Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Wes Streeting and Lyn Brown

2nd reading
Tuesday 16th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I admire the right hon. Gentleman for sticking to his convictions as a libertarian in making that case, even though I strongly disagree with him, but how far does his commitment to libertarianism go? He is defending the right of our country’s children to become addicted to nicotine for the rest of their life, which is an extraordinary argument. There are 356,000 people in his local area on NHS waiting lists. Does he want a future where that gets worse and the disease burden and cost pressures rise? When he was in government, the low-tax Conservatives crashed our economy and sent people’s mortgages through the roof, and rents, bills and the tax burden rose. That is their record. I wish he would do more to stand up for his low-tax convictions than his libertarian desire that children growing up in our country today should become addicted to nicotine. I have to respectfully disagree with him.

Compared with three years ago, half a million more people are out of work due to long-term sickness. People’s careers are being ruined by illnesses that prevent them from contributing to Britain’s economic success. We cannot build a healthy economy without a healthy society. Not only is there a moral argument for backing this progressive ban, based on the countless lives ruined by smoking and our shared determination to make sure that children growing up in Britain today will not die as a result of smoking, but there is an economic argument, too.

It is certainly true that vaping is less harmful than smoking and is a useful smoking cessation tool, but vapes are harmful products none the less. In the past few years, entirely on the Conservatives’ watch, a new generation of children have become hooked on nicotine. An estimated quarter of a million children vape today, and there is no doubt that this is the result of vaping companies’ decision to target children. On any high street in the country today, people can buy brightly coloured vapes and e-liquids with names such as “Vimto Breeze” and “Mango Ice”. They are designed, packaged, marketed and deliberately sold to children. The effect of this new nicotine addiction on our country’s young people should trouble us all.

[Ms Lyn Brown]

A couple of years back, Newham did a survey and discovered that 4% of year 6 children—that is 10 and 11-year-olds—had already vaped. I met Community Links in Canning Town in January, and it has been working on projects to tackle misinformation. Its students explained to me that they and their friends have been encouraged to believe that vaping is somehow safe and will not cause them the same problems with nicotine. Surely we can all agree that the voices of young people need to be heard and that they need to be encouraged and assisted to tackle the misinformation about vaping that is clearly out there.

[Wes Streeting]

I strongly agree with my hon. Friend, and I am very familiar with Community Links, which does brilliant work. We should take the voices of children and young people seriously—the right hon. Member for Chelmsford (Vicky Ford) made that point earlier.

Teachers monitor school toilets where children congregate to vape. Kids are making up excuses to leave their classroom in order to satisfy their nicotine cravings, and children in primary school, aged 9 or younger, have ended 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 at school told the BBC that she has

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

The question that must be asked of Conservative Members should not be whether they will take action today, but what has taken them so long. In 2021, Labour supported an amendment to the Health and Care Act 2022 to ban the branding and marketing of vapes to appeal to children—Conservative MPs voted it down. In 2023, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) led a debate on an Opposition day motion on the same proposed ban—once again, Conservative MPs failed to support it. Thanks to their delay in acting against this, and thanks to their awful, shocking complacency, thousands more children have taken up vaping and become addicted to nicotine. Can the Health Secretary tell the House whether the Government’s delay in acting against youth vaping had anything to do with the £350,000 donation her party received from the boss of a major vaping company that sells vapes with flavours such as “Blue Razz Lemonade” and “Strawberry Mousse”?

We are an ageing society facing rising chronic disease. We are approaching these challenges with an NHS already in the worst crisis in its history, with the longest waiting lists and lowest patient satisfaction on record, 121,000 staff vacancies across the health service and 14,000 fewer hospital beds than in 2010. If we do not act today to ease the pressures coming down the track, they threaten to overwhelm and even bankrupt the health service.

Prevention is better than cure. This progressive ban must be the beginning of a decade in which we shift the focus of healthcare in this country from sickness to prevention, which is mission critical to making sure the NHS can be there for us in the next 75 years, just as it has been there for us in the past 75 years.

If the Government are serious about taking on this challenge, Labour has many more plans that they can adopt before they finally call the general election. They could adopt our children’s health plan to give every child a healthy start to life. They could ban junk food ads aimed at kids so that children are not targeted by unhealthy food. They could tackle the mental health crisis facing young people, with support in every school, hubs in every community, and 8,500 more mental health professionals to cut the disgracefully long waiting times for treatment.

They could treat the 152,000 children who have been on NHS waiting lists for more than 18 weeks, ending long waits for children for good. We will do it by providing 2 million more operations, and by providing evening and weekend appointments to beat the Tory backlog. We will have supervised toothbrushing in schools to tackle the moral emergency of children needing to have their rotting teeth pulled out, which is the No. 1 reason why children aged six to 10 end up in hospital. We will have breakfast clubs in every primary school so that kids start the day with hungry minds, not hungry bellies. We will digitise the red book, making sure that all kids are up to date on their checks and vaccines. And we will once again put an end to measles in this country, after it has been allowed to return on the Government’s watch.

We want the next generation to be chasing their dreams, not a dentist appointment. They should aspire to reach their potential, not to reach a doctor. Labour’s plan is to make sure that today’s children are part of the healthiest generation that has ever lived, and this ban is just the start.

The Prime Minister may be too weak to whip his MPs to vote for this important Bill, but Labour will put country first and party second. We will resist the temptation to play games on votes. Instead, we will go through the Lobby to make sure this legislation is passed so that today’s young people are even less likely to smoke than they are to vote Conservative.

I commend this Bill to the House.