Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Lord Murray of Blidworth

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to open Committee on this significant Bill. I have Amendments 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, which relates to Northern Ireland, 127, 128, 130, 131 and 217. These amendments seek to remove, from every place in the Bill, the generational element of the smoking prohibition to be brought in.

Let us not mess around. A generational ban is de facto prohibition, and there is no evidence anywhere in the world that prohibition of a long-standing legal product has ever worked. In time, it will result in the termination of a legally controlled, highly regulated and heavily taxed industry. It will be replaced by an illegal, uncontrolled, unregulated and untaxed criminal market. The idea that because the Government ban a product, they extinguish demand for it, is pure fantasy.

The Government’s policy approach of exceptionally high taxation on tobacco is already failing. A generational ban will only cement their failure. The representation of that failure can be found in the flourishing black market. So long as there is a flourishing alternative market, consumer demand will always be met with cheaper, illicit tobacco. Taxes on tobacco have become so expensive that people are switching in huge numbers to buy cheaper, illicit products. Not only does this result in a decline in vital tax revenue to the tune of about £1 billion a year, but it is doing nothing to bring down smoking rates, which have stalled since 2020, according to Action on Smoking and Health. The Government desperately need to rethink their policy towards tax and banning tobacco, as it is not working and is the single biggest driver of the expansion of the illicit tobacco market controlled by organised criminal groups.

That takes me to the second consequence of driving cigarettes underground: the susceptible purchaser of cigarettes will then be offered the other, illegal products available on the black market. Action on Smoking and Health and the Government maintain that illicit tobacco consumption is in decline, but all the evidence from law enforcement and retailers tells a different story. The Government need to pay attention to what is happening in Australia, where organised criminals have taken over control of the illicit tobacco and vapes market and violence and chaos have exploded across the streets. Retailers are facing the full force of the impact of this violence, with more than 290 arson attacks taking place in the last two years. Even Ministers in the Australian Government are calling out the tobacco black market as the biggest threat to public health in Australia, with organised crime taking a stranglehold over the illicit market.

If the Government are serious about reducing smoking rates, they need to execute a twin-track strategy of pursuing stronger zero-tolerance enforcement action against those criminals trading illicit tobacco along with prioritising more investment in targeted education programmes, youth access prevention, smoking support services and campaigns to educate smokers on less harmful alternative nicotine products.

Implementing a generational ban will be unenforceable. It will only drive more consumers into the hands of the criminally controlled illicit market. It makes absolutely no sense at all. Further, it will deprive the Treasury of much-needed revenue, which will be redirected instead into the pockets of organised criminals. Smoking rates will not decline any further, given the exceptionally low price point for a packet of illicit cigarettes—apparently between £3 and £6 for a 20-cigarette pack—and for hand-rolling tobacco, which is between £5 and £8 for 50 grams. In contrast, a packet of 20 cigarettes in a shop apparently costs about £17. One can see immediately the incentive for purchasing black-market cigarettes.

My final point by way of introduction is that this Government purport to be a keen proponent of adherence to the provisions of international law, but, as reported in the Sunday papers, it is now clear that a generational ban would not be permissible in the European Union. The ability to impose this ban is therefore a Brexit benefit—something that noble Lords will perhaps not hear from the Minister. More importantly, it would be unlawful to introduce it in Northern Ireland.

There is now clear and careful legal opinion, from the former Advocate-General for Northern Ireland, John Larkin King’s Counsel, that a generational ban would be contrary to the provisions of the Windsor Framework. I ask the Minister, in respect of the applicability of this measure across the United Kingdom, whether the Government accept that that is the case, and if not, why not? Are they content to proceed in the face of contrary legal evidence and take their chances before the courts of Northern Ireland? In the event that the law is found incompatible by the courts of Northern Ireland, do they intend to disapply these measures in Northern Ireland, thus creating an imbalance whereby 21 year-olds in Northern Ireland are able to buy cigarettes but their compatriots in Wales, Scotland and England are not?

By way of further background to these amendments, noble Lords will note that the method by which my amendments would take effect is by raising the age of purchase from 18 to 21. This would be much more practicable and manageable and a more straightforward way for retailers to enforce a stricter regime on the purchase of tobacco than a generational ban, which would be complicated, impractical, unworkable and unenforceable. Furthermore, the Government’s own modelling in preparation for the last tobacco and vapes Bill showed that raising the age to 21 would have an identical effect on UK smoking rates as the introduction of a generational ban. Moreover, the Government’s own modelling in preparation for the last tobacco and vapes Bill showed that increasing the age of purchase from 18 to 21 would result in exactly the same outcome as a generational ban, achieving 0% smoking rates among 14 to 30 year-olds by 2050.

One further aspect that I wish to touch on is the impact of the proposed generational ban on retailers. For retailers, especially small independent ones, the introduction of the generational ban presents a number of very profound challenges. Crimes against retailers are already at epidemic levels. Many independent shopkeepers are scared of the impact that a generational ban will have on their businesses and the safety of their staff. There is no getting away from the fact that the weight of responsibility for enforcing the ban falls entirely on the shoulders of retailers, who will have to navigate a new legal age threshold that will change every year and with every customer. Already, the British Retail Consortium records that violent acts of abuse and intimidation towards Britain’s retailers have leapt to an unprecedented 2,000 incidents a day, up from 1,300 incidents a day in 2024. This is a staggering increase. Retailers have consistently tried to engage with the Government throughout the passage of the Bill, but the Government have ignored that audience and their concerns at every stage.

