Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Debate between Lord Moylan and Lord Young of Cookham

Committee stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 3 and 17. The bulk of the amendments in this group are to do with age verification, but mine are not, and I do not intend to speak about age verification. However, the process of numerical determinism that governs our actions and procedures means that I have the privilege of speaking first in this group.

My amendments are to do with the question of whether certain regulations should be approved and made by the affirmative or negative process, which I hope is a relatively uncontroversial topic. Indeed, I hope that it will find support across the Committee, because I wish to move from the current arrangement whereby these regulations are made under the negative process to the affirmative process, which generally finds favour among your Lordships.

Both amendments require certain specific regulations—not all regulations—to be approved by the affirmative process. Amendment 3 relates to tobacco sales and Amendment 17 relates to vape sales. The activities subject to these regulations are what constitute a defence by the retailer if charged with an offence under the Bill. In other words, these regulations state how a retailer must operate if they are to have a defence under the Bill from the charge of making illicit sales. To be effective, these must be highly technical and challenging regulations which will require the broadest consultation with representative bodies, including those representing not only retailers but trading standards and enforcement officers, which I think would benefit greatly from parliamentary scrutiny.

This would involve issues such as—we will come on to this—what sort of age verification would be acceptable and other matters of that sort. As I say, they are likely to be very technical and they will have to work. If they are going to work, the greater the scrutiny they are given, the better. In that sense, the argument makes itself.

I hope that the Government see that there is nothing mischievous about these amendments; the Bill and the operation of it would benefit by accepting them, and there should be little difficulty in doing so. I am not proposing to speak on the broader question of age verification that will come up in the course of this debate, but I wish to move Amendment 3.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 9, tabled in my name, would create an offence of selling tobacco products online. This is a probing amendment.

If the generational ban policy is to be effective, or the alternative policy of an age limit of 21, there would be a clear loophole if tobacco could be bought online, as roughly 9% of sales are at the moment, without any form of age verification. Such a policy would be unusual for the UK, as there is not currently a product that is available for sale in a bricks and mortar shop that you cannot legally purchase online. However, we would by no means be the first country in the world to introduce this measure: Brazil, Mexico, Finland, France and Greece, to name a few, have all banned the sale of tobacco products via the internet, so there are some clear international precedents.

Banning the online sale of tobacco was recommended by the Khan review in 2022 and the World Health Organization, which argued that internet sales constitute

“display at points of sale”

and

“inherently involve advertising and promotion”.

Today you can look up tobacco products on any of the major supermarket websites or shopping apps and see reviews, such as:

“Quite nice for relaxing on a summers day, beside a bubbling brook perhaps or at a test match”,


as one purchaser of Pall Mall Flow Red Superkings commented. Last time I went to a test match, smoking was prohibited.

Separately from the point about the delivery of smoking products, are these the messages that we want smokers to see about such a lethal product, given that such advertising was banned on television some 60 years ago? When retailers sell tobacco products, they are not permitted to display them, yet there are pictures of products online. This seems inconsistent. Products such as heated tobacco and cigarillos have colourful packaging, as they are not captured by plain-pack laws, which seems to be a regulatory oversight. I appreciate that the Government may be doing something about this, so perhaps the Minister can give us some details—but it feels like the online world is somewhere where rules are often bent with little repercussion, and the amendment would address that.

At the moment, online sales are not heavily exploited by underage individuals attempting to circumvent the law. However, we should be mindful of that possibility in the future. If the Government are minded to resist the amendment, I hope that the Minister will explain how age verification will be secured at the point of delivery. Someone born after 2009 can order their groceries online and include tobacco, but they could not buy it in the shop. How might this be enforced without the amendment? Does the Minister plan to go down the route that we have taken for the delivery of knives? Since 2022, a retailer has to verify the age of the purchaser before he or she sells a knife and, if that knife is delivered after an online order, it has to be checked at the point of delivery. Does the Minister have that in mind for tobacco sales? Who will be responsible for ensuring the implementation of the policy if tobacco products are available online? I look forward to her reply in due course.