Tobacco Advertising (Children)

HC Deb 02 December 1991 vol 200 cc97-126

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Nicholas Baker.]

8.13 pm

Miss Joan Lestor (Eccles)

I wish at the outset to explain what this debate is not about and I am pleased that we have rather longer to discuss the matter than would have been the case had the previous business run for its full time.

This debate is not about the banning of smoking, whatever my personal feelings may be about that. It is not even about banning tobacco advertising, although I deeply regret the Government's refusal last month to support an EC proposal to that effect. A ban on tobacco advertising should, in my opinion, be matched by a rethink of the enormous sums spent under the common agricultural policy on subsidising tobacco production. That costs about £900 million a year. I would rather some of that were diverted to help the national health service, which currently spends £437 million dealing with tobacco victms.

The debate is specifically about the impact of tobacco advertising on children. Some people more cynical than I say that it is a cold-blooded and calculated effort by the tobacco manufacturers to recruit sufficient under-age smokers to replace the 300 men and women who die every day from smoking-related diseases.

The debate is also about how the voluntary codes of practice which govern tobacco advertising are failing our children. There is now sufficient independent and expert evidence to suggest that tobacco advertising influences under-age smokers and that the current voluntary codes governing tobacco advertising do not work in the best interests of our children. As a matter of urgency, we should be pressing for a strictly enforced, independently monitored, statutory system of advertising control.

Earlier this year, my hon. Friend the Member for Warley, East (Mr. Faulds) successfully piloted through the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act 1991 to strengthen the law governing the sale of cigarettes in shops to children. I served on the Committee which dealt with that measure and, like other hon. Members, I was appalled by the concrete evidence laid before us of tobacco companies flouting the voluntary code.

As a result of that measure and pressure from Parliament and the health lobby, many of the offending advertisements were withdrawn or resited, but a recent survey revealed that, some of the offending advertisements are still in place. Should any hon. Member doubt that, I have the details.

Last month, The Observer ran a front page story which claimed that in Canada, Imperial Tobacco Ltd., a subsidiary of BAT Industries, was targeting non-smokers as young as 12 as part of its marketing strategy. The article was based on documents laid before a court in Canada during a legal fight over the banning of tobacco advertising. The judge ruled in favour of the tobacco industry on the basis that an advertising ban violated the industry's freedom of commercial speech. That case has now gone to appeal, and the ban remains in force.

The judge discounted thousands of pages of evidence related to health issues, but among the documents were papers which revealed an advertising strategy which acknowledged that children as young as 12 would fall within a targeted range.

I wrote to the chairman of BAT Industries. I wanted him to dissociate himself from the activities of the Canadian subsidiary. I wanted reassurance that such practices as detailed during the Canadian court case had since ceased. I also wanted confirmation from a leading figure in the British tobacco industry that the rules governing the protection of children from harmful tobacco products were both fully understood and fully accepted.

I received two letters in reply. The first was from Helen McDonald of BAT Industries' external affairs department, enclosing a copy of a letter written by Mr. Mercier, chairman and chief executive officer of Imperial Tobacco Ltd., addressed to Donald Trelford, editor of The Observer. Miss McDonald drew my attention to this sentence in Mr. Mercier's letter: Imperial Tobacco did not and does not advertise to non-smokers or to anyone below the legal age to buy cigarettes. Those were weasel words. Imperial Tobacco knew the age range of readers of magazines in which it placed cigarette advertisements.

Adam Raphael, in The Observer, quoted from Imperial Tobacco's own document: If the last 10 years have taught us anything, it is that the industry is dominated by companies which respond most effectively to the needs of non-smokers … Young smokers represent the major opportunity group for the cigarette industry. The second letter which I received from BAT Industries was from David Haywood, the deputy chairman, who wrote: BAT believe that smoking is an adult choice … Imperial Tobacco did not and does not advertise to non-smokers or to anyone below the legal age to buy cigarettes. He went on: We certainly would not promote cigarettes to non-adults or to any non-smoker. Again, those are weasel words.

The tobacco industry needs young smokers. Research has shown that, if people are not smoking by the age of 20, they are unlikely to start. As more and more adults either kick the habit or kick the bucket, new smokers must be found to keep up the sales and the industry's profits. The number of adult smokers is falling, and I am glad about that, but in the past decade the decline among teenage smokers has ceased. The latest figures from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys shows that 10 per cent. of 11 to 15-year-olds smoke regularly—[Interruption.] I am happy to clear my throat. The smoke in the Tea Room has probably affected it.

I feel extremely strongly about the issue, because my area of Salford has the dubious distinction of having the highest proportion of deaths due to smoking of any district health authority in the UK. Of a total 3,400 deaths a year, more than 20 per cent. are attributed to smoking. The victms are the grandparents, and, sadly, in some cases the parents, of children in my constituency. It is too late to help them, but it is not too late to help their children.

I do not suggest that advertising alone determines whether a child will smoke. A range of factors, including the example of parents and friends and other social pressures influence young people. However, for 25 years Governments and the tobacco industry have accepted that tobacco advertising recruits children as smokers. That is one of the main reasons why cigarette advertisements were banned from television in 1965 and why hoardings advertising cigarettes have been prohibited within sight of schools. But the Government have concentrated on protecting children through voluntary agreements with the industry.

Mr. Bob Cryer (Bradford, South)

Does my hon. Friend agree that, although tobacco advertising is banned on television, the ban is not effective because cheating goes on the whole time? On many sporting occasions that are attractive to children and young people, placards are shown around the ground and are picked up by television cameras, no matter how careful the television companies are. That amounts to deliberate cheating and it, too, should be prohibited.

Miss Lestor

I certainly agree with my hon. Friend and was about to come to that point.

The Government have concentrated on protecting children through voluntary agreements with the industry, but they do not work. As someone put it recently, the policeman may be around but he is not on duty. Despite a ban on television advertising, cigarettes are heavily advertised in newspapers and magazines, cleverly promoted through sports sponsorship, and widely available in corner shops and supermarkets festooned with bright and eye-catching posters that are attractive to children.

When tobacco advertising was in its infancy, the general trend was towards adverts that presented tobacco smoking as an adult or even sophisticated thing to do. Children who saw those adverts were in no doubt that smoking was an activity primarily for adults. But then came a move toward a more subtle approach. Golden Virginia has run a series of adverts which depict its brand name and logo in attractive and unusual materials such as mosaics, carvings and jigsaw puzzles. Readers of those advertisements are rewarded by cracking the code. They feel clever at guessing the message and advertisers clearly intend that that feel-good sensation should carry the reader on to purchasing their product. The increasing use of imagery associated with childhood blurs the distinction between an adult activity and one that is appropriate to children.

A new advertisement takes that trend to the extreme. Benson and Hedges are currently promoting their cigarettes with full-colour advertisements on hoardings in the street, and in newspapers and magazines featuring a puffin and a book. That is an outrageous theft of a symbol associated specifically with children. There can be no excuse for such advertisements. Puffin Books is a long-established and highly respected publishing house, and it is horrified at being blatantly associated with the promotion of smoking to children. The Publishers Association has also stressed that publishers of educational and children's books take the greatest care to avoid association of their products with practices such as smoking. The voluntary code has clearly been violated by Benson and Hedges' promotional material.

Benson and Hedges are marketed by Gallaher Tobacco Ltd. Ian Shepherd, its public affairs manager, tells me: We have agreed not to seek to encourage people, particularly young people, to start smoking". I have heard that before. In response to my specific point about the puffin advertisement, which Mr. Shepherd referred to as "Beak", he said: Considerable efforts were made to give it an adult appeal, through the use of text drawn from ornithological reference books depicted on the left hand side of the picture". In other words, Gallaher was aware of the obvious connection and, to get round the Advertising Standards Authority, looked for a cleverer way to disguise its message.

Mr. Shepherd assures me that Gallaher has had no complaints about the advert. I have news for him. I have a letter from the publishing director of Puffin Books, which describes Benson and Hedges' use of a puffin in cigarette advertising as highly objectionable. Puffin Books has now issued a formal complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority, explaining: We at Puffin Books have been distressed and dismayed to receive calls from several members of the public complaining at a children's publisher associating itself with the promotion of smoking. I well understand that, yet Mr. Shepherd tells me that he has had no such complaint. I, too, have received complaints, which prompted my interest in the matter.

What a remarkable coincidence that Benson and Hedges chose the puffin for their latest advertisements in the same year as Puffin Books celebrates its 50th anniversary. Bookshop windows throughout the country are emblazoned with the puffin symbol. There are competitions on BBC's "Blue Peter", newspaper features, and events at Alton Towers and at the Edinburgh festival. The main message of Puffin Books' promotional efforts has been that children should get enjoyment from reading Puffin books, as they do. Imagine its upset at having its special year sullied by a cheap trick of that nature.

