Meeting of the Parliament 14 September 2023
I, too, thank Gillian Mackay for securing the debate, and I thank members from across the chamber for their contributions, which have covered many aspects of the issue.
I chair the cross-party group on accident prevention and safety awareness; I will try to limit myself to the work that we have done on those areas and I will highlight areas that have not been mentioned.
The Child Accident Prevention Trust has recently issued a warning about the fact that hospitals are reporting growing numbers of children accidentally swallowing liquid nicotine from e-cigarette refills and disposables. There is a risk of poisoning from swallowing e-cigarette liquid; the symptoms are usually mild and include nausea and vomiting, but serious poisoning can happen after swallowing larger amounts. As with medicines or cleaning products, e-cigarettes should be kept away from children and toddlers. Although no deaths have been reported in the UK, a two-year-old girl from Israel was fatally poisoned from swallowing an e-cigarette refill, which reminds us to keep nicotine products of all kinds away from children and toddlers. As Katrina Phillips from CAPT has said,
“Babies put everything in their mouths – it’s how they explore the world around them. Toddlers are intensely curious – if you leave your bag on the floor, they’ll be in there like a shot. So remember to keep harmful things like e-cigarette refills where small children can’t find them.”
That is the tip of the iceberg. As we know, disposable vapes and refillables contain lithium iron batteries. The cross-party group has returned to that issue many times because of the danger of ingestion of lithium iron batteries for babies and toddlers. Yet, we are discarding those batteries into our environment where, as Gillian Mackay has said, they can easily be picked up—these things break up when they are disposed of, so you get the plastics and the broken bits of copper, which is both an environmental issue and a serious issue for children.
The cross-party group also worked closely with the Society of Chief Officers of Trading Standards in Scotland, which has talked about the complexity of the regulatory landscape with regard to those products. The products that are bought online often do not come from reputable production sources—I use the word “reputable” ironically, because I do not think that any of them are particularly reputable. SCOTSS has identified that products that come from the internet and are delivered directly to homes contain more nicotine than is recommended under the European Union and British standards as well as more complex chemicals, which have not been tested for human use, and in greater volumes. They are poorly designed products that are more likely to lead to the other issue that has been of concern to the cross-party group, namely zombie batteries, which have already been mentioned.
Thermal runaway can happen in any lithium battery. If people want to know how important that issue is, they should consider that people who go through an airport to go on holiday are asked whether they have any lithium iron battery products in their luggage—that is because it is too dangerous for them to go in the hold in case a thermal runaway happens during a flight. Yet, we are discarding these products in the volumes that Alexander Stewart mentioned when he quoted the report, which I was going to use, too.
There is complete consensus that we have to do something about the issue. I welcome the Scottish Government’s consulting on the ban of disposable vapes and I hope that it can lead to greater regulation of the product throughout the UK.