Tobacco Control Plan — House of Commons, 2017-10-19
Topic: Health
Stephen Charles Brine (Conservative, Centre-right): I simply say to the hon. Gentleman, who has not been present for the debate, that that point has been made. I also point out that we are giving £16 billion of ring-fenced public health spending to councils in England, which is significant. However, I shall come back to his point if he will bear with me To achieve the ambitions in the plan, we need to recognise that smoking is increasingly prevalent in particular groups in society and in particular areas. That is why we need to shift the emphasis from national to local action, and support smokers, particularly in disadvantaged groups, to quit. Now is not the time for more legislation—we have done that bit. I do not rule it out forever, but successive Governments have done that part. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to focus on our top priority groups such as pregnant women, young people and people with mental illnesses. We must focus on the people and areas with the greatest need Let me give an example. Yesterday, we published the two-years-on plan from the national cancer taskforce, which looks at the cancer strategy. It is full of good case studies. One that especially struck me was the Manchester lung cancer project, whereby we screen people arriving at supermarkets in certain parts of Manchester. That has led to improved cancer detection and outcomes for the local community that are quite staggering. Why do that in Manchester and not in Hampshire—in Winchester in my constituency? That is because there is a high prevalence of lung cancer driven by smoking in the Greater Manchester area. I visited Macmillan’s headquarters in London and sat and listened to some callers on their support line. I asked about regional disparities and they said that when they got calls from that part of England, they were about lung cancer, and that is no coincidence The example I gave is a policy response from the Greater Manchester authority, led by Andy Burnham, formerly of this parish, who has already put in place a plan that will mean 115,000 fewer smokers by 2021. I pay tribute to Andy, with whom I worked a lot in the House through my chairmanship of the all-party parliamentary group on breast cancer. I know that he has been greatly affected by that, and he is great partner for us on this matter. That is exactly the kind of thing we meant when we said in the tobacco control plan that we wanted local areas to develop their own local strategies There are many other good schemes locally—for example, the Fresh programme operates in a dozen local authorities in the north-east. I wonder whether the hon. Member for North Tyneside (Mary Glindon) is aware of it. She made an excellent personal speech, and I congratulate her on managing not to turn into a smoker, given the family background that she described. All the evidence suggests that children who grow up in families where the parents smoke go on to do so. The hon. Lady clearly knows something that we do not Leicester provides great examples of innovative stop smoking services, and the right hon. Member for Rother Valley mentioned Leicester and namechecked the council officer, who I suspect will keep that Hansard report. Well done to Leicester I recognise that hon. Members are concerned about local stop smoking services, but as I said in response to an intervention, we have a £16 billion ring-fenced public health budget. The Government believe that local authorities are best placed to make decisions on how the services should be prioritised to meet the needs of their populations. That is why I gave the example from Manchester. I am many things, but I am not best placed to decide what works in Leicester or Manchester; locally elected politicians are best placed The Government will continue to publish data that help local people hold those locally elected leaders to account. That is a crucial part of the plan. Public Health England, for which I am responsible, will continue to offer support to local authorities to help them develop their local approaches in the most cost-effective and evidence-based way. As Minister, I will continue to be a passionate advocate for evidence-based tobacco control plan policy making. It is an integral part of my mission to reduce the toll of preventable cancers I want to say something about the Government’s approach to e-cigarettes, which almost every Member who spoke mentioned. The new control plan commits to monitoring the safety, uptake, impact and effectiveness of e-cigarettes and so-called novel tobacco products. We must find a better term than that. The plan charges Public Health England with the responsibility of including messages about the relative safety of e-cigarettes in their quit smoking campaigns. I am pleased to say that that is already under way and that PHE’s current Stoptober campaign, for the first time, highlights e-cigarettes among the array of tools that smokers can use to improve their chances of quitting successfully As we like to say during Stoptober, there has never been a better time to quit. I will leave to my right hon. Friend the Chancellor the several Budget submissions around e-cigarettes. The suggestion of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Will Quince) of providing free e-cigarettes to pregnant women who are smokers is certainly worthy of consideration. I noted that the hon. Member for North Tyneside is not necessarily a fan of changes to e-cigarette levies, so it is fair to say that we so not have unanimity across the House on that. PHE is already preparing its new year quitting campaign, which is rolled out in January each year, and it will reprise the hard-hitting messages that we have seen on our televisions. It is through consistent messaging that we can hope to reverse the harmful, mistaken and increasingly widespread belief that vaping is no safer than smoking. It clearly is The right hon. Member for Rother Valley made an excellent speech, touching on health inequalities and how smoking disproportionately hits the poorest in society. There is huge variation in the figures for pregnant women, with smoking rates of between 2.3% in London and—to correct the record—28.1% in Blackpool. He also made an excellent point about dentists and oral health. PHE-commissioned training will continue to ensure that local authorities have access to the training they need to provide effective help to quit and the information they need to work with patients. He chairs the all-party parliamentary group on pharmacy—I think we will be meeting soon—so he would say this, but he spoke about pharmacists and healthy living pharmacies, which have been particularly good. He referred to Government research, and PHE is committed to reviewing the evidence on e-cigarettes on an annual basis, and is working closely with Cancer Research UK and the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies to deliver a forum to ensure that we continue to have that strong evidence base I think I need to wind up by 3 o’clock, Madam Deputy Speaker. Is that right? [Interruption.] "Well by," she says. Okay, let me conclude by thanking everyone who has spoken today. I particularly enjoyed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan). It was hypnotic in many ways but very good, and I noted her Budget submission. As usual, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, although I suspect that his berating me on this subject will not have started and ended today. The hon. Member for Ipswich (Sandy Martin) made a consistent point about local authority pension schemes, and it must be for local authorities to make such decisions and then answer to members of the scheme, their elected members and, of course, the residents who elect them and get to make such decisions every day In closing, I appreciate the many challenges and I appreciate the support that the House has given to tobacco control legislation over many years. It is now up to us to provide a national lead and to support our local authorities and ensure that they carry through what is in the plan. I thank my friend the right hon. Member for Rother Valley for introducing today’s debate and ensuring that tobacco control is no longer a partisan issue; this is now about the tobacco control plan.