Tobacco and Vapes Bill

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2026 Lords Chamber

Lastly, if the Government will not commit to the precise terms of this amendment, will they commit to ensuring that there is a clearly defined and publicly communicated minimum lead-in period between the laying of regulations and their commencement? I beg to move.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend on the Front Bench for asking some very practical questions, to which I hope we will get some practical answers. The only thing I will raise—I do not want to flog a dead horse for the moment—is that there are existing regulations for off-licences, and it would be interesting to see the degree to which the Government feel that those should be reflected, just in case there is a need for the two to come together at some time in the future.

Amendment 25 is key. Tobacco retailers are concerned —I have discussed this following the last debate—because they have never been in this area in any depth. They feel quite strongly that they should have some means of checking they have registered properly, and that, if the local authority changes something, they have a means of going back and checking on that portal. That is the reason for this amendment, and I will listen carefully to what the Minister says when she responds.

[The Earl of Lindsay (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the six amendments in this group that stand in my name and the names of the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, and my noble friend Lord Johnson of Lainston. In doing so, I declare an interest as president of the CTSI, although I emphasise that these amendments are not linked to the CTSI or my role there.

Before speaking to those amendments, I will speak in support of Amendment 21A, moved by my noble friend Lord Howe, because small businesses will need all the time they can get to prepare for yet another layer of administrative burden. By way of background, the track and trace system, for which specialist tobacconists have been preparing for over five years, requires every economic operator to have a unique identifier code that they must supply when an order is sent out to them. Even something this simple has been remarkably complex and very time consuming. It has taken one supplier in the handmade cigar sector well over two years to register all its customers, and it is not yet there. A fully fledged licensing system, with all that it entails, is likely to be much more complex, especially for businesses such as hotels, for which cigars are not a primary source of income.

Businesses will suffer and possibly cease trading if the licence application process is excessively burdensome in terms of cost, time or hassle. Traditionally, the handmade cigar sector, which comprises mostly family-owned businesses, has been permitted extra time to prepare for new legislation, such as on packaging, display restrictions and so forth, in recognition of how much harder it is for small and micro-businesses with fewer resources to adapt.

I move on to Amendments 23, 30, 43, 45, 114 and 115 in this group. I hope that these amendments will be seen as being a constructive, good-faith effort to identify an evidence-based, proportionate and workable solution for specialist tobacconists. Their principal business, comprising some 70% of their turnover, is in handmade cigars. As I explained on the first day of Report, handmade cigars, which are artisanal, individually crafted, high-value and relatively expensive premium products, are fundamentally distinct from mass-produced, lower-priced, machine-made, small-format cigars and cigarillos. In other words, they occupy a completely different segment of the market. That distinction matters in terms of price, consumer characteristics and, most importantly, the evidence base relating to youth uptake and public health.

There is no credible evidence that handmade cigars contribute to youth uptake or act as a gateway to nicotine addiction. That fact was challenged last week, and I should therefore reiterate that where there is any data or evidence of cigar usage by young people, it refers not to handmade cigars but to machine-made, mass-produced, lower-priced, small-format cigars and cigarillos. The overwhelming majority of those purchasing handmade cigars are over the age of 25, with most being over the age of 35. Furthermore, handmade cigars are not inhaled and are consumed infrequently, not habitually. They are sold almost exclusively through specialist tobacconists and other distinct retail channels to informed adult customers.

In these amendments, we do not oppose the principle of licensing. The introduction of a new licensing framework, however, raises legitimate concerns about how it would apply to existing specialist tobacconists. They are a small number of lawful specialist businesses whose principal business is handmade cigars. Most of them are long-established, multi-generational, family-run, small and micro high-street enterprises. They have long been separately recognised in legislation and regulations. These amendments would provide for the grandfathering of existing specialist tobacconists into the new licensing scheme and seek to protect them from future regulations that might impose numerical caps or geographical restrictions.

These amendments do not go as far as proposing a separate category of licence, nor do they propose exempting new entrants from the licensing regime. They simply recognise that the small businesses operating lawfully under the current stringent regulatory framework should be neither unnecessarily destabilised by the introduction of a new regime nor gradually extinguished by density or zoning controls designed for different purposes. On this point, it is worth noting that in certain locations—St James’s in London is one example—they form a recognised specialist cluster that is popular with tourists and is not dissimilar in character to Savile Row in the context of the bespoke tailoring.

At a time when small businesses face significant economic pressures, we should be cautious about regulatory layering that risks unintended consequences for niche sectors that do not present the public health harms that this Bill is designed to address.