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There have been attacks on the glossy magazines. I shall conclude my remarks by quoting in full a letter from ordinary tobacconists which appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 4 May 2009. It states:
SIR - The House of Lords will be voting on Wednesday to decide whether small shops like ours can continue to display tobacco products or not.
This is a matter of the greatest importance to 50,000 small convenience stores for which tobacco represents on average a third of trade. The Department of Health has suggested that hiding tobacco would reduce youth smoking, but sufficient evidence to support this theory has not been presented.
We are already struggling in the recession. A ban on the display of tobacco would deal us a new body blow.
Politicians talk about wanting to help hard-working families during the downturn. Not many people work harder than the proprietors of Britain’s small shops. Unlike the banks, we are not asking for bail-outs. All we ask is that any restrictions on our businesses are proportionate, evidence-based and absolutely necessary.
The government of New Zealand has abandoned plans to ban tobacco displays, because it does not believe that the evidence exists to justify the burden this would place on small businesses.
The Lords have a chance to ask the Government to think again about this ban”.
And I am going to read out the signatories:
“Ken Patel, Shopkeeper from Leicester; Mahendra Jadeja, Shopkeeper from London; Solly Khonat, Shopkeeper from Blackburn; Parminder Singh, Shopkeeper from Birmingham; Debbie Corris, Shopkeeper from Whitstable; John Abbott, Shopkeeper from Darlington; John McKeown, Shopkeeper from Ballymena; Fiona Barrett, Shopkeeper from Glasgow; Dev Aswani, Shopkeeper from Swansea; Paddy Paddison, Shopkeeper from Devon”.
The Earl of Onslow: My Lords, my father died aged 57 and we always said that on the morning that he died, on the announcement of his death, both tobacco and drink shares went through the floor. We all know that smoking is the most disgusting habit ever—you cough up globules of green gunge; it makes you smell; and it probably kills you. But it is legal. My difficulty is that I have enormous sympathy with what my noble friend Lady O’Cathain said; I know that she is so right about stopping young children going to the green-gunge stage. Equally, the Government are raking in tonnes of money. Surely it would be more logical and more intellectually honest to say, “Smoking is banned. It does so much harm and therefore we should ban it altogether”, than to hit small shopkeepers. So I find myself seeing both sides of the question. I do not wish an iota of harm to the signatories to the letter read out by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon. Equally, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain. So just to be really helpful, I do not know which way I am going to vote today.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: My Lords, last week a friend my age died of lung cancer. Two months before he died he tried to give up smoking. He had started
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The evidence is strong. We know that 340,000 children try cigarettes every year, 60,000 of whom go on to become fully fledged smokers. We know that those who are exposed to power wall displays are three times more likely to try smoking than are children who are not. That is why we want those big displays to go. It is worth noting that all these displays look remarkably similar. They are not put up by individual shopkeepers on their own; they are a matched design. We have not seen any statement from tobacco manufacturers that they will not support the costs of installing the display covers or the dispensing equipment that allows the shopkeeper to remain facing the shop when he is selling a packet of cigarettes to a customer. We know that shops are vulnerable and such equipment means that the shopkeeper does not have to take his eye off the ball.
It is bandied around that pubs have gone to the wall because of the ban on smoking in public places. I commend to your Lordships the BBC Wales programme entitled “Week In Week Out”, which launched a very good investigation into what is actually driving some publicans to the wall. The reasons are tied up with the franchise agreements into which they are locked by their contracts, meaning that the profit margin on all their products is incredibly narrow. It is false to blame a ban on smoking in public places as the sole cause for pubs going under.
This is a public health measure for the next generation. This amendment must be resisted.
Lord Walton of Detchant: My Lords, I, too, oppose the amendment for very similar reasons. I propose to speak very briefly because much of what I shall say has already been said.
Under peer pressure, I began to smoke at the age of 11 in a mining village in Durham County. By the time I was in the Army in the 1940s, I was smoking 25 cigarettes a day. I remember very well the agonies that I went through when the health problems caused by smoking arose and I tried to get rid of that addiction. We do not want that to happen to our children today.
Tobacco is the only product that if used according to what the manufacturers suggest, will kill one in two long-term users. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, asked why we are attacking the tobacco industry. We are doing so because it sells a lethal product. Tobacco remains the single largest preventable cause of cancer in the UK, and each year smoking-related diseases kill 87,000 people in England alone. I cannot forget a comment in the world tobacco industry journal which said, “If your brand can no longer shout from billboards or cinema screens, at least court smokers from retailers’ shelves”. And that is what these gantries are doing.
