Meeting of the Parliament 01 December 2015
We all support the Scottish Government’s ambitious target to reduce smoking prevalence to 5 per cent by 2034, but the simple fact is that we are not making nearly fast enough progress.
To start with part 1 of the bill, I believe that e-cigarettes have an important role to play in hastening that progress. Nicotine replacement therapy has never been popular, and the evidence from Professor Linda Bauld, who has been researching tobacco control for nearly 20 years, and from Public Health England is that e-cigarettes are far more effective at getting people off traditional cigarettes than other methods such as nicotine replacement therapy are.
We need to look at the evidence. It seems that Stewart Maxwell has not looked at the evidence from Public Health England or Linda Bauld. I recommend that he starts by looking at the five-minute video from Linda Bauld that I put on my Twitter page today. We need to look at the evidence and not foster scaremongering and myths.
I support the bill’s proposals on age restrictions and the related proposals on vending machines. However, as Public Health England has made clear, there is absolutely no evidence that young people are becoming regular users of e-cigarettes, that e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking or that they are starting to renormalise smoking. We have to challenge those all-too-common myths among the population, because they are a danger to people’s health. Why do members think that organisations such as Cancer Research UK support e-cigarettes? The reason is that those organisations know that e-cigarettes can save lives.
I support the provisions in the bill on advertising. We do not want to glamorise e-cigarettes, but we want to have some advertising of them. I certainly support point-of-sale advertising, and we can have a debate—it will not be at stage 2, because the provisions will be in regulations—about whether we need to go a bit further than that. The Health and Sport Committee said:
“We recommend that the Scottish Government works with”
the Advertising Standards Authority
“to ensure harmonisation”.
The committee is clearly going beyond point-of-sale advertising.