Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the comments from Baroness Merron regarding the five-fold increase in use of non-cigarette tobacco (HL Deb Col 741) what data they have that show the specific contribution that handmade cigars have made to the increase in use of non-cigarette tobacco products.

Tobacco is the single most important, entirely preventable cause of ill health, disability, and death in this country, and is responsible for approximately 80,000 deaths in the United Kingdom each year. There is no safe level of tobacco consumption. All tobacco products are harmful. We know that the tobacco smoke from cigars leads to the same type of diseases as the smoke from cigarettes.

A paper by Dr Sarah E Jackson, Dr Lion Shahab, and Dr Jamie Brown titled Trends in Exclusive Non-Cigarette Tobacco Smoking in England: A Population Survey 2013–2023 found that there are approximately five times more people exclusively smoking non-cigarette tobacco in England now than there were a decade ago, with the greatest increase seen in young adults. The products include cigars, pipes, shisha, and cigarillos. The data does not provide precise statistics for handmade cigars, and we do not hold the other detailed information on handmade cigars.