My Lords, my name is also attached to Amendments 60 and 62. I will speak briefly to them and try not to repeat some of the arguments we have already heard. I will also say how much I welcome government Amendment 57B. In Grand Committee, the strength of feeling across your Lordships’ House on the issue of standardised packaging of cigarettes was crystal clear, and the Government are to be strongly applauded for responding with their own amendment, which is very well founded and very persuasive. I, too, look forward to Third Reading, when the Government will introduce additional measures around proxy purchasing and e-cigarettes.
At the beginning of these debates, some noble Lords raised questions about the logic of including an amendment on the packaging of cigarettes in a Bill whose stated remit is children and families. To my mind, the relevance is unequivocal—this is the very nub of the issue, which is why we are discussing it today. Preventing the uptake of smoking among the young is primarily an issue of child protection. As we have already heard today, each year around 200,000 under-16s take up smoking. For some, it is the start of a lifetime of addiction which will result in debilitating health conditions and, for some in turn, premature mortality. As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, pointed out, many of those children will come from particularly deprived backgrounds. We have already heard about children in care and I would draw your Lordships’ attention to teenage mothers, who, according to an ONS survey, are six times more likely than the average mother to smoke throughout their pregnancy, to the detriment of both their own and their baby’s health.
Standardised packaging, bearing clear anti-smoking messages, is the first key step to reducing the attractiveness of this lethal habit to children and young people. As we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, we should be absolutely clear that tobacco packaging and branding is not innocuous. It is undoubtedly, at the moment, targeted at the young—the industry documents released in the USA about this were very telling indeed, although I do not intend to repeat the details of that. Equally critically, the weight of evidence is mounting that standardised packaging does work to reduce the incidence of smoking. I was very persuaded by the Department of Health’s systematic literature review, which found that, compared to current cigarette packs, standardised packs are less attractive to young people, improve the effectiveness of health warnings
and reduce the mistaken belief that some brands are safer than others. I eagerly look forward to the outcome of the review by Sir Cyril Chantler, who will look at all of this in the round. I will be very surprised if he does not come out supporting the various literature reviews that we have already seen.
Very recently, thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner, I had the privilege of meeting with Nicola Roxon, the former Australian Minister for Health who was instrumental in the implementation of standardised packaging there. I was very impressed as she explained to us the impact that standardised packaging was having as part of—this is absolutely critical—a wider anti-smoking strategy in no longer portraying smoking as cool and glamorous or cigarettes as a “must have” accessory, but instead portraying a much less desirable, and far more truthful, image.
It is revealing that hard data are already coming from Australia—something that I am sure Sir Cyril will want to look at. A study in Victoria, Australia, published in the British Medical Journal, concluded that when consuming cigarettes from the new packs, smokers are 66% more likely to think their cigarettes were of poorer quality, 70% more likely to say they found them less satisfying and 81% more likely to have thought about quitting at least once a day. Why is that? Because standardised packs carry powerful health messages that expose the reality of smoking. Frankly, having seen some of the images, it would take a very strong stomach or tightly closed eyes to be unaffected by them.
4.45 pm
I will say a few words in support of Amendment 62 on smoking in cars, which my noble friend Lord Ribeiro has already covered very eloquently. For me the nub of the issue is that as a nation we have recognised the harm that passive smoking can do and we have made laudable strides in mitigating its effects, by banning smoking in public places, on public transport and in work vehicles. There is a glaring omission: every day children across England are exposed to dangerously high levels of smoke when travelling in the family car. According to the British Lung Foundation—this is a different statistic—more than 430,000 children every week will be exposed to it.
In Grand Committee, in all the debates and earlier this afternoon it came up that whenever proposals of this sort are put forward some will argue that this is extending the reach of the nanny state: this is private space, where the Government should not get involved. But clearly there are overriding reasons for acting now to safeguard that most precious commodity, the health of our children. We hear lots of people, generally from the tobacco industry, talking about the rights of smokers, but who is speaking up for the rights of the child? Every parent can smoke if they want to, but surely every child should have the right to be in a safe environment, which includes when they are in a car.
When I read through the statistics, the one that most brought it home to me was that to which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, has referred—that within the confines of a stationary car with a roof and the
windows closed, a single cigarette can create concentrations of smoke 11 times greater than in the average smoky pub. How many parents would knowingly want to expose their child to such a toxic atmosphere with such adverse long-term effects on health? The answer of course is very few. Let us never forget that there is huge public support for this ban. A recent survey found that 80% of the public support it and so do 86% of children.
In Committee, my noble friend Lord Howe raised concerns about enforcement, but it must be possible to find a way forward here. The police already have a number of duties with respect to private vehicles, including on seat belts, intoxication levels of the driver, mobile phones and the use of child-safety seats and restraints. Those are not always easy to enforce and we may not have got things quite right yet, but I do not see why that role, primarily undertaken by the police, cannot with careful thinking also be undertaken in relation to smoking in cars with children.
We have a precedent. Seven out of eight states in Australia have adopted this legislation and found a way of enforcing it. We can learn something from them. I like to think that we can take this forward on a cross-party basis. I agree that it is too important to become a party-political football and it should be an issue that we can all agree on.
This has been an interesting debate. Is it better to have legislation or a public-education campaign? The latter would probably be effective. My own view, backed up by the statistics on wearing seat belts given by my noble friend Lady Finlay, is that having the two together is the most effective. We are not talking either/or; it is a clear case of both/and. I hope that today we send out a message, loud and clear from this Chamber, that it is simply not acceptable to expose your children to second-hand smoke in the car.