Lord Bethell (Con)

My Lords, first, I declare that my wife is a non-executive director of Tesco. Secondly, I spent 10 years working at the Ministry of Sound in south London, where I came face to face with the illicit cigarette trade on a weekly basis. Christopher Upton was the name of the burly character who delivered cigarettes to the club each week; he controlled the London casual cigarette business very tightly indeed. He was a charming, if burly, individual who gave us presents at Christmas and is famous among the legal fraternity for his case, Fagomatic v HMRC, in which he argued that his shiny purple Lamborghini Countach should be deductible for VAT as a business expense, which sadly he lost in 2002. That is the face of illicit cigarette trading in the UK. Since the days of Christopher Upton, the trade in illicit cigarettes has come down by 90%, from 15 billion sticks a year to 2 billion sticks a year. Those are the statistics that the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, rightly gave; they are different from those given by the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, which come from the KPMG report for Philip Morris, the cigarette seller, which are not figures that I feel this Committee should lean on. I can source the number, if it is helpful to noble Lords. May I just say a word about prohibition? I have two points to make about the prohibition of cigarettes for young people. First, as the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, rightly and powerfully said, there is now a clear displacement route to vaping for anyone who wishes to take up this kind of activity. In other words, there is an alternative. Prohibitions come when there is no alternative. Secondly, I remind the Committee that, among young people, interest in smoking cigarettes has collapsed: it has gone from 23% of 18 year-olds in 2011 to 10% of 18 year-olds in 2025, and it is heading downwards. We can only encourage this move with this measure. The amendments suggested in this group would be counterproductive and are, for that reason, extremely regrettable.