Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 34 in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, to which I and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, have added our names. I declare an interest as the president of the Local Government Association. I thank ASH—Action on Smoking and Health—for its briefing, in which it laid out these amendments clearly. It supports the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, though not the one in my name; however, it raises some really interesting points around what we are trying to do and how far we need to go. It is important to raise the issue of greenwashing and to look at better solutions than the one we currently have. Although this amendment does not go as far as some want, it is a step forward. I came to this amendment, which looks at the equivalent number of plastic straws that are in each cigarette—it is two plastic straws—because I worked on the impact of the ban on plastic straws on disabled people. Disabled people were vilified for daring still to want to use plastic straws, whereas people who smoke do not seem to have that same level of pressure against them. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, always makes really interesting speeches and asks really interesting questions. Are we doing this from the point of view of public health, the environment or littering? I would say, “All of them”. As somebody who has never smoked—I question how interesting any of the parties I went to as a teenager were—I presumed that filters were safer. It is only when you do the research that you realise that people have been deceived into thinking that they are safer than they actually are. The number of butts that are littered worldwide—4.5 trillion—is absolutely horrendous; it is the equivalent of 1.69 billion pounds of toxic trash. Look at the impact on the UK: a minimum of 3.9 million butts are littered every day. I am also interested in the fact that cleaning up these cigarette butts costs local authorities around £40 million a year; I think that that money could be spent far better in different ways.