Tobacco Packaging

John Leech Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Leech (Manchester, Withington) (LD)]

I am delighted to have a chance to speak in this Back-Bench debate, and I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) on securing it. I will make a few brief comments because many issues that I would have mentioned have already been covered by other right hon. and hon. Members.

I absolutely support the principle of standardised packaging of tobacco. I believe that it should have been introduced a long time ago and that it should have had a higher priority than a ban on point-of-sale displays. That is because introducing standardised packaging would have resulted in the end of displays of cigarettes, as the adverts that those displays created would no longer be created by standardised packets.

The decision not to proceed with standardised packaging has rightly been criticised. Questions about whether advisers have unduly influenced senior Conservative politicians are perfectly legitimate and do not seem to have been properly addressed. However, equally disturbing are the interventions by the unions, with bogus claims that standardised packaging will result in significant job losses in the packaging industry. I would have hoped that Labour Members would be just as vocal in condemning those interventions as they have been in questioning the influence of Conservative party advisers, but sadly not.

The Government’s argument for delaying a decision on standardised packaging was based on a perceived lack of empirical evidence that it would discourage young people from taking up smoking. I would have thought the fact that the tobacco industry has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, and more, in trying to lobby against standardised packaging would be evidence enough. Why would it spend so much money on trying to stop something happening if it was not going to have an impact on levels of smoking?

If that is not evidence enough, may I bring to the Minister’s attention early-day motion 559, in my name, which highlights research by the British Heart Foundation into standardised packaging for cigarettes in Australia? It interviewed 2,500 young people and found that more Australian teenagers than UK teenagers had been discouraged from taking up smoking, owing to the standardised packaging. Fifty-nine per cent. of Australian teenagers said that standardised packaging deters them from smoking, and 77% of UK teenagers and 66% of Australian teenagers support it. If that is still not enough for the Minister, perhaps she could look at the findings of the study by Cancer Council Victoria, which showed that when young people view packs stripped of colours and logos, they believe that the cigarettes are lower quality, will taste worse and are less appealing.

In my opinion, the evidence is clear: standardised packaging does discourage young people from taking up smoking, and we should introduce it without delay. However, may I suggest to the Minister that we go one step further? A lot of research was carried out to work out the most unappealing colour scheme for the packaging. I think we should extend this to the cigarettes themselves, and as well as having grotty green-brown packets, we should have grotty green-brown cigarettes.