Tobacco companies will deny the link with under-age smokers. They hide behind the claim that they do not advertise to recruit non-smokers, especially children. They say that they advertise to improve their market share and make existing smokers more brand aware—an absurd claim. Advertising not only reinforces the habit of those who already smoke but recruits new smokers, the majority of whom are under age. Research carried out by the advertising research unit at Strathclyde university shows that cigarette advertising reinforces under-age smoking. Another study among 10 to 12-year-olds revealed that those who notice and take a favourable view of cigarette adverts are twice as likely to start smoking within a year as those who do not.

There is increasing evidence that children are receptive to cigarette advertising. That is all the more disquieting when set against the need of tobacco companies to replenish their stock of customers. Substantial sums of money are paid by the industry to have its brands placed in children's films, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South might also have referred. For example, Marlboro appeared in "Superman" and Lucky Strikes appeared in "Beverley Hills Cop" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" That is advertising directed toward a young market, because mainly youngsters watch those films.

Even the Tobacco Advisory Council's own spokesman, Brendan Brady, admitted in a television interview: Every industry has to recruit new customers. We recruit new customers once they are over the age of 16. Of course they see the advertising before that age; of course, they see people smoking before that age. They make up their decisions before that age. But we are not interested in that market under the age of 16. But the industry is there to recruit and influence those young people. That market is worth some £90 million to the tobacco industry, so I shall let hon. Members draw their own conclusions.

In this country, tobacco advertising is governed by voluntary agreements negotiated between the Department of Health and the tobacco industry or, in the case of sports sponsorship, by the Minister of Sport and the industry. Independent observers representing health interests are not allowed at those meetings and the industry refuses to allow publication of the research Commissioned by the monitoring Commission. That information should be made available.

The very existence of these voluntary agreements, especially when they relate to young people, is proof that the industry and the Government accept the substantial health threat to youngsters posed by tobacco and the need to protect them from harmful information. They accept that it is wrong to position posters within full view of schools. Why is it not wrong to position the same posters near bus stops used by school children, or in magazines or newspapers that are read by them? Who is monitoring the content of those advertisements with a view to child protection?

It is clear that as long as the industry can claim, hand on heart, that its advertisements are legal, decent and honest the question of their appeal to children directly or indirectly will not be addressed by anyone in authority. Tobacco advertising is everywhere. It swamps health advertising and undermines its effectiveness. It influences children to smoke. A study of 18 countries carried out by the New Zealand Toxic Substances Board shows that countries with a ban on tobacco advertising saw a decrease in the number of children smoking. Of course, tobacco advertising is subject to inadequate controls.

I raise this topic now and have raised it in other ways over the years because we have a duty to protect our children. We cannot always expect adults to behave in a healthy fashion. That choice is theirs. We can warn them about the dangers, but when advertisements such as those that I have shown—and I could show others—are directly aimed at attracting children by using a symbol that is meant for children, the voluntary code has been exploded. I urge the Minister to make suggestions that will provide for children real protection from the effects of unscrupulous cigarette advertising.

8.31 pm

Mrs. Gwyneth Dunwoody (Crewe and Nantwich)

I hope that the Minister will agree that the Department of Health should look at what it costs this country to deal with the effects of smoking-related diseases. Although the evidence has been available for many years, it is extraordinary that the House still does not give sufficient weight to the impact of those costs on the national health service. One of the saddest and most frightening statistics of the past decade has been the increase in the deaths of women from smoking and smoking-related diseases.

Without wishing in any way to add to the guilt of any of the women concerned, I can tell the House that in many homes smoking has once again become part of the acceptable face of family life. That adds to the enormous pressures on children at every level.

Advertising does not assume that its sole role is educational. It seeks, and has always sought, to present products in a way that makes them attractive. Therefore, advertising that is specifically aimed at children does not seek to fulfil a pure information role. It does not say to those who are at or leaving school, "You should think about this but remember that it has implications." Advertising is meant to do something rather different. It aims to sell a product. There would not be anything wrong with that if society as a whole had not considered the impact of smoking on the young, but we know what happens. We know that, if smokers are caught young, they will be customers for many tens of years.

When I was a small child—which was not very long ago —it was customary for working-class children to smoke because it was regarded as a sign of growing up. As a naturally perverse child, I was the only one in my class who did not smoke, because it was an easy way to stand out. People were encouraged to feel that smoking marked the divide between the small child or the teenager and the adult.

For a while, because of the voluntary code of conduct and the acceptance by the industry of the need to understand that cigarettes were a health hazard, society started to come round to the idea that there should be direct controls on advertising and that we should do nothing to encourage the young. Unfortunately, that has undoubtedly changed. The techniques used by advertisers are far more sophisticated than before, and that is the real hazard.

It is no longer a question of simply having a glowing picture of a cowboy on a horse. Advertisers now make specific and cynical use of detailed marketing techniques. Companies pay educational psychologists and those with knowledge of marketing techniques to work out how goods can be presented most attractively to the young. Therefore, such advertising is no accident. The companies know that they are targeting specific buying groups who will have access to money, will be hooked on the product and will produce large numbers of future buyers.

The House has a specific duty. When we originally debated the code of conduct, we were told that the industry not only accepted the difficulties but was prepared to comply with a voluntary code because it knew that that was the way in which it could best fulfil its duty. We were told, and many hon. Members genuinely believed, that the industry accepted that its advertising campaigns had an impact on the health of the nation. I never believed that. I never accepted that such a large, expensively maintained and profitable industry would lightly give up an advertising habit of a lifetime without continuing to look at the customer as the ultimate and most important object.

What is happening now is outrageous. Quite small children are being encouraged at every level to regard smoking as an activity that is almost automatically tied in with specific health promotions which are important to them. Why does the tobacco industry spend so much money on the promotion of sports events? It is because the young, almost automatically, go to those events. They are excited by what they see and become followers of a sport or a team. Automatically they begin to see within the ambiance of that sport the constant advertising of certain goods. Almost without thinking, they accept that that is somehow or other part of the sport. Football is the classic one, but such sponsorship now appears everywhere.

Motor racing is just one of the sports which for many years has been promoted in connection with certain famous tobacco company names.

Despite all that, the industry is still prepared to suggest to the House that the voluntary code is working. Not only is it not working; it is being exploited in the most cynical, almost depraved way. If we were asked to give to every teenage or pre-teen child in our constituencies a noxious substance in a mild form to which they would become addicted and because of which they would face possible death and certain illness, the House would react violently. It would say that there was no conceivable way in which hon. Members could be asked to pass or support laws that would somehow or other put children at risk. But by not insisting on very deliberate controls and by ignoring what is happening in the tobacco industry, that is what we are doing, week after week, month after month.

For about 30 years I have watched developments in the health service and have seen the rising graph of deaths from carcinoma, coronary heart disease and smoking-related diseases. In my active time in the House of Commons, I have done everything that I can to promote the need for controls on the tobacco industry, but it is still necessary for my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) to make her plea tonight. She and I call one another "sister grandmothers" because we have been here for some time and our concern for our families and grandchildren makes us feel strongly that the House of Commons has a duty to protect those who are most at risk.

Enough of the cynicism, and of the abandonment of common sense to the promotion of commercial which that are dangerous substances. Enough of a House of Commons which no longer regards health promotion as something that requires equal commitment in terms of money and support to that which is expended by the industry in promoting its goods to the young. Enough of a House of Commons no longer fulfilling its proper watchdog functions and allowing noxious substances to be sold to our children. If we do not understand the implications, the deaths, illnesses and long-term unhappiness of many families will be on the consciences of every elected Member of Parliament.

8.40 pm

Mr. Bob Cryer (Bradford, South)

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) on securing an Adjournment debate on the important topic of targeting children in advertising tobacco. It links with the activities of my hon. Friend the Member for Warley, East (Mr. Faulds), who promoted what has become the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act 1991 to curb advertising at point of sale in retail shops.

I shall deal with two areas—a regulated one, television, and a non-regulated one, which is now covered by my hon. Friend's Act. The Independent Broadcasting Authority was replaced by the Independent Television Commission under the provisions of the Broadcasting Act 1987, under which the most recent auction of franchises took place. Hon. Members felt that the IBA was a toothless watchdog and we expected the newly constituted Commission to do better. The House took a long time debating the broadcasting Bill. I served on the Committee that spent many hours in diligent examination of it.

I have already mentioned my particular concern in an intervention in the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor). It is the way in which—at sporting events in particular, but all outside broadcasting events—the names of tobacco products are visible for all to see in the background. I am not much in favour of sponsorship, particularly that by the tobacco industry, and I think that one can divide sponsorship between that done by those who are genuinely seeking to assist an organisation and that by those who wish to exploit it. There is no question in my mind—this was reinforced by the evidence produced by my hon. Friend—that the tobacco industry falls in the latter category. Furthermore, it seeks to exploit the young.

Outside broadcasts of test matches, soccer matches, rugby league and rugby union matches and track activities at athletic events are keenly watched by a significant proportion of our young people, as they should be. Watching such events helps to stimulate young people to take part in sports, but in the background there is always advertising of tobacco products. On the whole, it is advertising of cigarettes, although sometimes it is of pipe tobacco, which is less of an offence.

