Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for introducing this group. I will speak in specific terms against Amendment 188 and very strongly against Amendment 200A. Starting with Amendment 188, I declare my position as a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Customer Service. I note the terrible figures from the Institute of Customer Service earlier this year—these are from people who work in all areas of public-facing customer service—which showed that 43% of those surveyed had faced some incident of customer hostility in the previous year. That figure was up nearly 20%. Some 21% of the people surveyed had also faced physical threats while they were doing customer-facing roles. As the noble Earl said, we have a real problem with shoplifting, but we also have a problem across the board. I do not think the best way to approach this is to look specifically at retailers of tobacco, vaping and nicotine products. There is a need for government action, and I have been working with the Institute for Customer Service more broadly, as I have in the past on other legislation, to tackle this. It does not make a lot of sense to regard this as a discrete problem; it needs a much broader angle of attack. I am very strongly against Amendment 200A, which would establish a government grant scheme to subsidise the cost of age-verification technology to reduce the financial burden on smaller retailers. I absolutely agree that the burden should not fall on smaller retailers. However, I point out that—this is based on work earlier this year by the Social Market Foundation—the big four tobacco companies make £900 million in profits annually and that their average profit margin, looking at the cost of producing and distributing tobacco products versus the price they charge to whole- salers, is 50%. There is no other product that has anything like that kind of return. Due to being involved here, I have not had a chance to look closely at what happened in the Budget today but, so far as I have been able to discover, a fairly standard increase in tobacco duty is coming in at 6 pm today. However, the Chancellor has not, it seems, followed the recommendation of the Social Market Foundation to put a levy on tobacco products on some of those windfall profits. At the time, that was suggested for health measures, but it could indeed go into such a measure as this. It is very clear that the merchants of death should be paying for the costs associated with their products much more broadly than this. But, certainly in the context of this amendment, they should meet any burden of compliance so that it does not fall on the smaller retailers.