Health Bill [HL]

I do not propose to detain the Committee for long in the light of what the Chief Whip said a little while ago. I was unable to be here on Thursday, but having heard the speeches this afternoon, I want to make three small points. First, tobacco smoking is one of the greatest health hazards of the age. It causes not just lung cancer but many other forms of cancer. It is a major cause of heart disease and stroke. It is a tremendous medical scourge and anything that we can do to reduce the incidence of tobacco smoking is in my opinion crucial in the interests of the health of the community. The issue of tobacco advertising was debated at length in this House and elsewhere in Parliament and the Government in their wisdom decreed that advertising should be banned. I said at the time that I smoked my first cigarette in a mining village in Durham county when I was 10 years of age. By the time I was 14, I was smoking not regularly but frequently when I could avoid being spotted by my parents. By the time I was in the Army in 1948, I was smoking 25 cigarettes a day because I could get a 50 can of Senior Service for one shilling and eight pence on my hospital ship. I did not know the hazards at that time. I gave up smoking completely when I was in my mid-40s. Happily, the statistics show that if you give up in your mid-40s, the incidence, the risk of cancer and so on, after another five years falls to that in the non-smoker. Recently agreed guidelines to the WHO framework convention on tobacco control define retail displays, vending machines and tobacco packaging as forms of advertising and promotion and recommend that parties to the FCTC, which includes the UK, should ban retail displays and the sale of tobacco products in vending machines and consider the adoption of plain packaging. I warmly support all those initiatives.