Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, I will speak first to the amendments from my noble friends. My noble friend Lord Russell and I laid Amendment 21 to probe the issue of the affordability of vapes for young people. Currently, the evidence of the number of young people below the legal age of 18 accessing vapes indicates that they are currently affordable. Not all young people are getting them on the black market, because about half of them state in surveys that they get them from a shop. This certainly raises the question of why retailers are selling vapes to young people without proof of age. It also raises the role of price. Minimum pricing is a mechanism that has been used for public health reasons to increase the price of alcohol and decrease the amount that people buy. Why do we not take the same approach for vapes? Besides, as I understand it, if the price of vapes is seen as a barrier to quitting, a patient can have them prescribed to them by a doctor. Is that true? Perhaps the Minister will clarify that later. We want to use this Bill to protect the use of vapes as an effective tool for quitting smoking. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that I do not think there is any contradiction between that and wanting to protect young people from taking up vaping, especially as it sometimes leads to smoking tobacco as well. We are aware that a vape liquid excise duty will come in next October, which will increase the price of vapes. A smoker who wants to use vapes as a quitting tool will not be deterred from buying vapes if they continue to be cheaper than cigarettes because clearly they can afford cigarettes, so of course they can also afford vapes. Can the Minister reassure us that the concurrent increase in the tax on tobacco will maintain that gap and keep tobacco more expensive than vapes? Do the Government have any granular research on the effect of the price of these products as a deterrent?