Club owners and sports event organisers fix up events so that tobacco advertisements are given prominence. For an outside broadcast with a big audience, they can ensure that the advertising space commands a premium, particularly for those displays that are near where the main events in an athletics competition are to be held or within the camera range at an important cricket match or test match. Therefore, it is important that the Government, through the ITC, make it clear that broadcasting of cigarette advertisements on television is a breach of the 1965 ban.

Ms. Mildred Gordon (Bow and Poplar)

Is my hon. Friend aware that, some time ago, researchers for the Esther Rantzen programme "That's Life" were preparing a television programme about children and tobacco, which unfortunately was never broadcast? As an experiment, they sent children to tobacconists in my constituency, together with an adult who kept out of sight. All those children were able to buy cigarettes.

Does my hon. Friend agree that, first, parents must be encouraged not to send their children round the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes and that, secondly, tobacconists must be asked not to sell to children who say that they are buying for their parents, but who nine times out of 10 are not? They are doing so for themselves, because they have been encouraged by the advertising to which my hon. Friend referred. I should like to see anti-smoking advertisements at sporting events saying that every cigarette is a coffin nail. Rather than linking tobacco with healthy sports, we should be linking it with death.

Mr. Cryer

My hon. Friend is right. The link between cigarette advertising and sporting events is mischievous. These events are about healthy exercise and can sometimes be very glamorous. They involve strenuous physical effort and sometimes shrewd mental processes and selective judgment. By associating that with cigarettes, the advertisers give a false image to cigarettes. As my hon. Friend said, if cigarettes are mentioned at all at sporting activities, people should he told that they are a drug which produces an addiction and which can lead to death if smoked for long enough. as we know.

A week ago, the Tobacco Advisory Council held a reception in the House of Commons for small retailers who were concerned about the reduction in their turnover that would result if taxes on cigarettes were increased. Ironically, that was the same day as the publication of yet another report setting out the dangers of tobacco smoking and the enormous consequences for the rest of us because NHS facilities must be used to cater for those who are endangering their bodies and losing their lives as a result of their addiction to cigarette smoking.

The ITC has the power to do something about this advertising, but it does not. Year after year, there has been deliberate, organised cheating by the ITC and its predecessor body to allow tobacco advertising despite the ban. It is time for the Government to say that they want an end to all placards advertising cigarettes on outside broadcasts from both the BBC and the ITV. I hope that the Minister, when he responds to this useful debate, will make a clear statement on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Eccles spoke about the disgraceful use of tobacco products, and cigarettes in particular, in feature films. Feature films are well enough financed, including those mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles—"Superman" and "Who Killed Roger Rabbit'?", which were financed by American money—and they should not use advertising in a dishonest way. That is when advertising in concealed within a story that is presented by the film without an explicit reference to the fact that money is being paid to promote a particular product.

That is something that we do not allow on television. We do not allow invisible advertising. The last "invisible" programme that was allowed was shown in the 1960s. The programme was a weekly trip to a consumer magazine, which went through various products, and it was paid for by the promoters of the products shown in the programme. That abuse was stopped. It is unfortunate that we do not have an organisation to examine hidden advertising in feature films.

I am concerned because I consider the feature film industry to be important and I believe that we should have one in the United Kingdom. The criticism that there is hidden advertising cannot be attributed to British producers, but it can rightly be directed towards American producers. It should be made clear that, if such advertising is incorporated in a feature film, the practice can be taken into account when the censorship certificate is being awarded.

The censorship system is essentially trade organised, but I think that the Government should make it clear that they deplore the sort of advertising that I have described, which is a form of cheating. The advertising is not made clear and specific on television. Instead, it is part of the background. The same could be said of any feature films that promoted cigarettes in a hidden and dishonest way.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bow and Poplar (Ms. Gordon) intervened to talk about advertising at retail outlets. It has been stopped specifically by the private Member's Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Warley, East. It was a simple measure that passed through the House because of the good will of hon. Members on both sides and their wish to ensure that such advertising at retail outlets was curtailed. That advertising is attractive to children, and very often the small retail street corner shop—I accept that their number has diminished and that this form of retail advertising applies to all shops—is used by children. Their parents ask them to go for small items such as milk, loaves of bread and tins of food. If they see the advertising, they find it a temptation.

When the Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Warley, East was passing through the House, many examples were quoted of shopkeepers who were prepared to split packets and to sell single cigarettes to children. The Bill merely enhanced existing legislation by providing facilities for local authorities to institute prosecutions against shopkeepers who adopted that practice. When the Bill was being considered, I recall asking the Government to provide financial resources to local authorities to ensure that environmental health officers could put the relevant legislation into operation and to make it clear to all shopkeepers that, if they were found to be selling cigarettes to children, they would be pursued, prosecuted where evidence was available and fined heavily in the courts.

It is no good the Government taking action on advertising that helps to lure children if, when lured, they can buy cigarettes easily in the street corner shop or in the local supermarket. It must be made clear—I hope that it will be by the Minister—that the Government will take action.

What is the Government's position? They stood idly by while supermarkets opened their doors on Sunday in town after town and city after city. The supermarkets traded with impunity, unfortunately. The Attorney-General told us last week that he could not do anything. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday that he could not do anything either because, as he claimed, the law was confused. In this instance the law is not confused. If the resources are available, local authorities will take action against the scavengers who are selling the poisoned weed to schoolchildren who are often younger than 16.

We must be careful in this place about the effects of the tobacco industry's lobbying efforts. It has been said that, when the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young) was a Minister at the Department of Health and Social Security—he is now the Minister for Housing and Planning—he said that he was determined to introduce much more widespread curbs on advertising. It has been reported in books about the advertising industry which have been written by practitioners that the hon. Gentleman became a victim of lobbying.

I warn the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Loughborough (Mr. Dorrell), that if he is determined, as he should be, to improve the health of the nation by completely curbing tobacco advertising, especially that which is highly accessible to children, he should be aware of the influence of the lobbyists. They will pad round this place with a view to sidling up to his superior Minister, the deputy Prime Minister or the Prime Minister, and saying, "Self-regulation is better. The young Minister is going beyond his brief. He is trying to do something that will harm the tobacco industry." They will not say that the intention is to save children's lives or to save them years of miserable existence as they cough out their last few years.

I say that as someone who has never smoked cigarettes. My father died of a heart attack when he was 78. I think that a number of years would have been left to him if he had not smoked Capstan full strength for so long, until his doctor advised him to stop doing so because his smoking was causing his health to deteriorate.

My father started smoking as a young lad when he volunteered to serve in the first world war. It was a period of great stress, deprivation and difficulty. Many people smoked and they did not think much about it. After all, the next cigarette might be their last. The thought of living until their 70s and 80s, or perhaps beyond, by avoiding tobacco did not occur to them.

My father became addicted to Capstan full strength, which were probably the most poisonous of all the attractively packaged poisons that were available in the form of cigarettes. I am certain that his life was made more miserable as a result. He coughed heavily every morning of his later life and was afflicted with a heart condition in his final years. The tobacco industry is powerful and certainly wealthy enough to employ parliamentary lobbyists. If it is true that their influence displaced a Health Minister who was determined to achieve something important and useful—curbing tobacco advertising—I hope that such a thing will never happen again.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles for allowing me to contribute to her Adjournment debate. I am glad that she initiated it, but unfortunately I think that we will have to agitate much more forcefully before we will be satisfied with the Government's action in this and similar areas.

8.59 pm

Mr. John McFall (Dumbarton)

I share the delight of my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) in being able to participate in tonight's debate, and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) on initiating it.

The debate reminds me of the Jesuit dictum—"Give me a boy when he is seven, and I will give you the man." That is how the tobacco industry looks upon our young people —"Give them to us young, and we will keep them throughout their adult life."

Research—not least by Strathclyde university's advertising unit, which is part of its marketing department—for the report "From the Billboard to the Playground", which was published a few months ago, show that almost all smokers start as children. I did the same. I started smoking at 14 years of age because I thought that it was the right thing to do, just as my classroom friends did. It was also one up on the teacher.

At lunchtime, my friends and I would go to buy singles —or on days when we were well off, five Players. Our English teacher, who was a particularly nasty little character, was even nastier than ourselves. He knew which of us smoked, took our cigarettes—calling us "smoky beasts" in the process—and then kept them for himself and his pals. I did not think that that was particularly fair.

I was hooked on smoking from 14 years of age, and I did not give it up for 11 or 12 years, until I was about 25 —despite making six or seven attempts to do so. I stopped because my father made me. He died of an arterial disease, and had both his legs off because he was a heavy smoker. After I reached the age of 20, I had a litany from him every day, exhorting me to give up cigarettes for my own good. I did not listen to him then—but later I tried again to stop smoking, and eventually, at 25 years of age, I succeeded.

