Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to commission independent research into heated tobacco products; and if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of inviting the new Public Health England research centre in Harlow to have a role in that research.

As outlined in the Tobacco Control Plan 2017, Public Health England (PHE) publishes annual independent academic reviews of the evidence on e-cigarettes and will do so up to the end of the current Parliament in 2022. The scope of these reviews includes heated tobacco products.

The review PHE published in February 2018 considered the available literature for heated tobacco products but evidence for these products was in its infancy and mainly published by the tobacco industry. The 2018 review is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/e-cigarettes-and-heated-tobacco-products-evidence-review

The next e-cigarette review will be published in February 2019.

The laboratories at the new public health science hub at Harlow will be for microbiological and related research and thus not appropriate for this type of research.