The government's Tobacco and Vapes Bill is one of the casualties of the snap election call. In this blog, Aveek Bhattacharya reasserts the case for the bill, the politics surrounding its future.
Pity the poor proponents of the smokefree generation policy. Having devised a nifty innovative policy to prevent people from taking up smoking without harming existing smokers, they have for the second time in the matter of months been thwarted from implementing it by the vagaries of electoral politics.
Last month, the House of Commons voted to make it illegal to sell tobacco to anybody born in or after 2009, effectively raising the minimum purchase age each year from 2027. Yet this week’s surprise election announcement interrupted the passage of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill before it could reach the House of Lords, and it is unlikely there will be time to see it through before parliament dissolves.
That follows the news in November that the New Zealand government would scrap a similar law before it could be implemented at the insistence of Act and New Zealand First, the junior partners in the incoming coalition.
Anti-smoking campaigners should dust themselves off and try again after the election, though, and hope it is third time lucky, because there is a lot to be gained from making Britain the first country in the world to achieve the policy.
Tobacco is surely the most toxic substance consumed on a mass scale in human history, which is why it is so imperative to prevent another generation becoming addicted to it. It has been estimated smoking reduces life expectancy by around ten years. Countries like the UK have had success in driving down smoking rates, through a range of interventions from tax increases and marketing restrictions to graphic warning labels, treatment funding and new technologies like vaping.
Nevertheless, one in eight people continue to smoke, which explains why policymakers have reached for an outright ban.
Those on the libertarian end of the Conservative party have expressed predictable objections, though it requires a certain amount of dogmatism to insist on protecting this particular freedom. The fact that almost half of smokers want to quit suggests a significant degree of what economists call ‘time inconsistency’, which makes the case for paternalism particularly strong. In any case, they are in a clear minority: 67% are in favour of progressively increasing the smoking age, with only 14% against. Indeed, that openness to intervention applies to a range of public health policies across alcohol, unhealthy food and gambling.
The failure to get the legislation through reflects a certain carelessness on the part of Rishi Sunak with his legacy: this was supposed to be the most notable lasting achievement of his premiership. If he is back in No 10 in July, presumably he will try again. Alternatively, if as is likely, the Labour Party win power, they would also be expected to return to the policy, having strongly backed the plan.
It is less clear how a Conservative Party under new leadership would respond. Sunak allowed a free vote on the bill last month, and those who voted against or abstained were widely seen as making manoeuvres in a future leadership contest. Coming out hard against the reintroduction of the bill would be a sign of the party taking a more doctrinaire tack, further out of line with public opinion.
Whether there will be further free votes on issues like these will also be interesting to see. As an approach, it seems to have been broadly successful in taking the heat out of conservative opposition, and building cross-party cooperation of a sort that gives the smokefree generation policy some hope of survival. It’s unlikely that a Labour government would do the same on this issue, but on others like gambling and alcohol regulation, party management is often a significant barrier to progress. Rather than curbing tobacco, Sunak’s most enduring contribution might have been to parliamentary tactics.
