Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, I am not going to say much about Amendment 4. I think that, if this Bill is effective, there will not be many people still left smoking by 2040—I certainly hope not—but I do worry a bit about the poor old chap of 95 who has somehow managed to avoid the bullet of lung cancer and all the other health problems but started smoking when he was in the Army and simply cannot give up. Leaving all that aside, as your Lordships know, I welcome the Government’s plan for us to become a smoke-free country. I believe that that is achievable, but we must go further and faster than we have ever gone before; that is what we are doing. Such a plan will require a comprehensive, integrated, monitored and enforced strategy—hence the need for a road map, as proposed in Amendment 193 by the noble Lord, Lord Young, my noble friend Lady Northover and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. It is true that smoking rates have declined by two-thirds over the last half century while smoking inequalities have grown, but, at the current rate of decline, we will miss the Government’s target and the poorest in society will suffer most. We will achieve a smoke-free Britain only by motivating more smokers to quit using the most effective quitting aids, while reducing the number of children and young adults who start smoking each year. The evidence on which policy levers work is quite clear, but what is needed is for the Government both to pull them together to their fullest extent and to report on them. This will require targets, monitoring, enforcement and investment, but the investment required for education and smoking cessation services can be counted in millions of pounds as compared with the billions of pounds that it costs us to treat smoking-related diseases and in lost productivity caused by smoking-related disability. The benefits will far outweigh the costs. As I say, there are big inequality issues in this smoking situation. Smoking drives more than 1 million people, including many children, into poverty by leeching money out of their pockets and out of the local economy. Indeed, only a tiny proportion of the spending on tobacco stays in local communities; most of it goes up in smoke, in taxes or in tobacco manufacturers’ profits. We will probably come on to that next time.