Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Wes Streeting and Alexander Stafford

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for her intervention. I think she makes a perfectly sensible point, actually, and I am perfectly open to lobbying from Conservative Members on how a Labour Government will behave after the general election—she seems to think it is a foregone conclusion, but I certainly do not; we will be working hard for every vote. I can reassure her that our concern has been about children becoming addicted to nicotine. In relation to adult use of vapes as a tool for stopping smoking, I think she makes an absolutely reasonable point about flavourless vaping, and of course she is right that we need to ensure that we get the regulation right on that so that we do not unwittingly deter people from stopping smoking. However, as I will come on to talk about when I come to the vaping section of the Bill, there is no excuse whatsoever for the kinds of flavourings and marketing of vapes that we have seen, which I believe have been deliberately and wilfully designed to addict young people to what is, let us not forget, a harmful substance. I make that very clear.

Anyway, back to the Bill—someone has to defend it, and I get the sense that there are not going to be too many on the Government side, so I will have a go at doing what the Prime Minister is too weak to do and take on the arguments of his own party. They say that the progressive ban on smoking is unconservative. Let me tell them what is unconservative: the heaviest tax burden in 70 years, and it will get heavier if we do not act to prevent ill health.

If we continue down the road that the Conservatives have put us on, with more and more people suffering, falling sick and falling out of the workforce, we will not just be letting those people down; we will all be paying a heavy price for it too. The costs of sickness and disability benefits are due to rise on the Government’s watch, from £65 billion this year to over £90 billion by the end of the next Parliament.

The budget for the NHS is £165 billion this year, and the health service is not coping with existing demands. If society continues to get less healthy, those demands will only rise. If the health service and our welfare service are to be made sustainable for the future, then we must act to prevent ill health in the first place. What better way to do that than by wiping out the leading cause of cancer? It is not just our public finances that are held back by ill health; so too is our economy.

[Alexander Stafford]

I am trying to follow the hon. Gentleman’s argument to its logical conclusion. He talks about substances that are bad—addictive and harmful to people’s health—and have a huge impact on the NHS through those costs, but there are so many more things that are in fact worse for health. Sugar and salt are highly addictive. Does this mean that Labour’s plan is to ban foods with high levels of salt or sugar? Logically, that is the next step, and therefore, if we need to protect the NHS and cut costs, we should be banning anything that is slightly bad for us, rather than actually taking a better enjoyment of life and saying, “A little bit of what you fancy every now and again is okay, and good for your mental health.”

[Wes Streeting]

I think that is extraordinary. I do not think that smoking is slightly harmful; I think it is the single biggest cause of cancer, and I think that the costs to people’s health, to our national health service and to our economy are enormous. This sort of argument—that if we ban smoking for young people, we have to ban everything else—is absurd. I think that the Secretary of State just pointed out the absurdity of it when she pointed to a whole range of harmful things in our country that are already banned.

Let me put the question back to the libertarian wing in the corner of the Chamber. Will the new modern Conservative party not ban anything? Will we have a libertarian dystopia in which people are free to do whatever they want in the name of liberty? [Interruption.] I am just trying to help the Secretary of State by taking on the libertarians in the corner. I would be very sad if she wants me to give in to them but, with 187,000 people on the waiting list in the local area of the hon. Member for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford), I think we should do something about it.