Tobacco and Vapes Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Tristan Osborne and John Whitby

Committee stage
Tuesday 7th January 2025 Public Bill Committees

[John Whitby (Derbyshire Dales) (Lab)]

Q There are obviously going to be future health benefits and financial benefits but, realistically, based on what happened in New Zealand, how quickly are we going to feel the benefits, public health-wise and financially? It is going to take years for us to realise the benefits of the Bill.

Professor Linda Bauld: This is quite a comprehensive piece of legislation, with lots of different pieces, so I will give a couple of examples. One area we looked at was protecting more places from second-hand smoke, and the health benefits of that to people who are vulnerable—people with asthma, respiratory conditions and cardiovascular disease—are very immediate. When the smoking ban came in in England in 2007, I did a study looking at admissions to hospital from myocardial infarction after the legislation was introduced, and in the first year we saw substantial reductions in admissions to hospital for heart attacks. So I think some things will be quite quick.

In terms of the pregnancy question, if a woman is not smoking during pregnancy—some of the measures encourage that—the health benefits to the mum and the baby are immediate and long lasting. I also mentioned the modelling statistics on driving down prevalence, which is obviously going to take more time. There are then the regulations to protect young people from vaping, some of which will, I think, have quite a big effect if they prevent somebody from taking up vaping at all, and some will take a bit longer in terms of driving down the rates. It is a balance.

The final thing I would say is—this is my opportunity to make this point, as you would expect—please, let us make sure that we do the research. We must support the academic community to do the research to monitor how the Bill is implemented, so that we can provide evidence that what colleagues have put forward and decided to do actually makes a difference. Other countries will then be able to look at that evidence and make up their own minds.

[Tristan Osborne]

Q I have read some of your research from Edinburgh and have two questions relating to it. First, you said that in the research you undertook two years ago 40% of smokers thought that vaping was more harmful than cigarettes. What is the evidence base for that? Based on my understanding of the industry, and from elsewhere, that seems to be quite a high proportion.

Secondly, linking to the economic argument you made earlier, you are right that deprivation is key. There is more smoking in deprived communities. I have asked all the witnesses this question. Is there a concern that because of the concurrency of people vaping and smoking, the people who are doing both will move to an economically cheaper option—that is, pick up smoking again because vapes might become more expensive because of other measures that are introduced? Has that concern been raised in academia?

Professor Linda Bauld: Let me start with the first part of your question. Those data come from the Action on Smoking and Health survey covering Great Britain, which was funded by Cancer Research UK and conducted by YouGov for ASH. Those harm perceptions are really concerning to me because we do not want people who have never smoked or young people to be vaping but, from the evidence I have seen, if more of those 6 million smokers could switch to vaping, we would see health benefits. I think those misconceptions are largely driven by the media and some of the myths—the really harmful stories that get the front page. We need to deal with that and make sure that health professionals and others are empowered to give accurate advice about vaping. We have got a distance to run on that, and anything that the Bill can do to assist that would be welcome.

On whether people who are dual using, which is a significant proportion of smokers, are more likely to switch to smoking if we take action on, for example, removing point-of-sale displays or take other measures on vaping, I am actually not sure about that. The key point is that we need to continue to make smoking more expensive than vaping and to make sure that we address the availability of tobacco in our environment and in different settings. If we can keep that balance to show that vaping is a good option for cessation and is more affordable than cessation, while we keep doing the research on it, I would be optimistic that we are not going to see masses of smokers who are currently vaping to cut down just switch back to smoking in its entirety—hopefully.