Tobacco Control Plan

Debate between Will Quince and Steve Brine

Thursday 19th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Steve Brine)]

I thank the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), my ministerial shadow and my friend—she certainly is that.

I congratulate the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Sir Kevin Barron) on securing this important debate. The Backbench Business Committee was an excellent innovation that arrived in this House at the same time as me—there is no correlation between those two things, I should point out—and debates such as this would not necessarily have happened without it. So well done to the right hon. Gentleman, and to all the Members who have participated. As the shadow Minister said, it is Stoptober, which is an excellent time to have this debate, but of course our passion to cut back on smoking rates is not confined to October.

Let me say a bit about the tobacco control plan and try to respond, as far as I can, to the points raised in the debate. My ministerial brief covers a wide area: public health, primary care, and cancer. That might appear to be a disparate agenda, but there is a plan. For me, all of my responsibilities come back to prevention and in particular how we prevent some of the major diseases; cancer is, of course, still the biggest preventable killer in our country, and the link to smoking is obvious and has been given by many Members. To give some obvious examples, our work to tackle the harmful use of alcohol, our strategy to tackle obesity and specifically childhood obesity, and our tobacco control plan are all about doing more to prevent ill health in our country, and above all cancer.

The TCP is not an end in itself; it is part of a plan. The shadow Minister kindly said that publishing it was down to me. At our very first health orals, she asked when it would be published, and I gave the answer that it would be published by the summer recess. She then shouted out, “Which summer recess?”, but the plan had been started and I wanted to get it right and to get it out. It is amazing what announcing things at oral questions will do to our officials. Anyway, we got it out, and I am very pleased with it.

The last TCP ran from 2011 to 2015 and was considered highly successful; I am grateful to the many Members from all parties for saying that. All the ambitions we set out in that plan were exceeded. We introduced a significant amount of legislation over the course of the plan, as did the Labour Government before then. There was the ban itself, then the ban on smoking in cars containing children, and then, last year, the introduction of standardised packaging, which is a first for Europe. The UK remains a world leader in tobacco control, and Governments of both parties have a proven track record in reducing harm caused by tobacco. The country has made a significant reduction in the prevalence of smoking over the past 25 years, from 27% in 1993 to just over 15% today. That is some achievement.

[Will Quince]

At the moment we have symbols on every bottle of alcohol sold in the UK. I appreciate that this is under EU rules, so other Government Departments would need to look at this, but could we consider having “no smoking while pregnant” symbols on all smoking products, rather than just one in six, as is the case at present?

[Steve Brine]

I will look at that point; as ever, my hon. Friend makes a pertinent point from the Back Benches—where I do not think he will be forever, I might add. [Interruption.] It is evidently not my decision.

I have given the relevant figures, and we are now considered by independent experts to have the best tobacco control measures in Europe. We published the new plan this year to build on that success, but there is no room for patting ourselves on the back in this game, and we still have a huge amount to do.

We still have 7.3 million smokers. That exerts a huge impact on our communities and our NHS. Tobacco use is the biggest contributor to cancer, accounting for more than one in four UK cancer deaths, and nearly a fifth of all cancer cases in this country. Research by the Independent Cancer Taskforce reported that up to two thirds of long-term smokers will die as a result of smoking if they do not quit. We have heard from a number of Members across the House about people whom they have loved and lost, and they are not statistics; they are people’s mothers and fathers, and sons and daughters, who have been lost to cancer. Cancer is not contracted through smoking alone, of course, although it accounts for a huge part of the cancer rate. We must remember that 200 people die every day due to smoking; I think every Member will join me in saying I want us to do better than that.

The plan sets our interim ambitions en route to that goal. Over the next five years we want to reduce the prevalence of adult smokers to 12%. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), I would like to go lower than that, but that is the current figure in the plan. It is not necessarily an end-point, however, and it is not an end in itself. We should also remember the prevalence of 15-year-olds who regularly smoke. We want to get that down to 3%, and the prevalence of pregnant smokers—which so many Members have mentioned today—down to 6%. We want to reduce the burning injustice—a number of Members have used that term today— that sees some of the poorest in our society die on average nine years earlier than the richest, so we will focus, as the plan says, on people in routine and manual occupations.

We want to focus on other groups particularly affected by smoking, such as people with mental health conditions and those in prisons. The hon. Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams) rightly spoke about that being part of a wider poverty reduction programme. That has to be central to the plan, which is not just owned by the Department of Health and me. It is a cross-governmental plan and everything that we do should be part of that aim to reduce poverty. That is why the Prime Minister said what she did. I guess that the hon. Gentleman does not agree with everything she said, but surely he must agree with her words on the steps of Downing Street about poverty reduction.