Baroness Walmsley (LD)

My Lords, I support Amendment 22 in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. As my noble friend said, it seeks to prohibit pre-filled single-use vaping pods, mainly for environmental reasons. These things have been the tobacco industry’s response to—indeed, its pre-emption of—the ban on single-use vapes that was introduced in June this year. Single-use vapes were such an effective entry point into vaping for young people and such a terrible blight on the environment. These liquid pods are single-use vapes by another name. Just because you have to insert the pod does not mean that this is a multi-use product. They are cheap and available and have turned out to be just as bad for the environment as the single-use ones were, for all the reasons outlined by my noble friend. Indeed, they have introduced a new litter problem, which is that the removable sticker from the liquid container is appearing everywhere, stuck on to waste bins and pavement furniture after people have peeled them off to insert the pods. Local authorities have to spend time removing those, as well as the discarded vapes. They are just as much of a litter hazard as their predecessors were. Perhaps the Minister will tell us why they should not be treated in the same way as the original single-use vapes. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the industry has only itself to blame for the ban on single-use vapes, because it used them, via its egregious marketing, to attract young people to addictive nicotine products. So the Government were quite right to ban them. The problem with Amendment 145 is that single-use vapes were immediately replaced by the devices we are talking about in this group. There is no point reviewing the effect of the ban on the original single-use vapes alone, because they are all mixed up with the emergence of these products at pretty much the same time. A review would only cause a delay to the introduction, by this Bill, of measures to reduce youth smoking and vaping and to assist smokers to quit—which is an objective to which everybody who I have heard speak so far is committed.