Clause 1 - Meaning of ''tobacco advertisement'' and ''tobacco product''
Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill [Lords]
6:30 pm
Ms Yvette Cooper (Parliamentary Secretary (Public Health), Department of Health; Pontefract and Castleford, Labour)
I have considerable sympathy with the intention behind the amendment. Clearly we need to ensure that people have access to the support and help that they need if they want to give up smoking. We know that 70 per cent. of smokers say that they want to give up. That is why we have been so clear in promoting the availability of nicotine replacement therapy and Zyban on the national health service, and asked the National Institute for Clinical Excellence to advise us on it. The institute pronounced it an extremely cost-effective way of improving health. The intention is to promote ways of helping people give up smoking.
The reason that I reject the amendment is as follows. First, the Bill does not prevent the advertising or promotion of nicotine replacement therapy, Zyban or any similar product that is available on the market to help people give up smoking. That is because although nicotine is a constituent of tobacco, tobacco is not a constituent of nicotine. Tobacco is not an ingredient in nicotine replacement therapy—Zyban, patches, gums, Nicorette, and so forth—so there is no danger that the Bill would cover the sorts of nicotine replacement therapy that we all want to be widely accessible and available for people throughout the country.
However, the amendment, as it is drafted, would create a loophole along the lines that was described by the hon. Members for Edinburgh, West and for Basingstoke. The issue of low tar offers us a good example. Ever since the harmful effects of cigarettes became clear in the 1950s, tobacco manufacturers pursued a low- tar strategy. Cigarettes were engineered to produce reduced tar and nicotine yield on laboratory measurement. Since the 1970s, low-tar brands have been promoted with the implication that they are less harmful to health than high-tar brands, and additives were introduced to improve the palatability of low-tar cigarettes.
We would not want to accede to the advertising of low-tar cigarettes but, as the hon. Member for Basingstoke pointed out, the amendment would make that possible. It would be a serious problem if the advertising ban were suddenly opened up to permit the advertising of low-tar cigarettes: there is now a clear scientific consensus that the low-tar strategy has not
produced the expected benefits to individuals and to public health. The Royal College of Physicians said in its report of 2000 on nicotine addiction in Britain that smokers compensate in their smoking behaviour to maintain a constant nicotine and tar level, and the United States of America's National Institutes of Health and National Cancer Institute have made similar points. Smokers unconsciously alter their inhalation patterns and block ventilation holes with fingers or lips, so the machine measurements do not represent what a human being actually takes in. Indeed, the promotion of low-tar brands may have lulled some smokers into a false sense of security, so that they continue to smoke, rather than to quit altogether.
The low-tar example indicates why we would not want an exemption for low- tar cigarettes on the basis of claims that they are safer, or that they are a way of reducing the use of tobacco products. The same sorts of arguments that were used in favour of low-tar cigarettes might be applied to other products coming on to the market; they could be promoted by the tobacco industry as so-called safer products. With regard to them, we may find ourselves in the same situation as we were with low-tar cigarettes, 10 or 20 years down the line—and we now deeply regret the decision that was taken to permit their advertising.
That is why I am extremely cautious about the approach taken in the amendment, although I have sympathy with the intentions that lie behind it. I assure the Committee that nicotine replacement therapy will not be included, and I urge Committee members to reject the amendment because of the potential to replicate the low-tar problem, or a future example of that.