Those who start smoking at an early age can take it from me that it is very hard to get off the weed if one starts on it at an early age. The tobacco industry knows that very well. Why else does it spend £160 million a year trying to convince people that smoking is good? It spends that money because it receives its rewards—but those rewards are to the detriment of the country, and particularly the national health service, to which the cost of smoking-related diseases is £437 million a year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles said, every hour 12 people die from smoking-related diseases—nearly 300 per day.

My late father spent many years receiving hospital treatment. I often accompanied him on his hospital visits, and the consultant challenged me to find one patient suffering from vascular problems who was not a smoker. It is true to say that not one non-smoker was to be found in those wards. That empirical evidence, burnished in my mind, is enough for me to know that smoking damages health.

As a former schoolteacher, I was dismayed to learn that the incidence of smoking among the young has not diminished. Although the number of adult smokers is falling, research shows that 30 per cent. of 19-year-olds smoke regularly, and in the past nine years, the decline in teenage smoking has been arrested. Latest figures from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys show that 10 per cent. of 11 to 15-year-olds smoke regularly. What are the Government doing about that? They are fighting the European Commission because they do not want the Commission to impose a ban on cigarette advertising. The Government have succeeded in obtaining a six-month stay of execution. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Mr. Cryer

My hon. Friend is right when he says that the Government are behaving disgracefully, but does he accept that the Commission has double standards? It is spending about £20 million a year on a tobacco mountain. It has bought tobacco at a fixed price. The wine lake, the cereal mountain and all the other mountains have now been joined by a tobacco mountain. The Commission ought not to subsidise tobacco growers.

Mr. McFall

I did not think that it would be possible to mention the European Commission without my hon. Friend jumping to his feet, but I take his point. Yes, the Commission is hypocritical in a number of respects, but we should join it in fighting to have this directive implemented.

Cigarette smoking harms young people, but it harms women and young girls even more. Medical research shows that pregnant women who smoke have underweight babies. The tobacco industry focuses its advertising campaign on young girls. Strathclyde university's report, "From the Billboard to the Playground", shows that the tobacco industry's advertising campaign is directed specifically at young people. The report was Commissioned by the Cancer Research Campaign and demolished the argument that the tobacco industry advertises only in an effort to attract smokers to particular brands. That is not So.

The position was summed up by the chairman of McCann Erickson, an advertising company, who said that the primary purpose of tobacco advertising was to create a positive climate of social acceptability for smoking, which encourages new smokers to join the market. Reference has already been made to cigarette advertising in cinemas and sports grounds. Advertising by Marlboro, and all the other cigarette companies, is designed to make people feel good. They show cowboys on horses riding the prairies, beautiful clear streams and wonderful weather; then somebody sits down and takes out a cigarette. Why? Because it is another world that advertisers are trying to show to young people. They are faced not with reality but with a dreamlike world. Young people are falling for it. It is an acceptable alternative to everyday reality.

The Minister and the Government know that the voluntary code does not work. Why otherwise does the tobacco industry spend £160 million on advertising? That question must be answered. By their inactivity, the Government are condemning people to a slow and painful death. They are also condemning those who work in the national health service to looking after them. It makes no sense. Only the interests of big business are being served. The sooner the interests of big business and the tobacco industry are subordinated to the health of all adults and young people, the better.

Mr. Cryer

I have not received the details of Labour party research that may have been carried out this month into any contributions that the tobacco industry makes to the Conservative party. If. however, the industry has made any such contributions, it would behove the Government to send them back so that they can be seen to be completely free from any tobacco company influence. They ought also to send back the money that Asil Nadir and the other crooks have contributed to Conservative party funds.

Mr. McFall

I could not have put it better.

Mr. Rhodri Morgan (Cardiff, West)

Does my hon. Friend agree that there should be some equivalence between the amount spent on advertising and the additional expenditure occasioned to the national health service by its consequences? That would happen if, instead of donating to the Conservative party, tobacco companies donated to the NHS the sums that it has to spend because of smoking.

Mr. McFall

As I said, advertising by the tobacco industry costs £160 million per year, whereas the cost to the NHS of tobacco smoking is £437 million a year—a 3:1 ratio. I agree with my hon. Friend that the Government should do something about inversing that ratio.

I am sure that the Under-Secretary will give a dismal response, because the Government are not willing to take on the tobacco giants and to preserve the health of young people. A dismal message is being sent to young people —they can continue smoking and damaging their health, but the Government are not interested, because there are a few bucks coming in the front door, and perhaps a few coming in the back door, too.

Strathclyde university's research has shown that the subliminal message which gets across to young people, in advertisements for the John Player and Marlboro brands, is that smoking is associated with excitement and fast cars. It was found that children as young as six were aware of that excitement. The message that it is nice to smoke cigarettes because it brings excitement and another world is getting through to young people.

Brand stretching has been mentioned. Cigarette advertisements are displayed around football grounds. On the one hand, Ministers want health education councils to make life for young people more pleasant and varied, but on the other they are encouraging young people to smoke, thereby negating all the assistance given to health education councils. That is massive hypocrisy, and the sooner it is eliminated the better.

As long ago as 1979, a British American Tobacco memorandum stated: Opportunities should be explored by all companies so as to find non-tobacco products and other services which can be used to communicate the brand or house name, together with their essential visual identifiers. Strathclyde university's research showed that that strategy works well with children. An example was given of an advertisement for John Player Special grand prix holidays which did not mention cigarettes or carry a Government health warning, but 91 per cent. of 12 to 16-year-olds said that it advertised cigarettes. What a triumph for the advertisers. They got their message across easily, and the Government by their inactivity are condoning that strategy.

If the Under-Secretary of State does not have anything positive to say to us tonight, he should be ashamed of himself. He should think of the young people who are dying, and of those who will die in the future. He should also think about the national health service. If it is supposed to be safe in the Government's hands, it should be made safer for the people who use it. That is the message to get across. We want action from the Government, not total inactivity. The facts have been spelt out. The nation's health is at stake. The Under-Secretary of State should do something for a change.

9.14 pm

Mr. Brian Wilson (Cunninghame, North)

I fully endorse the plea by my hon. Friend the Member for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall) for the Under-Secretary to do something. I suspect that my hon. Friend will be disappointed, because short shrift was made of the last Minister who tried to do something about this matter—the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton (Sir G. Young); he was sent—

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Stephen Dorrell)

My hon. Friend was promoted to housing.

Mr. Wilson

The Minister said that the hon. Gentleman was promoted to housing, but it was by a somewhat circuitous route. He was sent sliding down the greasy pole, was a poll tax rebel for a while and was then brought back to housing. He has certainly not uttered another word about smoking and health. I suspect that any Minister who has been in such a position will have learnt the lesson that to speak out as a matter of principle about the tobacco industry and its influence is not likely to lead to promotion within the Conservative party.

Mr. McFall

The hon. Gentleman was very honourable in his actions but when the tobacco industry got word of what he was doing they had a word with Downing street. According to one policial pundit, the Prime Minister at the time—the right hon. Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher)—asked, "What is he—is he clever or not so clever?" Someone said, "He is clever," so she said, "Well, he's got to get the bag."

Mr. Wilson

The one episode of "Yes, Minister" that rang true was that in which the wheezing advocate of the tobacco industry ended up as Minister for Sport in the Conservative Government.

However, the subject should not be treated with levity. It has interested me for a long time, both politically and personally. My father was a heavy smoker and a non-drinker who died after a massive heart attack at the age of 59. I am sure that he was one of the triumphs of the tobacco industry's activities in the past few decades.

There is something peculiarly obnoxious about an industry that knows that in order to guarantee its continued profits far into the next century it now has to hook young people—the most vulnerable in our communities—on a habit which is unanimously agreed to be addictive. People who have not yet reached the age of reason, who are not responsible and who have their whole lives ahead of them are caught at an early age by the industry in the cynical knowledge that once they are caught as kids, the industry will probably have them for the rest of their lives.

The fact that those lives are truncated—often markedly —and blighted by the cost of the exercise is as nothing to the tobacco industry or its handmaiden, the advertising industry, which promotes its wares. Those facts are irrelevant to the industry as long as it can keep churning out the profits for its shareholders—that is the extent of its interest. It is in every sense of the word a dirty business and it is a pretty grubby Government who defend the industry's activities and who live as closely with it as the present Government do.

I have been interested in the issue for some time and I am grateful to my hon. Friends who quoted what I have written about it recently. I was struck by the absurdity and degradation of the fact that above all else in the European debate the Government are desperate for flags to raise as witnesses to their success in defending British interests against the wiles of Johnny foreigner in Europe. However, the best they can come up with is that they are "leading the Opposition" to an EC-inspired attempt to ban tobacco advertising.

What a proud activity for our Government to be engaged in. We are supposed to be proud that they can carry on flogging their wares and promoting cancer and the sale of cigarettes to youngsters. That is possible on every front with the massive budgets to which my hon. Friends referred because in order to display their proud anti-Europeanism, the Government have successfully opposed a ban on advertising in the European Community.

