Finance (No. 2) Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Craig Whittaker and Gareth Davies

Committee stage
Thursday 18th May 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Gareth Davies]

Clause 319 implements changes announced at the spring Budget 2023 concerning tobacco duty rates. The duty charge on all tobacco products will rise in line with the tobacco duty escalator, with additional increases being made for hand-rolling tobacco and to the minimum excise tax on cigarettes. Smoking rates in the UK are falling, but they are still too high. Around 13% of adults are smokers. Smoking remains the biggest cause of preventable illness and premature deaths in the UK, killing around 100,000 people a year, and about half of all long-term users.

We have plans to reduce smoking rates further, towards our Smokefree 2030 ambition. To realise that ambition, the Minister for Primary Care and Public Health recently announced the next steps to help people quit smoking. Our policy of maintaining high duty rates for tobacco products will support the Government’s plan to reduce smoking to improve public health. According to the charity Action on Smoking and Health, smoking costs society £21 billion a year in England, as a result of sickness, disability and premature death, including £2.2 billion in costs to the NHS for treating disease caused by smoking.

At the spring Budget, the Chancellor announced that the Government will increase tobacco duty in line with the escalator. Clause 319 thus specifies that the duty charged on all tobacco products will rise by 2% above the retail prices index level of inflation. In addition, duty on hand-rolling tobacco increases by a further 6% above RPI inflation. The clause also increases the minimum excise tax—the minimum amount of duty to be paid on a pack of cigarettes—by an additional 1% to 3% above RPI inflation. The new tobacco rates will be treated as having taken effect from 6 pm on the day they were announced, which was 5 March 2023.

Recognising the potential interactions between tobacco duty rates and the illicit market, the Government intend to introduce tougher sanctions later this year to punish those involved in the illegal tobacco market. The Government also recently announced that HMRC and Border Force will publish an updated strategy to tackle illicit tobacco later this year.

This clause will continue our tried and tested policy of using high duty rates on tobacco products to make tobacco less affordable, and will continue the reduction in smoking prevalence towards a smoke-free 2030, as well as reducing the burden of smoking on our public services.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

On the Government’s ambition to reduce smoking, I briefly want to mention heating tobacco, in preference, I might say, to vaping.

The only problem with vaping, of course, is that there is absolutely no evidence of any health benefits or health risks. However, with heating tobacco, there is a huge amount of evidence, particularly from Japan, about its health benefits, in helping people to reduce and stop smoking. I just wondered whether the Minister has had any indication that heating tobacco has been looked at as an alternative to vaping. Of course, adding extra duties to it is an inhibitor to people reducing or stopping smoking.

Finance (No. 2) Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Craig Whittaker and Gareth Davies

Committee stage
Thursday 18th May 2023 Public Bill Committees

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

May I declare a loose interest?

I have an elderly mother who lives in Australia. As she is elderly, I am spending more and more time going down there. That aside, has the Minister done any evaluation of air passenger duty and the economic competitiveness of the UK versus our European partners?

I ask that because I know from previous years travelling down to Australia that it has been much more viable for me to catch a flight to Amsterdam, Oslo or wherever and pick up a flight from there, because the cost of flights from the UK has been phenomenally more expensive than those from our European partners. From speaking to people, I know that more and more people are doing that. APD has the adverse effect of making us uneconomical and perhaps at some future point even taking a reduced rate because more and more people will be doing that. Has the Minister or anybody in the Treasury done any evaluation of our air passenger duty versus those of our European counterparts?

[Gareth Davies]

Let me try to answer those questions in order. Just to clarify for the Committee, there is no APD other than on fixed-wing aircraft. Private jets pay a higher rate than any other flight domestically, and they are not, to answer the hon. Member for Wallasey, subject to the 50% cut that we are talking about here. Any ultra-long-haul flights will face a new band, as I described in my opening remarks.

To answer the excellent and reasonable question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker), I understand there was a review in 2021 of the economic impact of APD. As I said in my opening remarks, all factors are considered as part of that process, but I am happy to provide more detail in due course if that is warranted.

The point on Northern Ireland that the hon. Member for Wallasey raised is a good one. It is a devolved matter, as she points out, and Northern Ireland has the ability to set the rate for ultra-long-haul flights. Let me look into the matter of the arrangements we are putting in place, given the specific circumstances that we find ourselves in with the Executive. It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer, so I will come back to her.