Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I feel I might lower the tone, especially after the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Johnson of Lainston. This is absolutely not my world; I am much more on the grubby vaping/smoking side of the fence, to be honest. However, the world of cigars and other tobacco products is also not the world of the nation’s youth. There just is not an epidemic of teenage pipe-smoking—not that I am aware of, at least. These amendments are incredibly important to the Bill because they are all about evidence and the Bill’s attitude to it. I am concerned not to have a situation whereby “tobacco” is used as a scare word that blinds us to facts, medical science and what is actually happening in terms of real harms and risks. The speech from the noble Earl, Lord Lindsay, helped explain the distinction between cigarettes and vapes in terms of the consumer-based demographics, usage patterns and risk profiles for these other tobacco products. If you just lump them all into a one-size-fits-all, we shall behave in a disproportionate, unevidenced way, based, to a certain degree, on prejudice. Can the Minister also explain whether there is new evidence to explain this new approach? As the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, explained, previous legislation has successfully been used to differentiate in the regulation of these particular tobacco products. What is new that means that the Government now want to treat them all as though they are indistinct? I appeal to the Minister to add some nuance to the Bill, because we really must stop conflating things that are not comparable. We should stop conflating tobacco with nicotine, as I have argued, and we must stop conflating cigarettes with all the various tobacco products without differentiation. I added my name to Amendment 103 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey, but, as he does not appear to be here to speak to it, I shall speak to it briefly instead. This amendment asks for evidence of the potential harms posed by heated tobacco compared to cigarettes. Again, this is important to me. Heated tobacco devices are being used by cigarette smokers to quit smoking cigarettes. It is perfectly proportionate and reasonable to ask for evidence of whether they carry the risk of any kind of significant harm. So far, the Government have not come up with any arguments for why they should be treated as though they are indistinguishable from cigarettes. It speaks to a certain carelessness, if you like, around evidence—and, indeed, around liberty—if specific activities carried out by adults are all treated the same on the basis that a one-size-fits-all approach to public health means that we can all forget the details. However, as scrutineers and legislators, we should never forget the details and always think about the unintended consequences, regardless of our attitude to smoking fine cigars; that is irrelevant to why we should support these amendments.