It was timely that, as the debate was getting under way, we had news from Canada through The Observer—as my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) said—that some documents have emerged. I do not believe that they differ from the existing documents in every tobacco multi-national in the world. They reveal that the strategies make it perfectly clear that all the verbosity and apologia for what advertising is supposed to do is so much padding. The fact is that the whole marketing strategy is to aim at children from the age of 12 upwards, especially girls of that age. In the industry's own terms, it is a great triumph. Every piece of research shows that the strongest client market for new smokers is that category, especially young women from the lower social and economic background.

Millions of vulnerable, poor people are targeted. For the industry to be sustained, it has to get them into the addictive habit between the ages of 12 and 18. How can any Government, even of the calibre and stamp of this one, defend that as a legitimate commercial activity? How can they refuse to take the modest step that my hon. Friends have proposed? To their honour, some Conservative Members support that step, and they would have been here if they had known that there would be an elongated debate. The issue crosses the House, because it is a question of basic morality. How can anyone accept that an industry should be allowed to go on flogging its wares in that way?

This may be a convenient point at which to get the libertarian argument out of the road. If people make a decision to smoke of their free will, that is their business. If they are in possession of the facts and decide to smoke, it is a decision freely made. I may quibble with their right to smoke in places where there are non-smokers, and there is a whole debate about secondary smoking, but, if they make the decision when of mature age and with the information available from many sources, I cannot quibble with it.

However, I quibble deeply with the idea that smokers should be deprived of that free will and that the argument should be so weighted towards those who have a vested interest in abrogating free will by pushing their wares through the most subtle techniques of advertising, marketing and sponsorship specifically directed at the people in society who are known to be the most vulnerable.

Other hon. Members referred to the report "From the Billboard to the Playground", Commissioned by the Cancer Research Campaign, which is an extension of the Cancer Research Organisation. It is a timely report, because it considers precisely the issue of the impact of tobacco advertising on youngsters. It considered first the familiar self-justification which everyone in the House and in the country knows is rubbish. The industry says that all it is trying to do is to switch customers between competing brands. Nobody believes that, and I hope that it will not form part of the Minister's defence tonight.

If tobacco companies were only promoting brand switching, the industry would have an ever-diminishing number of smokers among whom to share out the various brands. The Minister says that there are a diminishing number of smokers. That is true in spite of the best efforts of the tobacco and advertising industries, but it is not a sharply diminishing number. To prevent it from becoming a sharply diminishing number, the industry has to have new recruits. Everybody knows that advertising is targeted primarily at achieving those recruits.

Mr. Morgan

The Minister will probably claim that the decline in the number of smokers is greater in this country than it is in Italy and in France. However, the decline is smaller than the decline in the United States, where smoking among the middle class and among college students is virtually unknown. It would be great if we could achieve that level of non-smoking among school and college students. The banning of tobacco advertising would be a great contribution to achieving what the United States has already achieved.

Mr. Wilson

Everyone recognises that the banning of tobacco advertising does not achieve all those ends on its own—that it has to be part of wider strategy. It is obviously highly desirable that middle-class youngsters and students drop out of smoking—even in this country, they do so in relatively high numbers—but that concentrates with an even stronger focus the efforts of the tobacco and advertising industries on youngsters 'who do not come from such categories.

A huge gulf exists. I do not have the statistics to hand, but they show how the number of smokers differs between socio-economic groups. In a group of 20 or 30 youngsters from the background described by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. Morgan) it would be considered odd for someone to be puffing away and spreading filth in the direction of others in that group. However, in a group of 20 or 30 youngsters from the least successful socio-economic background, who have the least going for them and the smallest incomes, the chances are that there will be a greater number of smokers. The corollary of that is that a higher proportion of their income is spent on tobacco products.

The attitude that smoking is anti-social is gaining currency among the more articulate, better educated and more aware groups in society, but the vicious corollary is that the tobacco and advertising industries must get their recruits from the lower end of the socio-economic scale.

I attended two meetings in my constituency yesterday. The first comprised people with advanced educational qualifications. To some extent, it was a self-selecting group. There were no smokers in the room. However, there was a much wider range of society at my second meeting. There were more people from lower socioeconomic groups. I emerged from that meeting, like everyone else, covered in the smell and stains of tobacco smoke because 60 or 70 per cent. of the people had been smoking at the meeting.

It would be desirable if we could reduce the number of smokers to the level found in the higher socio-economic groups. As an interim step, we must try to wean from smoking the people in society who are most vulnerable to the habit.

The Strathclyde university report stated: The idea of a mature tobacco market"— that means a market which cannot expand any further— cannot be supported … the key group for the tobacco industry is young smokers. They have to be recruited and retained for the industry to flourish. In no sense can this market be said to be mature. The report examined research from the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, and concluded that cigarette advertising is getting through to children and encouraging them to smoke and to carry on smoking. That will doubtless be satisfactory news in Canada, and probably in the United Kingdom, where we know, from incontrovertible evidence, that that is the precise name of the tobacco industry's game.

I want to refer to the relationship between tobacco and sport, and particularly the role of sponsorship. Recently, I was astounded to receive a document in my post entitled "British International Sports Relay." It is difficult to establish who published that document. Where one would normally expect to find those details, there is the logo of the Sports Council, and the statement: Additional copies of Relay available from Sports Council International Affairs Unit. Under the heading "Tobacco Sponsorship" is a debate in which David Pollock, the director of Action for Smoking and Health, argues against tobacco sponsorship in sport under the accurate heading, "A cancerous growth on sport". However, to my bewilderment, I found that the argument in favour of tobacco sponsorship was not put by some fruitcake from the tobacco industry's front organisations, but by the general secretary of the Central Council of Physical Recreation, Mr. Peter Lawson.

If the Minister for Sport was on the Treasury Bench, I would ask him—instead, I ask all hon. Members and the country—what is going on when the general secretary of the Central Council of Physical Recreation puts his name and that of his organisation to a positive argument in favour of tobacco sponsorship in sport?

His words read like an ultra-right libertarian tract rather than the reasoned utterances of a representative of a body that has been entrusted by the Government with the responsibility for sport and physical recreation. He begins: Sport in Britain is strapped for cash. We all know that. The article continues: Sports bodies are denied resources by government, which takes more from sport than it ever gives back. The gap between government parsimony and the needs of sport is filled by commercial sponsorship. Without it, sport would wither. That may be a wee indictment of the Government, but so far the argument is reasonably incontestable. However, Mr. Lawson then continues by making no distinction whatsoever between tobacco sponsorship and any other form of sponsorship.

I very much regret that it is impossible to have a sports event, club or team these days without having a commercial sponsor. We could have an interesting separate debate about the role of sponsorship, but we accept that, if any sport in this country is to get off the ground, such sponsorship is a mandatory part of the scene. Surely, however, there are lines to be drawn, and it is not only remarkable, but worrying, to find that someone in such a responsible position can argue that the tobacco industry provides a neutral form of sponsorship.

Mr. Lawson continued: The tobacco industry is frequently and unfortunately vilified for its association with sport. Such criticism is, in my view, totally misguided. The governing bodies of sport are not naive, nor are they irresponsible. Sponsorship decisions that they face and must take because of their impecunity are based on a careful assessment of their impact upon their participants and their supporters. Sponsorship of sport by the tobacco industry is controlled by voluntary agreement and is carefully monitored to ensure that young people are not recipients of a pro-smoking message. With respect, that is so much cosh. Mr. Lawson knows it, the tobacco industry knows it and the Government know it. Indeed, I would be deeply concerned to think that the people who preside over the Central Council of Physical Recreation do not know it. It is extraordinary that an employee of that body is allowed to write publicly in such terms. It is even more odd that the Sports Council should publish his words.

We know that the controls over tobacco sponsorship of sport do not have the affect that Mr. Lawson attributes to them, because all the academic research shows that the tobacco industry's sponsorship of sport is aimed at a younger market. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dumbarton (Mr. McFall) has said, the sponsorship is aimed at a market that identifies sport with glamour and, by extension, with tobacco. That is not only the market at which the advertising is aimed—it is the market that it hits. It is appalling for the general secretary of the Central Council of Physical Recreation to argue otherwise.

However, Mr. Lawson continued: The often repeated suggestion that sports bodies are free to select sponsors as and when they wish is nonsense. I shall stop quoting Mr. Lawson there because, until that point, he has used the argument of impecunity. The Government must address that argument directly.

I am not interested in scoring cheap points in this debate about the underfunding of sport, but if sport is using underfunding as an excuse or justification for taking large amounts of money from the tobacco industry, the Government must address the question whether they should put more money into sport so that sport does not have to use that excuse.

Mr. Lawson moves on to what I regard as even more dangerous territory. He writes: At base, there is a larger issue than that of finance. Fundamentally, it is a question of freedom. Are sportsmen and sportswomen to be at liberty to negotiate in the interests of their sport or are they to be browbeaten by the lobby of latter-day puritans?

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Harold Walker)

Order. The hon. Gentleman is going wide of the subject before the House. He should return to the targeting of tobacco advertising on young people.

