Health Bill [HL]

I follow the noble Earl, who made an impressive and powerful speech. One can sum it up by indicating his view that an inadequate case has been made by the Government for the ban on the display of tobacco products. The Government’s case ignores the fact that the display one sees—I hope no one is blind to this—contains the words "smoking kills", and each packet of cigarettes has rather unpleasant information on it, pictorial and otherwise, because only three months ago the Government devised regulations for these hard-hitting indications of what smoking can do. The noble Earl’s description of the evidence from Saskatchewan in particular, other Canadian provinces and Iceland, is surely correct. What one sees from those provinces and from Iceland is a coincidence between a fall in smoking and the ban on display at the same time as other things have been going on, including, of course, the rise in prices and the rise in taxes, let alone the perfectly good propaganda—I am sorry if that is a bad word—which other Governments indulge in, as indeed does ours. The noble Earl quoted most effectively from Yvette Cooper’s statements in the early part of this decade at the time of the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002. I repeat her point that it is perfectly legitimate for products to be displayed with prices so that they can be sold because, after all, tobacco is a legal product. I emphasise that it is a legal product. The Government must know that it would be ridiculous to try to use this as an undercover way of making it illegal. We have to remember that 20 per cent of the population smoke. They surely have some expectation of consideration in what is being done by the Government in furthering their perfectly legitimate aim of reducing smoking among young people, if not among the population generally. That is a perfectly good objective. However, as I indicated on a previous amendment, we have a hugely successful ban on smoking in public places. I am not a smoker and I have benefited from being able to go to meetings, pubs and restaurants without having other people’s unpleasant smoke affecting my enjoyment of the environment. There is to be a review next year and it seems to me entirely premature to start introducing new restrictions. Further to the powerful points made by the noble Earl, Lord Howe, I add that removing point-of-sale displays would have an adverse effect on manufacturers and retailers and are particularly damaging in a recession. Fancy introducing this when retailers, particularly SMEs, are in economic difficulty. In an attempt to claim that they are conscious of the damaging effects of the measure on smaller retailers, the Government have said that they will introduce the ban for large outlets in 2011 and for smaller retailers only in 2013. That, in itself, distorts competition between the big and the small. What do the Government think they are doing interfering in normal competition between different types of retailers in that way? In any case, there is little doubt that the restrictions on display will adversely affect competition generally, especially as display is one of the few ways left for the consumer to know what brands are available. As we have said, advertising and other forms of promotion have been banned for years. You may or may not call this advertising—that is a matter of choice—but it is different. Now it is sought to ban even display at point of sale. The Government are trying to go much too far much too quickly. I do not think that noble Lords will vote in favour of this part of the Bill on Report.