Contribution
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is not able to be here to move this amendment. For me, this amendment falls in a slightly odd group. I thought that it would be in the first group; then I thought that it was going to be in the group before. It has ended up in this group. I shall talk briefly about this amendment; I will then speak on what this group is actually about, which is a different set of concerns.
The point of this amendment is to ask whether lowering the voting age to 16 would add a layer of complexity to the discussion around any age-gating that is happening in relation to either the generational smoking ban or the sale of vapes and so on. This issue obviously intersects with questions around autonomy, responsibility and any kind of consistency that we might have in relation to how we treat young people.
A lot of concerns have already been raised today, in our debate on the first group, about young people and whether they are mature enough—that is, the vulnerability of young people and so on—but, if 16 year-olds are deemed mature enough to vote and to influence laws that affect society, that strengthens the argument against denying them the right to make personal choices about a range of things; those things could include smoking, let alone vaping. Denying them such a right when they have the right to vote—which implies, we hope, a level of rational decision-making capacity—would seem to be contradictory. So this amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, is a probing one; it would be interesting to hear the Government’s response to it. There is a danger of there being confusion around age, and around whom we think we are protecting from harm, with this contradiction in terms of a different government policy on voting.
I will now talk about the amendments in this group that make a bit more sense to me. I am very supportive of, and put my name to, Amendment 18 from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan. It looks at the issue of a ban on all vending machines and whether there can be some exemptions. I urge the Government to engage with a wide range of stakeholders to prevent the unintended consequences I believe there will be if the legislation carries on with this ban. Surely this law wants to ensure that safer alternatives to smoking are available, especially in environments where they might help people resist having a cigarette, such as hospitals and, in particular, mental health settings.
I am reluctant to push this too much because it is the noble Lord’s amendment, but I cannot work out how else I can speak to it. I ask the Minister whether there is a danger that we are imposing measures on tobacco and vaping—this follows on from what we have just been talking about—without clarity about the differing relative harms of each product. The ban on vaping machines talks to a conflation of products, which I am concerned about.
Vending machines containing vaping products have been used very successfully in mental health settings, providing patients who would otherwise be smoking with a route to giving up. Therefore, an exemption to the vending machine ban for healthcare settings—which, by the way, is supported by the Mental Health and Smoking Partnership, which is a coalition of 27 health and mental health organisations and includes some of the major royal colleges—seems to be something of a no-brainer, as they say.
I started my professional life working in mental health and went on to work in education in psychiatric hospitals for a period. When you first start working with people with severe mental health conditions, who may be sectioned into hospitals, or those with terrible debilitating illnesses such as schizophrenia, the thing that you notice—I remember noticing this when I was young—is just how much they smoke. Chain-smoking is almost part of the condition. All of us who worked with the mentally ill were always concerned that not only were they suffering these terrible psychotic illnesses, but they were smoking so much. The irony was that you also knew that it was part of calming them down; that was how they were able to cope with the heavy medication, the psychosis and so on.
I am not making a case here for smoking cigarettes, because it is fantastic—is it not?—that we have found a substitute for smoking cigarettes for a group of people in society who are already suffering terrible mental health problems, which is vapes. We are therefore talking about a group of people who, by the way, are often locked up in hospitals, having access to those vapes. That is what the vending machines for vapes mean, and it is why, I think, so many people are very enthusiastic about this. There are a couple of amendments so I will just say quickly that that is why this amendment is really important.
I am afraid that I cannot support Amendment 21 in this group in the names of the noble Earl, Lord Russell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on minimum pricing of vaping products. The noble Earl assures me that his £30 vape is ultimately cheaper than constantly restocking. He also says it is easier to use. I have two thoughts on that. First, £30 as a minimum price is rather an expensive upfront cost for the people whom we keep hearing that everybody cares about: poor people. Generally, the problem with poor people is that they have not got enough money. We should have a thriving economy where they can earn money through jobs.