Mr. Wilson

I am grateful, Mr. Deputy Speaker, but sponsorship is a form of advertising. Every sponsorship is accompanied by advertising. There is manifold evidence which I could—

Mr. Deputy Speaker

Order. The hon. Gentleman is talking about the financing of sport.

Mr. Wilson

I have left that subject, Mr. Deputy Speaker.

As Mr. Lawson writes: At base, there is a larger issue than that of finance. So we are off finance altogether. He continues: Fundamentally, it is a question of freedom. Are sportsment and sportswomen to be at liberty to negotiate in the interests of their sport or are they to be browbeaten by the lobby of latter-day puritans? Mr. Lawson applies that description to people like me, who believe that tobacco advertising and sponsorship of sport are immoral and have precisely the effect that they are intended to have, which is to recruit young people into smoking.

Mr. Morgan

Surely the critical issue is that of role models. Sporting heroes are naturally role models for young people. The deviousness and deceitfulness of tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship activities which are directed at children lie in the fact that they tell them that one must be healthy and have lung function of 120 per cent. to do well at sport, while it is practised by people wearing jerseys and caps carrying insignia and logos which bear a message about a product which will reduce one's lung function to 80 per cent., 50 per cent. and eventually zero per cent.

Mr. Wilson

My hon. Friend is right. There is a link between the the words "advertising" and "sponsorship". The tobacco industry plans a long time ahead. It sees the writing on the wall for its advertising. It knows that, whatever the Government say, eventually European law or the law of a more enlightened British Government will say, "You just cannot do it."

Tobacco advertising on television was banned in 1965. The industry has had 26 years grace for other forms of advertising. That will not go on much longer. Now the tobacco industry is going for the slightly more subtle form of advertising which is sponsorship. It is aimed at the same target, which is the young and vulnerable people in society whom the industry needs to recruit.

I am aware that other hon. Members wish to speak. The points are obvious and clear. The only question is whether the Government have the will to do anything about them. Let us confront the matter. It is a moral question at root. We talk in many different contexts about the need to protect young people from various vices in society. The fact that something happens to be legal as a matter of tradition going far back into history does not mean that it is not a vice in society.

I suspect that, if someone now discovered a substance as addictive and harmful as tobacco, even this Government would be highly unlikely to license it to get it off the ground as a marketable product. We experienced a similar event in Scotland, when Skol Bandits started to be manufactured in East Kilbride. They were a relatively new product. Eventually, the Government intervened to prevent the manufacture of that product in Britain.

We all inherit a tradition from a different age when tobacco was acceptable. As I said earlier, one cannot switch off the tap and ban tobacco. That is not the proposition, but the fact that one does not ban it does not mean that, with the knowledge that we now possess, we do not regard it as a debilitating and dangerous influence on society, and especially young people. The question is whether we protect those young people from the recognition of the information that we have accumulated in the past two or three decades. That is a moral choice.

I have no wish to attribute motives, but clearly finance intervenes. Every advertisement on behalf of the tobacco industry delivers millions in tobacco tax to the Treasury. If that is the wages of sin, to what extent are the Government prepared to maintain them? If the price of doing that is leading another generation into that habit—

Mr. Alun Michael (Cardiff, South and Penarth)

The subject of the debate is the targeting of young people. Surely all hon. Members would argue that it is wrong for the industry to be able to target young people. However, does my hon. Friend agree that the Government have the worst of both worlds? They seem to be allowing the targeting of young people through advertising, but, because of the tax regime that they have introduced in the past few years, they seem to be exporting jobs in the tobacco industry. We seem to have the worst of both worlds. We still seem to have cigarettes, but jobs are going overseas, yet we allow the targeting of young people. Both parts of that equation seem to be crazy.

Mr. Wilson

It is tricky to agree with that argument. I am not that interested in where the jobs that make the product are located, but I have sympathy with tobacco workers. Like everyone else, they were taken into whatever jobs were available for them. If a social and political decision is taken against tobacco products and cigarettes, clearly there is a social and political responsibility to find other forms of employment for those people. In parts of Glasgow, the tobacco industry is very important. One cannot shut up shop and say, "We wipe our hands of those people." There is a responsibility to create other employment, and that would be the view of any responsible Government.

I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, South and Penarth (Mr. Michael) that it is doubly absurd to destroy jobs in the British tobacco industry—as has been done on a large scale—if that leads not to a reduction in tobacco consumption but to the substitution of imported brands of cigarette.

Mr. Michael

There is a large tobacco factory in my constituency. I have made it clear to the people who work there and to the management that I am against the encouragement of tobacco addiction and in favour of measures which will prevent the use of tobacco in public places. However, when the company was considering the service and repair of machinery and was thinking of sending it abroad to Scandanavia, it was willing to listen and to ensure that the work was carried out in this country.

The Government, through their tax regimes, do not seem to be interested in that. Tobacco consumption will be a fact of life in this country for some time. During that period, we want to do all we can to reduce it, especially among young people, and we want to avoid targeting them in advertising. However, we must do what we can to ensure that that does not have a consequent effect on unemployment in this country through a failure to understand that process.

Mr. Wilson

My hon. Friend argues his own case very well. I do not disagree with a word of it.

I suspect that people who work in the industry are under no illusions. They know the way that the wind is blowing, and would be only too pleased to be redeployed into another trade. The tragedy is that, whatever the direction that market forces blow, when they are left to their own devices, the choice for workers in such industries is not between the status quo and redeployment, but between the status quo and loss of their jobs. In those circumstances, it is natural that those who work in the tobacco industry should be as anxious as anyone to defend their jobs.

I conclude with a plea to the Minister. We are faced with a moral choice: do we allow our youngsters to be exploited? Do we allow people from the age of 12 to be induced into a habit which is addictive and will undermine, and in many cases destroy, their lives? How many smokers who were hooked when 12, 13, or 14, in their formative years, are grateful for having been subjected to the wiles of the tobacco and advertising industries? The vast majority curse the day they became hooked on the habit. That surely places a responsibility on any Government of any political complexion to trample on the bogus libertarian appeal of the tobacco and advertising industries that they are only offering choice.

9.45 pm

Mr. Nigel Griffiths (Edinburgh, South)

I am grateful for the opportunity that we have been afforded by my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) to debate an extremely important subject. We are also indebted to the Minister and the Whips for allowing us adequate time in which to adduce our arguments.

The debate is not about banning the advertising of tobacco. It is about the impact of tobacco advertising and the promotion of tobacco on young people. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North (Mr. Wilson) pointed out, we in Scotland know that the words of some irresponsible sectors of the tobacco industry during the 1980s turned out to be weasel words.

One thinks of the way in which the industry set up a factory, with considerable Government money, to produce Skoal Bandits, and then blatantly promoted that carcinogenic product, which promotes mouth cancers, to children in nearby schools. That factory turned out to be a short-lived exercise and a gross waste of Government money. It was a symptom or symbol of the 1980s and a lesson for the 1990s of collusion between Government and irresponsible elements who have done much to give the tobacco industry a bad name.

I pay tribute to people who have advised parents and children of the dangers of taking up smoking. Dr. Lynne Michelle, of Edinburgh, has highlighted in her studies on the perception of children of the promotion of cigarettes the grave danger, almost the entrapment of a younger generation by irresponsible elements in the industry and, sadly, the example set by other adults, including parents. Those results were published last year and cited by an all-party group in Westminster Hall. The findings were horrific. I also pay tribute to Alison Hillhouse, of ASH in Scotland, who has done much to highlight the dangers of smoking.

Mr. Michael

While my hon. Friend is paying tribute to several people who have highlighted those issues, will he also pay tribute to a specialist in Wales, with the Celtic name of Dr. Ian Campbell, who has highlighted those issues strongly? In the light of his experience and expertise at Llandough hospital in my constituency, he has alerted people in Wales to the dangers of smoking, the burdens that smoking places on the NHS and the tremendous damage that it does to health. He, too, has sought to publicise and to persuade the public of the need to avoid the activities that are being condemned in this debate.

Mr. Griffiths

I could not pay a more eloquent testimony to the doctor than my hon. Friend has just paid. He, too, will have had a chance to study the fourth report of the Committee for Monitoring Agreements on Tobacco Advertising and Sponsorship, several paragraphs of which deal with the targeting of tobacco advertising at young people.

Before I go into the details of the report's findings and the accompanying and interesting, if depressing, press statement by the Minister on 9 September, I should say that there is not only increasing public awareness of the problems of smoking and its long-term consequences to the health of smokers, but an increasing awareness of the dangers of passive smoking, particularly to children. Lothian Region Transport plc has done much to ensure that smoking is banned from public transport in the Lothian area. As in America, smoking is now increasingly prohibited in public places in Britain, which means that children are less influenced by adults who smoke and whose passive smoking does much to damage young children's health.

I look forward to the day when restaurants, pubs, cafes and public transport undertakings through the United Kingdom take seriously the problems of smoking. If they permit smoking, they should set aside special rooms for those who wish to smoke and for those who do not.

