Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Baroness Gerada Excerpts

Tuesday 24th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

If my noble friend is correct, I will absolutely and humbly correct myself. Maybe we could have a drink afterwards and compare notes on that.

On the question of freedom, I too am a passionate believer and fighter for freedom. However, the freedoms I care about are not only the freedom of choice but the freedom not to be impoverished by taxes and not to see my nation, my country, ruined by the health, welfare and productivity costs of carcinogenic, nasty toxins such as cigarettes. The financial cost on ourselves, and particularly on our children, of this industry is absolutely enormous and is still growing, even if the numbers have stalled. So the freedom from addiction and debt should be included in any discussion of what the freedoms are. For those reasons, I will be voting against this package of measures.

[Baroness Gerada (CB)]

My Lords, I am also against these amendments. I will disclose a conflict of interest: I started smoking when I was 16—and 33 years later, like many of us who start to smoke at that age, because it is a childhood disease, I gave up.

We know and have heard about all the health effects of smoking, but we also have to realise that smoking is an easy addiction to start. I have looked after every addiction—heroin, cocaine, alcohol—and smoking is the easiest. You need only two cigarettes for 80% of people to be addicted, like me, for 33 years, and many people, like me, try to give up.

It is not just addiction that is the problem. It is not even about death, although death is a bad outcome to have. It is also about all the other complications. Like many smokers, I have lost many of my teeth. Our eyesight goes. We have skin problems. Smoking causes all sorts of things.

As a GP for nearly 30 years, I am pleased that I have seen a massive reduction in people with smoking-related diseases. My surgeries used to be full of what we call blue bloaters and pink puffers and full of people with premature heart disease. It is not an accident that I no longer see that in my consulting room; it is because of the hard work of our Chief Medical Officers, the Department of Health, ASH and many others to stop normalising smoking.

On the issue of the black market, there is of course a price differential. Wherever there is a price differential you will get a black market, whether it is diesel, cigarettes, alcohol or whatever. But the Bill is about stopping people starting—as the noble Lord said, preventing the next generation that has not even been born from starting. We have to focus on prevention, which is what the Bill is about.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, called this a world-leading policy. It is world-leading, because no one else in the world has chosen this policy. One wants to know why. At least the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, admitted that this was novel and therefore untested. Can we at least have a little humility by admitting that the Bill is an experiment? It is a risk.

How you do age verification, as rather wittily described by the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham, is a bit untested. How will we cope with the 84 year-old versus the 85 year-old—will there be a scrap? It is said that it is not going to happen for many years, but I thought the idea of legislators was that you were meant to think about the future, not just tomorrow, and the long- term implications of policies that pass.

Let us be honest: there is no good practice to copy with this Bill. There is no evidence about exactly how it will work or whether it will work. The claims on its behalf are largely based on modelling and speculation, and that is not evidence; it is not scientific. Therefore, the moral high ground and the sense of certainty deployed by those who are enthusiastic about the Bill, and the disdain towards those of us who are sceptical about it, are just a little misplaced.

I therefore request that, as we go through the very short Report stage, because a lot of us have been through a longer Committee stage, we are honest about things such as cost-benefit analysis—what is lost, what is gained—and, rather than moral righteousness, consider whether this is actually fit for purpose, even the purpose of those people who are putting the Bill forward. Whatever the intentions of those promoting the Bill, many of the clauses in it are counterproductive.

I know we are not on this section yet, but as an ex-smoker who started vaping, I am utterly distraught that we now have a Bill that, to all intents and purposes, treats vaping and tobacco as interchangeable, despite a denial by the Government. I do not think that there will be the health gain that is claimed.

My final point at this time—because I will be back —is that it is a little rich to sneer about freedom. Saying the word “libertarian” gives certain people a thrill; they can feel as though they are morally virtuous. I do not consider myself to be a libertarian, despite what Wikipedia says. However, I fully embrace living in a free society. I do not think that freedom is something I should be embarrassed about, nor that saying that people should be given choices about their lifestyles makes you to the right of Genghis Khan, or whatever it is that people are implying—or, worse, in the pay of big tobacco, which is the inference of many of the contributions. At some stage relatively soon, lots of adults—the 84 and 85 year-olds, because these kids do grow up to be adults—will be denied a choice. This Bill affects adults.

People can make choices about whether they take risks in their health. I suspect that practically everyone I know is using those weight-loss injections. To me they are a bit risky—I think, “Are they safe?”—but I am not mounting a campaign yet, because half this House would be out. People say it is worth the risk. A lot of people do daft things such as going skiing—mad; too risky for me. There are all sorts of things. People have been known to have the odd extra pint or eat the odd greasy breakfast. People take risks and make choices about their health all the time.

I do not want more people to smoke, but I also think that, in a free society, we have to give a certain degree of room for people to make choices—even the wrong choices. We live in a free society. Deciding the right and wrong choice is what happens in authoritarian regimes, but in a free society we say, “I don’t think you should do that, but I’m not necessarily going to legislate so that you can’t do everything I personally disapprove of”. We should not even say, “You shouldn’t do that, because I know best for your health what you should and shouldn’t do”. In medical ethics, there are times when you go to your doctor, who says, “Take this”, and you say, “I decline to take that medication; I do not want that intervention”. In a free society, a doctor cannot force you to do what you do not want to do—even the virtuous health professional who we are all meant to revere.

As we carry on this Report stage, can we all show a bit of humility? Living in a free society puts before us difficult moral decisions. There is no necessarily right or wrong. We are allowed to scrutinise a Bill that is put before us without being accused of somehow being evil because we do not go along with the Bill. Just because the Conservative Government, when they were in, and the Labour Government now agree—if that is the basis on which we should not scrutinise, we might as well all go home. I am sad to say that, for some of us, the Conservative Party has had far too much agreement with the Labour Party over recent decades.