Health Bill [HL]

My amendment relates to the plain packaging of tobacco products and deals with whether packaging is a form of advertising. I declare an interest as vice-president of a charity called Quit, which helps people to quit smoking. My amendment seeks to make plain packaging mandatory for all tobacco products, removing all branding and leaving the health warnings and, in plain text, the name of the product. Tobacco packaging, sometimes called the silent salesman, has always been an important part of tobacco marketing, communicating attributes such as style and sophistication to the would-be smokers. As some of your Lordships may have noticed, I was interested by an article from the Times of Monday 9 March, which said: "Branding on cigarette packs under fire from MPs". I was glad to see the article say that the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, was going to move this amendment. More importantly, the writer of the article referred to: ""Tobacco companies—for whom branded packs are the only remaining form of advertising in the UK"." I shall not quote further, but it interesting that this comes not just from me but from journalists. Tobacco branding should be prohibited because it is plainly advertising. It recruits young people into a lifetime addiction and misleads smokers about the relative safety of different brands. So is it advertising? According to legal opinion from Sir Richard Buxton, a former Lord Justice of Appeal, the packaging being used by the tobacco industry meets the definition set out by the 2003 EU directive for tobacco products, which is, ""any form of commercial communication with the aim or direct or indirect effect of promoting tobacco products"." Since the advertising ban of 2002, the pack has acquired even greater importance as a tool that the tobacco industry uses to recruit smokers to replace those who have quit or died. The ban on advertising therefore did not lead to an end of the influence of the cigarette brand but rather the displacing of its potency to the cigarette pack. There are many examples of how the tobacco industry has risen to the challenge of carrying the whole message on the pack. Examples include Silk Cut; the number of advertised variants within the Silk Cut "brand family" has doubled since the advertising ban, allowing the logo to appear repeatedly in a variety of colours. They have also used creative packaging, such as the "perfume pack", as it is called, to target particular markets. Camel is another brand, marketed as a "natural flavour". This new youth-oriented brand variant was launched in 2007. Speaking to the trade press, Jeremy Blackburn, communications manager of Gallaher Group, said: ""Camel is the smoking style statement for young adult smokers"." Then there is the Lambert and Butler "celebration pack". When this was introduced into the market, Imperial Tobacco was able to see just how much difference packaging made; with nothing else changing in the marketing mix, it added £60 million in its sales. I remember when I used to smoke some 38 years ago that brands such as Peter Stuyvesant were my favourite, because the cigarettes were slightly longer. At weekends occasionally, if you could afford it, you bought what were known as black Sobranies to the student ball, for example, to impress ladies. There were "cocktail" Sobranies, with green, black, yellow and cream-coloured cigarettes. It did not make any difference to the ladies, but they were certainly cool to carry. The cigarette pack is plainly a sophisticated form of advertising. It seduces young people into a lifetime of addiction. The majority of smokers start smoking before they are 18. The younger a smoker starts to smoke, the more addicted they will become by adulthood, the harder they will find it to quit, and the more likely it is that they will die from the habit. Findings from a UK study, reported in a 2008 report for Cancer Research UK, showed that the number of cigarette brands that 15 year-olds could recall increased the chances of them expressing an interest in trying smoking by 35 per cent for each additional brand. Research conducted for ASH by the University of Nottingham has further shown that young people found branded packs more attractive than plain packs. That demonstrates the appeal of packaging and branding independent of the appeal of the tobacco product itself. Branding on cigarette packs has a powerful impact on young people, and different brands are used to perpetuate and reinforce the ideas that young people have about themselves. Therefore they become powerfully totemic in themselves. Tobacco branding is designed to confer status and sense of belonging. This is a quotation from a young person in the north of England that was gathered for the recent Department of Health consultation on tobacco control: ""At school the type of cigarettes you smoked depended on what group you were in. The ‘cool kids’ smoked Lambert and Butler because they liked the silver packet and the cards that came with it, and the people who liked rock music smoked Marlboro. The ‘Goths’ smoked John Player Special because of the black packets. What you smoked said a lot about you and it was all down to what was on the packet"." Packaging misleads smokers about the relative safety of different brands. The use of branding, particularly the colours or livery on packs, also misleads smokers into thinking that their favoured brand or brand variant is a safer product than other brands. With the removal of wording, the tobacco industry has switched to colour coding. In the Nottingham study, young people were shown pairs of cigarette packs in the same brand family and asked which cigarettes were lower tar, less harmful to health and more attractive. Young people and the adult smokers were more likely to perceive the lighter coloured packs as less harmful and less addictive. Large, bold, written health warnings are effective in motivating smokers to quit, and new picture warnings may be even more effective. However, tobacco branding lessens the impact of the warning message, as colourful branding detracts attention from health warnings. If young people and smokers are to be given a real, free and informed choice about whether they smoke, we should prohibit branding as it inhibits that choice. On-pack branding undermines the existing tobacco advertising law, misleading smokers and continuing to promote tobacco. It dilutes the impact of health warnings designed to ensure that smokers were making a more informed choice. Most importantly, it seduces young people into taking up a habit that in their youth they see as something that expresses who they are, but in their adulthood could kill them.