I am very much attached to my local convenience store in the village where I live in north Northumberland, and I have talked to the owner. He agrees that the
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Two nights ago, fairly late at night, I turned on the television and immediately switched to Ceefax, if only to find out the county cricket scores. I saw a great line across the top of the screen which said: “News: Children say, ‘Please hide tobacco on the shelves’”. Some of your Lordships may have seen the story. It was a very sketchy item, but it was obviously based on a study of children who felt that the display of cigarettes would attract them to smoking. That was the idea. I do not know its statistical validity, but at least it was an important contribution.
People have talked about Canada and other countries. It is important to realise that the president of the Canadian Convenience Stores Association, who has been arguing that many stores have closed in Canada, is a former executive of the Canadian tobacco giant RJR-MacDonald, which may well have influenced his attitude. I support many of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, and others have said. We must oppose the amendment. This provision is a crucial public health measure to help our children not start smoking.
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Lord Rea: My Lords, there is one point that needs to be addressed. A number of noble Lords—among them the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, and the noble Earl, Lord Onslow—have said that if tobacco is so bad, the answer is to ban it. They should know that banning a highly addictive substance has no effect in reducing consumption; in fact, it may even increase it. The use of cannabis or ecstasy is very widespread although both are illegal, and it shows little sign of stopping. It is better to restrict the sale of a product such as tobacco as much as possible and, in addition to the other measures that the Government have passed, to reduce all forms of promotion, as this Bill will do. The product should also be highly regulated and, I suggest, available only through licensed outlets. At the same time, the danger of tobacco—and of cannabis, for that matter—should be widely explained and publicised, and facilities for encouraging people to quit should be made widely available. That, and not banning it, is the way to deal with it.
Lord Patel: My Lords, I refer to two questions that came up earlier in the debate. One is whether there is any evidence that display at point-of-sale is advertising. We had a lengthy discussion about that in Grand Committee. It is accepted—there is plenty of evidence—that the industry uses display at point-of-sale as a means of advertising. The next question is whether that will affect people, particularly children, and influence whether they take up smoking. The evidence for that was questioned. I, too, was impressed by the evidence presented by Professor Hastings. I did not find it scientifically lacking. The paper that Professor Hastings published is a peer-reviewed piece of research which found that exposure to point-of-sale displays had a significant effect on young people. On the basis of the precautionary principle, it is completely appropriate to introduce a ban on point-of-sale display of tobacco. The evidence shows that the intention to smoke is
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Now I come to the issue of whether or not small shopkeepers will lose their jobs. This is getting a bit personal. Although I expected the Gallery to be full of Patels today, it is not, because they are all busy selling cigarettes. Before this debate I telephoned my nephew, who runs a small shop selling, among other things, cigarettes. They were among the Patels who were thrown out by Idi Amin when he threw all the Asians out of Uganda. I asked him, “Today we are going to discuss this amendment, and if the amendment is defeated, you will not be able to display tobacco. Is that going to matter to you?”. He said, “Yes, it is”. I asked, “Are you going to lose a lot of business?”. He said, “I will, but I don’t know how much”. I asked him if he was going to go bust and he said, “You must be joking”.
Of course there might be small shops with small revenues for whom the sale of tobacco might be significant, but I believe that they are resourceful enough to find a means of making sure that they do not lose out on selling all products, including tobacco. I believe that it is right that tobacco display at the point of sale should be banned.
Baroness Tonge: My Lords, I am afraid that I am totally unconvinced by the retailers’ campaign. I will not repeat the arguments, but I thought that they were very ably put by my noble friend Lady Northover. I, too, am a cynic and I have seen many such campaigns before. I am more convinced by the arguments of Professor Hastings, and particularly his surveys of young people’s behaviour, which is backed up by my observations of the behaviour of my own children and their friends and, indeed, the behaviour of the young people I dealt with when I was in clinical practice. It is also backed up—I do not think that anyone has mentioned this so far—by every medical body, medical college, NHS federation, nursing college and cancer research campaign. Every medical organisation you can think of is backing the Government’s position. That should not be dismissed lightly. If you have any doubt at all in your own minds, my attention was drawn to something that I found in my background reading: British American Tobacco’s guidelines on marketing. Those state that point-of-sale displays set out,
To generate interest and excitement—that is what point-of-sale display is for. It is drug pushing, is it not? That is what it is about. They are pushing their product and they do not consider the consequences. The argument that we all have individual freedom and we must not interfere with individual freedom is all very well, but when the Government, with our taxes, are paying for a free health service at the point of delivery, is it not then the duty of that same Government to ensure as little disease as possible, so that our taxes are used wisely, so that they use their money on preventative measures too?