Shopkeepers could not be clearer: the end result of the implementation of a generational ban is that they will close their businesses, with all the loss of jobs and convenience that that will entail. Tobacco and vape sales make up 20% of the annual revenues of many of these shops. With the inevitable escalation of further violence and intimidation towards themselves and their staff, it does not make economic sense in the long term to carry on. We also know that organised criminal gangs are keen to dominate the illicit tobacco market, as they have been in Australia, and, as I mentioned earlier in my remarks, have sought revenge on those who are not participating in their illegal schemes.

This Government tell us that they wish to introduce ID cards. If that is right, would it not be better—if they insist on persisting with a generational ban—to await the introduction of those measures prior to introducing a measure such as this, to avoid the absurd situation when you have potentially an 18 year-old shopkeeper having to ask a 46 year-old to prove that they are in fact 46 and not 45, with no obvious basis on which to ask for that and with all the attendant risks of aggression and difficulty that that would give rise to?

For all those reasons, I beg to move Amendment 1 and commend all my amendments in the group.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 5 and 205 in this group, which, although there has been no prior discussion between myself and my noble friend Lord Murray of Blidworth, point in a very similar direction. I propose in Amendment 5 that the permitted age of sale be raised in the interim to 21—Amendment 205 is purely consequential, so I do not intend to say anything about that separately; I will focus on Amendment 5—so that there would be an immediate introduction on the passing of the Bill of a ban on sales to persons under the age of 21, with a view to replacing the generational ban.

The arguments against the generational ban that have been made by my noble friend are compelling and comprehensive, so there is not a great deal that I can add. But I can bring some experience, which perhaps my noble friend does not have, of having had political responsibility in the past for the enforcement of underage tobacco sales in a local authority through a trading standards department and having myself been out in disguise in a fairly clandestine way, because that is how they operate on such excursions—I will not call them “raids”, because that makes them sound very dramatic; I shall just say “excursions”—in order to test sales at various premises to see whether they are complying with the law. So I have some experience of that.

I think that, in the minds of those promoting the generational ban, there is an expectation that it is going to be self-enforcing. After all, the ban on smoking in offices and in shops, which was introduced some years ago, is self-enforcing. I have never seen anybody attempt to enforce it, because there has not been any necessity. When was the last time one saw somebody smoking in a shop so that enforcement might be required, or wandering around their office with a cigarette or a pipe? It is self-enforcing.

Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Lord Murray of Blidworth

Committee stage
Monday 12th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

Before my noble friend turns to that amendment, I am of course not a lawyer but really quite a simple soul, who is struggling to catch up in some ways with the things he has explained to us. But it seems—forgive me if I have grasped this entirely wrongly—that we are now talking about two quite separate Bills. In one Bill, if your pestilential foot is set upon English soil the Home Secretary, as the Secretary of State, has a duty to remove you forthwith. That duty having been satisfied, the question might arise in your mind: are you in fact entitled to registration as a British national on the facts of your case? I fully accept that a degree of discretion is always involved in judging these facts, because they will rarely be compelling either way. You would be doing this, presumably, from your new home in Rwanda or whatever country it is to which you have been safely deported.

On the other hand, the Bill my noble friend is describing is one through which these people will, having landed illegally, already have acquired some sort of settlement here—the Home Secretary, presumably, having failed entirely in the duty that we are imposing on her to remove them. They will be exploiting the advantages of that settlement and clocking up hours on the clock, qualifying increasingly for British nationality, which my noble friend thinks—I rather agree with him—is a little unfair because you are getting ahead of the queue by getting in illegally. Then the clock is running and you would be accumulating all the benefits. Which Bill are we discussing here? The Bill I thought I was discussing was one through which the vast majority of the people who would be making a claim for registration of British nationality, with very few exceptions, would already have been subject to the duty to remove. How many does my noble friend think will not have been subject to it?

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that contribution. The position, as he outlined in his speech, is that the deterrence effect takes its force from a number of sections in the Bill: the first, obviously, being the detention and removal, as he rightly identified; the second being the bans on the ability to settle or stay here, the idea being that that disincentivises people from entering illegally using dangerous routes. I do not accept that there are two Bills in the way that my noble friend identifies. The reality is that the question of registration of citizenship, which he raises, is unlikely to arise in as many cases as the naturalisation circumstance—I think we can agree on that—so it is natural that what we are talking about is probably an exceptional state of affairs, in any event. That is potentially why my noble friend perceives a dissonance between the deterrent effect and the two factors, but in fact there is no such distinction.

Amendments 98ZA and 98EA, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, seek to expand the circumstances in which the bans on settlement and citizenship are to be disapplied. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, also touched on this issue. We consider that the circumstances in which a grant of settlement or citizenship would be an appropriate remedy are wholly covered by the ECHR, so our view is that the addition of other international agreements is unnecessary, hence the amendment, as we have already canvassed.

I turn now to Amendment 98I tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. This seeks to provide a broader protection for those holding British national (overseas) status. We do not believe this is necessary. The clauses which prevent people from obtaining various forms of British nationality already do not mention British national (overseas) status. This is for the simple reason that no one has been able to obtain that status since 1997 and, consequently, there is no need to ban people from obtaining it should they arrive illegally.

We already have in place a dedicated migration route for people from Hong Kong and, as the noble Baroness knows, it has been a significant priority for the Government and the department to offer this route to British national (overseas) people from Hong Kong in response to the situation there. We have done a great deal for the citizens of Hong Kong and hope to continue to do so. As cited in my response to my noble friend, Lord Moylan, a route to citizenship exists under Section 4(2) of the British Nationality Act 1981. There should therefore be no reason for a person holding British national (overseas) status to arrive illegally in the manner which would mean they fall under this Bill’s provisions.