Mr. Morgan

I hope that my hon. Friend agrees that, if, we are to stop young people inhaling smoke unintentionally and passively in public places such as restaurants and railway carriages, the physical segregation between areas where people are allowed to smoke and those where they are not must be far better.

Mr. Deputy Speaker

Order. None of that relates to the targeting of advertising on young children.

Mr. Morgan

I am sorry, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was about to come to that.

Mr. Deputy Speaker

I think that I will allow the hon. Gentleman to get on with his speech.

Mr. Griffiths

It was not an unhelpful intervention, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because one of the problems in dealing with the targeting of advertising is that advertisements aimed at adults will be less effective than the Minister may wish if they take account of the fact that children may be present. The problem that my hon. Friend rightly highlights of there being no closing doors on trains between smoking and non-smoking areas exposes children to smoking.

Mr. Morgan

The point that my hon. Friend is about to come to is that the advertising directed at young people creates a climate of social acceptability in which children will then not complain about the awful smell of smoke from the other side of a physical barrier—

Mr. Deputy Speaker

Order. That is nonsense. Mr. Griffiths.

Mr. Griffiths

The fourth report of the Committee on Monitoring Agreements on Tobacco Advertising and Sponsorship was produced this summer and the Minister will have had time to study it in detail.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the report relates to the financing of the committee. The funding for direct mail research was £24,000, the chairman's fees were £2,000 and there was a miscellaneous sum of £331 for telephone, stationery and the like. That is a total of £26,331. An additional sum for certain members and secretaries' expenses was met by the Department and the companies, but the amount is unspecified. That is a derisory total for a committee monitoring agreements on tobacco advertising and sponsorship. It is less than £30,000, compared with the tens or hundreds of millions that are spent on promoting tobacco.

Only four members of the committee represented the Department of Health, but there were seven from the trade, the Tobacco Advisory Council and various tobacco companies. That shows an imbalance. More disturbing is an analysis of the complaints. A fifth of the complaints against companies for advertising in an irresponsible fashion in breach of the code were upheld. That is serious in view of the fact that the committee has been running for more than four years. One would have thought that its very existence would be some sort of deterrent. The fact that one in five of the complaints were held to be breaches of the code shows that the tobacco companies have perhaps been treating the committee and the issue in a cavalier way.

The report shows that the committee devoted some time to analysing a helpful report from the Health Education Authority, "Beating the Ban", which was published in 1990. It grieves me to say that the committee seemed to spend some time trying to denigrate the authority's findings and to vindicate the tobacco industry. It should have spent a little more time looking at the serious work being carried out by the Health Education Authority and less time on carping criticisms of the authority's work.

Sadly, the preface to the report, the covering letter from Mr. John Belloch, chairman of the Committee for Monitoring Agreements on Tobacco Advertising and Sponsorship, shows that the increase in the number of breaches in the past year has risen by 35 per cent. Perhaps that increase reflects a decline in profits, the recession and the drive by tobacco companies to advertise their products even more fiercely. None the less, the rise is worrying.

The committee was set up under the terms of a voluntary agreement. The Minister and I may disagree about whether the emphasis should be on voluntary or statutory agreements. The agreement was concluded with the Government on 1 April 1986. The committee contains leading representatives of the tobacco industry and its task is to monitor the operation of the agreements on advertising and on sponsorship of sports by tobacco companies in the United Kingdom. My hon. Friend the Member for Cunninghame, North spoke about that.

That is a more recent agreement, dating from January 1987. I shall not read out the main provisions of the agreement, because they fall outwith the terms of the Adjournment debate topic, but they are available to the general public, and to hon. Members in the Library. The problems that are highlighted—here is where we question the faith of some of the marketers of tobacco companies —include the limiting of expenditure on cigarette brand poster advertising to 50 per cent. of the level in the year ended 31 March 1980. The problem arises from the fact that—

It being Ten o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Wood.]

Mr. Griffiths

I was saying that the proportion of advertising expenditure given was for that in the two lowest tar groups, which was rather less than the proportion of total sales.

I do not want to carp about the work of the Committee. I welcome the fact that the industry gets together with the Minister's representative and with representatives of other Departments, and I welcome the agreement to cease advertising in cinemas and to support an advertising campaign about illegal sales to children under 16. These measures have the full endorsement of the Labour party, which also welcomes the fact that notices about the law will be made extensively available for display by the retail trade and will be fixed to automatic vending machines by operators.

I know that the industry and the Department of Health are to consider what further action is needed to publicise the law in the light of the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act 1991. I refer to the case outlined in the report of breaches of the code and to the cases behind the figures that I have given.

Mr. Michael

My hon. Friend has mentioned the reports of the Committee, including one on the general aspects of two televised sporting events sponsored by tobacco companies. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is not the specific element, but the general targeting of young people, which may not be explicit, that causes the most difficulty? All of us who have worked with young people know that, in relation to pop music and sport, the impact of the event and the personality goes way beyond w hat one would expect. Should this not be taken into account, and does it not appear that it is not taken into account in the voluntary code?

Mr. Griffiths

I endorse that point, which follows on from the one that I have been making. There are volumes of evidence to substantiate what my hon. Friend has said, and I hope to give the House some examples. The Evening Standard of 20 May this year published an excellent critique of advertising and the ways in which the tobacco industry had dodged bans on advertising. Anyone who has not read Mr. Eric Clark's excellent article charting how classic adverts, in the past and in the present, have succeeded in linking the cigarette with sophistication, should read it.

As he so rightly says, despite all the increasingly tougher codes, much of what is happening in advertising now does not contravene codes, yet tobacco companies get the message across in the same way. Marlboro, for instance, does not have to show or even mention somebody smoking cigarettes—it just has to show a cowboy. That is an example of what my hon. Friend has in mind.

Mr. Morgan

There was a notorious example, similar to the one that my hon. Friend has given, which no doubt had a great deal of appeal to young people. It was the famous Peter Stuyvesant advertisement which showed passengers on aircraft. No doubt it had a great deal of appeal because it suggested that, if someone could afford air travel, he must be a bit of a swinger and must be with it. That was bound to appeal to young people as well. That was shown about 20 years ago, shortly after the first voluntary code. Instead of the advertiser stating directly that someone is a with-it swinger if he smokes, he implies that to young people by showing them smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes on airliners.

Mr. Griffiths

It could well be that it will take more than the measures that the Government have introduced to strip the glamour from smoking, notwithstanding the 115,000 smoking-related deaths per year in Britain alone. Tragically, as my hon. Friends have said, the image that is portrayed is still one of the smoker being chic or macho. That image is targeted at adults and at children, who are the most impressionable.

Mr. Michael

It seems that my hon. Friend is going to the essence of the argument. For many years before coming to this place, I worked with young children. It strikes me that it is young people who are most at risk and who have most to lose. The children with whom I worked had the least opportunity in terms of personal development and careers, and they were likely to be drawn into a variety of different forms of behaviour, among which the first was often the use of and then addiction to tobacco.

Mr. Griffiths

My hon. Friend makes the point well and pithily.

The article in the Evening Standard takes up the issue in the same vein. I am sure that that newspaper lives or dies by its advertising and can claim some expertise on the subject. The article states that we have only to look at the black-and-white magazine shots of Val Kilmer, Jim Morrison in The Doors, with a cigarette. Read about Julia Roberts as she takes 'a deep draw on the cigarette in her right hand'. Or visit the Olivier/SWET '91 award-winning play Dancing at Lughnasa and hear talk of 'Wild Woodbines'. All these things have an impact on the public. In particular, as the journalist, Mr. Clark states, they have an effect on his daughter, who is 13. She mimes smoking. I am sure that that will be familiar to hon. Members with teenage children. That shows the impact of smoking. It is almost passive advertising and promotion, but I am convinced that it is carefully crafted in many instances by the advertising companies on behalf of the cigarette companies.

The notion that we do not have to have anything to do with those who want to smoke is odious, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, West and Penarth (Mr. Michael) has said. The notion also that advertising is designed to persuade people to smoke one company's brand instead of that of another—in other words, to switch—has little validity.

Today's cigarette has 110 years of image-making behind it. Part of the task of the modern tobacco promoter is to make the smoking habit appear clean and healthy, and to imply that it is all right to smoke if we take plenty of exercise. Spurious devices are used to put forward a powerful message.

For young women in particular, the message conveyed is that of elegance, poise, and perhaps a hint of luxury. Such an image can be seductive to people who have not enjoyed so-called rising prosperity—the number who have not done so is increasing—and have fewer pleasures in life. I refer to people who, as I speak, are sitting at home, unable to put on their electric fires. The message that one can gain for just a few pence, by smoking, something that a Liz Taylor or a Julia Roberts with all their millions have can be seductive—and it is being deliberately promoted.