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Finally, I will just share with you my advice—I do not know whether they took it, I think they did—to my own children when they were experimenting with smoking. They asked me why it was such a bad idea: Granddad had lived till he was 90 and he was all right and he smoked 60 a day—you know the story. I used to say, “That is fine; he was very lucky then, though he does have a much higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease”. Smokers do have a much greater chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease. I said, “When you are pregnant, dear, you are likely to damage your unborn child and make it much smaller and weaker than it otherwise would be. If you are lucky and you carry on smoking, you will probably die of a nice, swift heart attack—cardiovascular disease. It kills you but it need not be that painful. It can be quite quick and there are treatments nowadays, so there is a lot of hope. If you attend the doctors and the surgeons and they do lots of things to you, there is hope; but cardiovascular disease is something that could happen. If you are not so lucky, of course, you will get cancer of the lung, which is a very nasty business indeed. Again, there is hope. Some people can be cured, but the treatments are often pretty awful. They make you very ill and you are unlikely to live a normal life afterwards. If you still think that it is worth it, you should consider what is most likely to happen to you if you carry on smoking, even moderately”. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, mentioned all the things that are bad for us, and indeed they are, but they are not necessarily bad for us in moderation, whereas smoking, I am afraid, is bad for us in moderation, too. “If you carry on smoking, you will almost certainly get chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, emphysema and bronchitis. You will gradually suffocate for lack of oxygen and eventually drown in your own green sputum, as we have already heard. That is what will happen to you. It is your choice. You make up your own mind, but those are the options if you carry on smoking. I am easy about it”. None of my children now smokes.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland: My Lords, I make one very brief point in the hope of winning at least two votes from the Floor of the House—those of the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege. I address the noble Baroness directly because of her comments about the balance between potential harm and condoning exploitation in a visit. That is what this is about; we cannot condone potential exploitation because of another potential harm that we know is not a killer, because we know that smoking is a killer. I am a great respecter of the noble Earl, Lord Howe. In fact, I would have liked to have been persuaded by him because he is so persuasive, but I wish only that I could persuade him that this is a strategic health issue.
The noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, argued clearly for children, and the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, pointed out that it is not the small shopkeepers who will pay for the new displays. When I talked to another noble Baroness earlier, who is not in the Chamber but will vote in a particular way, she said, “I am not particularly in favour of this but I will vote for it, because we are at a point in history at which we will move to these kinds of gantries being seen as an
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The Earl of Listowel: My Lords, I wish to speak for half a minute before the Minister replies. As vice-chairman of the All-Party Group on Children and Young People in Care, I remind your Lordships that, according to the Office for National Statistics, two-thirds of children in public care smoke. For many years, I have talked to professionals who work with such children, and it is very clear that what all children benefit from but which children in public care particularly need is a consistent, unified voice from adults. It is not helpful to have prominent displays of brightly lit tobacco products in stores that children visit, often daily, when one is trying to tell them that tobacco is a poison and addictive and should never be tried even once.
Baroness Barker: My Lords, I shall set out very briefly the formal position of noble Lords on these Benches and address one or two points that have not been covered in the debate so far. I will not take very long, because there is a danger that we will not reach two measures that most definitely will have a positive impact on youth smoking—banning vending machines, and plain packaging—if we continue this debate for a great deal longer.
I came to this debate as someone who strongly supported the tobacco advertising Bill of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. I also advocated the ban on smoking in public places. I, like the noble Earl, Lord Howe, came to the debate wanting to see evidence of what works. Perhaps my biggest disappointment has been that we have been bombarded from all sides of the argument by evidence which, as the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, rightly said, is dubious and highly speculative. I listened very carefully when the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, started to talk about indicative evidence. I wanted evidence that this measure would work.
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We on these Benches supported a number of amendments in Committee from my noble friends, such as an amendment to have a comprehensive strategy, and we supported the ban on vending machines, but we wish to see the evidence on point-of-sale displays. I have found the case made by small shopkeepers far from compelling. I have not met them, but I have read every single piece of lobbying that has come to me. Much of it is overstated, so I am not going to rely on their evidence.
