Electronic Cigarettes
(asked on 11th October 2017) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether e-cigarettes can be promoted in public health campaigns under the Tobacco Products Directive.
As announced in the England Tobacco Control Plan published 18 July 2017, the Department will monitor the impact of regulation and policy on e-cigarettes and novel tobacco products in England, including evidence on safety, uptake, health impact and effectiveness of these products as smoking cessation aids, to inform our actions on regulating their use.
Public Health England will continue to provide the evidence annually on e-cigarettes and other novel nicotine delivery systems until the end of Parliament in 2022 and will include within quit smoking campaign messages about the relative safety of e-cigarettes compared to smoking.
The Department has published guidance on Article 20(5) of the EU Tobacco Products Directive covering restrictions on advertising electronic cigarettes. That guidance states that “a public health campaign about relative risks of e-cigarettes versus tobacco products by Public Health England or local stop smoking services are not advertisements made in the course of a business and therefore not covered by these restrictions”. The guidance is published here:
The Government will review where the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union offers opportunities to re-appraise current regulation to ensure this continues to protect the nation’s health.
The Government also has a statutory duty to conduct an implementation review of the Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016 by the end of May 2021 to assess its impact.