe—they will move out of this country. Will that affect the number of people who smoke cigarettes? Not one jot. The same number of people will continue to smoke cigarettes, but they will be manufactured elsewhere. We will be the biggest losers, because we will have lost the jobs, the tax and the pay-as-you-earn tax.