Earl Howe (Con)

My Lords, I cannot put it better than the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has just done in relation to the recommendations about Allen Carr’s Easyway, which has been warmly endorsed by NICE in its guidelines. This is one of the four interventions that NICE recommends. The content of those guidelines should now be underlined for NHS smoking cessation clinics, to ensure that, exactly as the noble Baroness said, there is an option for those who do not want to remain addicted to nicotine when they elect to stop smoking. I hope that the Minister will take this amendment away with her; I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Moylan for raising this issue. I say to him that there is probably another dimension to his amendment, if one takes literally the wording around what constitutes an appropriate level of nicotine in vapes. We have heard from the Minister that there is a power to regulate this in the Bill. However, again, we have a tension here: on the one hand, there are obvious arguments in favour of limiting the strength of nicotine in vapes that are used recreationally; on the other hand, we want vape dosages of nicotine to be strong enough to satisfy the addictive craving of someone who is hooked on smoking tobacco and who does not wish to go down the Allen Carr route. If you make the dosage too weak, the patient will simply revert to their former harmful habits. My noble friend’s amendment is also useful in the sense that it would enable us to hear from the Minister how the Government propose to reconcile those dual objectives and the potential difficulties that face policymakers in attempting to regulate nicotine strengths. This short debate has brought us to an interesting point in the smoking cessation arguments. I look forward to what the Minister has to say.