The evidence from Canada and Iceland is extremely weak, and that is the main evidence that has been used by the cancer charities. I am afraid that the fact that it is not convincing has not necessarily been put to me by tobacco manufacturers, who I have the pleasure of not meeting. The NHS Confederation itself said that those studies cannot prove causation. That is a key stumbling block for me because of something that has not been mentioned so far. People have drawn parallels with other products, and I have found many of those parallels spurious. What has concerned me is the number of young people who make their way to finding distributors of other addictive drugs. The policy of “out of sight” has not worked for other drugs such as cannabis and
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The one organisation that I have met is ASH. I have been trying to find evidence not only that this strategy will deter young people from buying products in shops but that it will not drive them into the hands of the illegal trader. For me, that is a major consideration. Having thought about this every day for several months, I have on balance come to the conclusion that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, is right. My colleagues, as noble Lords have heard, disagree strongly with me. It is their right to do so. I respect them, and I respect Members on other Benches who disagree with those on their Front Benches. We will have a free vote. I do not know what the outcome will be; the noble Earl, Lord Onslow, may yet swing it. I simply hope that when any Government present serious public health proposals to this House in the future, they can do so on the basis of independent and reliable evidence. That is what we have missed all the way through.
Baroness Thornton: My Lords, we all knew that today would be a hard fought and passionate debate, and so it has been. The Smoking Kills White Paper of 1998, the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002 and the “smoke-free” legislation of 2006 have educated people about the harms of smoking, have controlled tobacco advertising and have stopped people smoking in public places. These measures have been spectacularly successful in reducing the number of people who smoke; we now have the lowest smoking rates on record.
There was no way of knowing how far-reaching the good effects would be when we passed legislation on advertising and for smoke-free public places. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Walton of Detchant and Lord Patel, my noble friend Lord Faulkner, the noble Baronesses, Lady Howarth, Lady Finlay, Lady Emerton and Lady O’Cathain, and many other noble Lords fought hard against hostility, scepticism and misinformation to win these great reforms. We are asking noble Lords to do this again this evening.
The success of the past means that, since 1998, 2.4 million fewer people have been smoking and countless lives will be saved as time moves on. However, this success also means that the future of the tobacco industry depends increasingly on recruiting new people to smoke and keeping them smoking. We know that two-thirds of people who have smoked regularly started smoking before they were 18. We also know that if they had not started smoking before age 21, there is a very good chance that they would never have become addicted smokers.
It is to help ensure that our children and young people do not become addicted smokers at an early age that we want to remove tobacco promotion through cigarette displays. We do not want cigarettes in our corner shops alongside the sweets, the magazines, the soft drinks and the newspapers. The noble Earl completely failed to address that point, or the point about how susceptible children are to promotions; advertising, sponsorship and celebrity association are all tools that marketing agencies use to promote a product and to encourage young people to use it, to want it and to feel uncool without it.
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It is true that we have stopped tobacco advertising; why, then, do we need to go further? It is because the tobacco displays in our shops constitute promotion in themselves. In 2002, when we debated the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill, we were prepared to leave tobacco displays in stores alone, but we have since seen them develop with lighting, colours and features designed to draw the eye such as clocks and tower cases. There are glass containers strung from the ceiling, and transparent counter-top boxes on which you place your change. Display is enough to cause a problem on its own, without those fancy trimmings; it, along with in-store product positioning, is a central feature of marketing. Being close to the till is a prominent and highly valued position, which is exploited to great effect.
Cancer Research UK has clearly identified the role of tobacco displays in prompting young people to smoke in the UK. Even when the role of other, important factors that noble Lords have mentioned—including parental smoking, sibling and peer smoking, gender, age and social background—is taken into account then brand awareness, based on packaging and point-of-sale display, drives smoking among children who have never smoked before. The noble Earl tried to cast doubt on the research that has been mentioned; I will respond briefly to that. The Smee and Goddard reports were both conducted in the 1990s before measures were taken to limit tobacco promotion and, since 1998, we have had smoking prevalence fall from 11 per cent to just 6 per cent among 11 to 15 year-olds. The noble Earl, Lord Howe, is correct that smoking uptake does not depend on a single factor; that is why we need to continue to educate, to provide services for stopping smoking and to prevent tobacco promotion.
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