Electronic Cigarettes

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Thursday 29th June 2023 Westminster Hall

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Latham, and to respond to the points made in the course of this afternoon’s debate on behalf of the official Opposition. I thank the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) not just for securing the debate, but for the enormous amount of campaigning work that she is doing on this issue and for the wide-ranging and detailed scene-setting speech she gave at the beginning, which highlighted the extent of the challenge and the severity of the risk to children’s health.

Sadly, I think the hon. Lady has more work to do on her colleagues in the Government when it comes to her proposal to ban disposable vapes. The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care gave a speech this week on

“recasting prevention from a Conservative perspective”—

whatever that means—in which he argued that bans are left wing and an affront to personal freedom. I look forward to finding out what that means for the Government’s drugs policy, but let me be the first to welcome the hon. Lady—our new comrade—to the left. The lyrics to “The Red Flag” are in the post.

I will address the point raised by the right hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker). The central argument put forward by the vaping industry is that, at their most effective, e-cigarettes are a useful tool for driving down smoking rates. As Dr Javed Khan highlighted in his 2030 smokefree review, if we want to create a smokefree Britain, using vapes and other smoking cessation aids will be essential in reaching that ambition, but we should be under no illusion: although vapes are unquestionably less harmful than cigarettes, they are none the less harmful products.

I share the deep concerns that Members have expressed about the impact that the vaping industry is having on children, because it is not targeting children to get them off cigarettes, but to get them on nicotine. I do not care what the industry leaders told the Health and Social Care Committee yesterday; frankly, they are insulting the public’s intelligence. If someone walks down pretty much any high street in our country today, they will be able to buy brightly coloured vapes and e-liquids with names such as Vimto Breeze, Mango Ice, or indeed Unicorns. There is no doubt that these products are being designed, packaged, marketed and sold deliberately to children.

It is no wonder that there has been an explosion of under-age vaping in recent years. Action on Smoking and Health estimates that in just the last three years, under-age vaping has increased by 50%, which shows that the vast majority of kids are being exposed to e-cigarette promotions. In this debate today, we have heard about the impact of illicit goods and the harmful substances that many of these products, which are often sold to children, contain. I personally have heard horrifying stories about the extent of their promotion on popular social media platforms, where children are able to buy them with ease, although, frankly, they can also chance their arm quite successfully on our high streets.

The effects of these products should seriously trouble us all. Teachers have to monitor toilets in schools where children congregate to vape; children make up excuses to leave their classroom in order to satisfy their nicotine cravings; and children in primary school, aged nine or younger, end up in hospital because of the impact of vaping. Paediatric chest physicians report that children are being put in intensive care units for conditions such as lung bleeding, lung collapse and lungs filling up with fat. One girl who started vaping while she was at school told the BBC last week that she has:

“no control over it. I start to get shaky and it’s almost all I can think of.”

I have seen some people warning of a “moral panic” about under-age vaping, but children who are addicted to a drug are unable to focus in the classroom, and it affects their behaviour in other ways, too. We cannot sit back and allow a new generation of kids to get hooked on nicotine.

I recognise that this concern is shared by Members across the House, but I have to say that it is hard to swallow the comments of Ministers, including the Prime Minister, who try to grab headlines today by promising a crackdown on under-age vaping at some time in the future, because they had a chance to vote for such a crackdown two years ago. Labour tabled an amendment to the Health and Care Act 2022 to ban the marketing of vapes to under-18s, and it was Conservative Members who voted it down. I hope that Ministers have had a genuine change of heart, but either way there will be action on this issue after the general election. The next Labour Government will come down like a ton of bricks on companies pushing nicotine to children and we will ban the branding and advertising of vapes to children.

I want to press the Minister on the Government’s progress towards their Smokefree 2030 target, which Cancer Research UK estimates they are set to miss by nine years. That will result in thousands of additional deaths due to the health impacts of tobacco and pile more and more pressure on an already overburdened national health service. Cancer Research UK also estimates that, on current trends, smoking will cause one million cancer cases by 2040. What are the Government planning to do to get us back on track?

What has happened to the Government’s tobacco control plan, which was promised in December 2021? Prevention is better than cure, so the next Labour Government will shift the NHS from being a service focused only on treating sickness to one that prevents ill health in the first place, because that approach is better for patients and less expensive for the taxpayer. We would make all hospital trusts integrate smoking cessation interventions into routine care and we would expect every trust to have a named lead on smoking cessation. This would come alongside work with councils to improve access to e-cigarettes as a stop-smoking aid, and a clamp- down on the pervasive myths peddled by the tobacco industry that smoking reduces stress and anxiety.

That is Labour’s plan to build a healthier society; that is Labour putting the vaping industry on notice that we will not sit idly by and allow a generation of young people to become addicted to nicotine. Where is the Government’s plan?