Health Bill [HL]

I have added my name to the amendment, to which I give my strong support, because packaging is the most ubiquitous form of tobacco advertising. At Second Reading, I said that I had reservations about cigarettes being sold in plain packaging because I felt that it would not help individuals to identify which cigarettes had the greatest and lowest nicotine content. However, I discovered that my comments were ill advised; for some considerable time, it has been illegal for anyone to identify a brand as "mild" or "light", so that reservation is no longer valid. Since the introduction of the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002, packaging has become increasingly sophisticated and appealing, with careful use of imagery, colours and design. Each smoker displays their brand every time they take their pack out to smoke. Cigarette packaging has been called "the silent salesman". Since 2002, the number of cigarette brand variants has more than doubled as tobacco companies increasingly use the pack itself as a promotional tool. The importance of pack design in branding and promotion is explicitly recognised by the tobacco industry in its own documents. For instance, Imperial Tobacco in the UK has stated that, ""additional brands and pack design in the United Kingdom have a significant impact on profit improvement"." Imperial’s global brand director, Geoff Good, said in December 2006 that pack redesign had been worth, ""over £30 million in additional turnover and a significant profit improvement … the UK had become a dark market, the pack design was the only part of the mix that was changed and therefore we know the cause and effect"." That is a compelling comment. Members of the Committee may not be aware that Professor McNeil of the University of Nottingham and Dr Hammond of the University of Waterloo in Canada have a research paper shortly to be published on the effect of tobacco branding on young people. The research shows that the branding gives the misleading impression that one member of a brand family, typically in paler coloured packaging, is less harmful, less addictive and more attractive than others that come, typically, in darker coloured livery. It is illegal to mislead people about tobacco products in this way, which is of course why the terms "light" and "mild" are prohibited. The only solution to this problem is plain packaging.