Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, I do not think it is fair to ask a courier driver to verify the age of a person, so the noble Lord, Lord Young, has a very good point, and age verification online is very poor. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, spoke about age gating. I can see why it is popular with retailers, because it would take some of the burden away from them. It has been claimed that the Bill may not currently keep up with technology. Can the Minister say whether the wide powers in the Bill would allow powers to be taken in future to mandate age-gating technology if the evidence indicates that it is needed? Clearly, there is a problem even now with underage children buying vapes. A briefing that I—and I think quite a few other noble Lords—received from something called IKE Tech said that 71% of underage children buying vapes get them from retailers. That indicates that we need a really vigorous enforcement regime. It also said that 76% said they are buying them online, which indicates support for the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Young. On the whole, when people buy from a retailer, I think that I am in favour of a wide range of means of age verification being acceptable. Both these amendments aim to reduce opportunities to start vaping underage, which is a very good thing, because young people who start vaping may not be killed by tobacco but they will be made addicted and very poor by the addiction to nicotine that they will get hooked on. I look forward to the Minister’s reply on that. I would not want to prevent an adult who could not obtain digital age verification buying an effective quitting tool, so we have to be a bit careful about unexpected consequences. One thing that I saw in the briefing was interesting. The claim is that similar tech can also prevent circulation of illicit products by embedding low-cost NFC tags into product packaging so that every legal vape can be instantly verified; this stops fakes at the border and on shop shelves. That is something that we should all be concerned about, because drugs could well be inserted into vapes—and I understand that this is happening already—so people are getting things that they do not expect to get. Of course, something like that would not be legal and, if there was a tag on them to identify anything that is legal, you would only want to buy those. I know that teachers have reported problems with children being drugged by things that have been inserted into vapes, so that is something that we should consider.