The tobacco industry has done much to sidestep the Secretary of State's restrictions by moving more into other marketing areas, such as sampling, road shows, travel films, clothing, and sponsorship—from Glyndebourne to rock, from angling to snooker. Earlier this year, Philip Morris appointed a London agency to explore news areas of so-called non-conventional advertising.

At the heart of the debate, and of the promotion of cigarettes to young people, is a crisis of confidence in the House and the country over the good will of the tobacco industry. The Government have at least been partly honest in their stand. A few years ago, they went in to Europe with the deliberate aim of sabotaging any tough ban on cigarette advertising, and any insistance on tough medical warnings of the kind that appear today.

Since then, the Government have perceived public opinion and disquiet with their handling of the issue, but still they have not fully learnt the lessons. When the new voluntary agreement on tobacco advertising was concluded, the Secretary of State for Health issued a trumpeting press release stating: The agreement will ensure that the new health warnings such as 'Smoking Kills', which will appear on cigarette packets from 1992, will also appear on advertisements. Three cheers for that—but they are three cheers three years too late in terms of Government action, the tens of thousands of people who have died from smoking, and the tens of thousands more who have taken up smoking during that time.

The messages that the Secretary of State trumpets in his press release are "Smoking Kills," "Smoking Causes Cancer," "Smoking Causes Heart Disease," "Smoking Causes Fatal Diseases," "Smoking When Pregnant Harms Your Baby," and "Protect Children: Don't Make Them Breathe Your Smoke." They are all welcome but my right hon. and hon. Friends—together with responsible interests outside the House, such as the British Medical Association and other medical authorities—have pressed for such a policy for some years.

I suspect that the Secretary of State's inability to press that policy on the industry, and the industry's failure to adopt it voluntarily before now, has done much to heighten public awareness of the reticence of the Secretary of State and of the industry to take the issue as seriously as they might.

I believe in tough regulations, not knee-jerk reactions to public opinion—but the industry should be allowed to gear up to them and to plan five or 10 years ahead. If the industry had gone along with the sort of scheme that we were urging three or four years ago, it would be well geared up to meeting the challenge now, instead of being caught short by its friends—who I am sure the industry feels have in some way betrayed it.

In his press release the Secretary of State says: Many of the new measures are designed to protect children from being influenced to take up the deadly habit of smoking. Again, we welcome that, but is it not sad that it comes 12 years after this Government were elected and after not just one but two Secretaries of State since I have been a Member of Parliament have been influenced because of criticism of tobacco advertising and irresponsible elements in the tobacco industry?

The Secretary of State said that he wants to discourage children and young people, particularly young women, from taking up smoking and that it is one of the most important things we can do to protect their future health. We welcome that statement. In the remaining 15 minutes we look forward to hearing from the Minister what he intends to do to advance that cause further.

10.15 pm

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Mr. Stephen Dorrell)

I congratulate the hon. Member for Eccles (Miss Lestor) on securing this debate and on mobilising so much support from her side of the House. Despite the best efforts of one or two of her hon. Friends, I do not believe that the debate has revealed a party political difference on anything other than the very narrow issue of an advertising ban. There is no dispute about the incidence of smoking among young people and among the population as a whole, which must be reduced.

Statistics have already been quoted and they bear repetition. They show that 100,000 unnecessary deaths a year are the result of tobacco consumption. That is a Lockerbie disaster every day of every year. A third of all deaths in the age group 40 to 70 are smoking-related. That is a frightening statistic. A few Opposition Members told us that smoking costs the national health service £437 million a year. I am not sure how accurately that can be measured, but it represents a substantial cost to the NHS, which the hon. Member for Eccles compared, in my view rightly, with the large sums of money that the European Community still commits to subsidising tobacco production, against which we have argued vehemently in Brussels. At the very least there is something contradictory—most people would apply a stronger epithet to it—about an organisation that subsidises tobacco production but seeks to present itself as interested in reducing tobacco consumption.

This Government's record, as well as that of our predecessors who pursued precisely the same policy, shows some success in delivering the objective that both parties have espoused—reduced tobacco consumption. The number of smokers has fallen from 45 per cent. of the population in 1974 to 32 per cent. of the population in 1988, the most recent year for which figures are available.

The Green Paper which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health published this summer, entitled "The Health of the Nation", suggests, as part of the consultation about health targets, that we should adopt as a target a further reduction, within the time span of the White Paper, when it is published, of that proportion of the population who smoke from 33 per cent. in the case of men, as it was in 1988, to 22 per cent. and from 30 per cent. of women down to 21 per cent.—a reduction of more than 30 per cent. on present incidence rates.

There cannot be and there should not be any attempt to open up a party political divide over the importance of further reducing tobacco consumption. Nor is there any serious basis on which it can be argued that there is a party political divide over the particular of reducing tobacco consumption among children.

Clearly, if we want to deliver long-term reductions in tobacco consumption, we need to ensure that the smallest possible number of children—preferably none—take up the tobacco habit. Once again, that is not in dispute.

We have made it clear that we are disappointed at the figures revealed in the latest survey by the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys of tobacco consumption by young people. It showed that, in 1990, 10 per cent. of children aged between 11 and 15 still used tobacco. I was horrified by the definition of "regular" users. Those are not children who smoke one or two cigarettes a week to prove to their contemporaries that they are older than they are; if they are boys, they smoke more than 56 cigarettes a week and, if they are girls, more than 49 cigarettes a week. By any definition, that is a substantial level of tobacco consumption by children, to whom it is illegal to sell cigarettes.

Action has been taken, not just in the past few years but consistently by successive Governments since 1904, to inhibit tobacco consumption by children. The sale of cigarettes to children has been illegal since 1904. Successive legislative steps have been taken since then to tighten the restrictions on access to tobacco by young children.

The most recent was the Children and Young Persons (Protection from Tobacco) Act 1991, which the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) mentioned. It was passed with the Government's support. The Act makes it an absolute offence for a shopkeeper to sell cigarettes or any other tobacco product to young people. It makes it clear that a shopkeeper who sells cigarettes to young people cannot simply say that he did not know that he was doing so. To establish his innocence, he must prove that he took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence to avoid the Commission of an offence. In other words, if a shopkeeper cannot show that he took every reasonable step to satisfy himself about the age of the person buying cigarettes or any other tobacco product, he has committed an offence.

Action has been taken to deal with one of the issues which undoubtedly is an important contributor to tobacco consumption by young people—their access to tobacco products. The law is tighter than it has ever been, and it has the backing of both sides of the House.

Mr. Morgan

Does the hon. Gentleman really wish to imply that it is difficult for young children to buy cigarettes from a local corner shop? My impression is that the old trick of saying that the cigarettes are for one's mother or older brother still works 99.99 per cent. of the time.

Mr. Dorrell

The House need not rely on the hon. Gentleman's view that it happens 99.99 per cent. of the time. One of the slightly more encouraging findings of the OPCS survey—I emphasise the word "slightly"—was that, in 1988, 8 per cent. of young smokers had been refused cigarettes by the supplier the last time they sought to buy them but that, in 1990, the figure had risen to 15 per cent. Although that meant that 85 per cent. had been able to buy cigarettes illegally without challenge, none the less it was a welcome trend.

The special position of young people has been recognised in the voluntary agreements that the Government have negotiated with the industry and it was explicit in the 1986 voluntary agreement. It has been suggested that the voluntary agreement makes no reference to children and young people, but that is not true. I quote the 1986 agreement under which the industry agreed to take special care to ensure that their advertising … and promotion does not represent a greater attraction to young people than to the population as a whole. The agreement hinds the industry and is carried forward into the new agreement. It is the basis on which any discriminatory advertising directed at young people can be challenged under the terms of the voluntary agreements between the Government and the industry.

The voluntary agreement published in September this year by my right hon. Friend takes several further steps towards restricting the extent to which advertising is directed—purposefully or otherwise—at young people. The voluntary agreement commits the industry to a 50 per cent. reduction in shop-front advertising starting at the shop fronts closest to schools. It commits the industry to applying the same ban on billboard advertising overlooking playgrounds as already applies to billboard advertising close to schools.

It also commits the industry to a ban on cigarette and other tobacco advertising in magazines specifically aimed at the young women's market. "Specificially aimed" in that context is defined in the agreement as describing any magazine where the age group 15 to 24 comprises more than 25 per cent. of the magazine's readership. This year, we also insisted on a substantial strengthening of the nature of the health warnings put on packets and on any tobacco advertising. To suggest that the Government have taken no action, or have taken no action against the specific problem of advertising directed at children, is a charge that does not stand up.

The hon. Member for Eccles mentioned the case of the Canadian company Imperial Tobacco Ltd. The charges against that company are serious, although the hon. Lady made it clear that there is no suggestion in any of the supporting paperwork that the claims relate to any sales outside Canada and certainly not that they relate to any sales in this country. Indeed, it would be hard for them to do so, because British American Tobacco does not sell tobacco in the United Kingdom.

The hon. Lady also quoted the use of the puffin symbol by Gallaher. That is a good illustration of the strength of the voluntary agreement approach to advertising and of the weakness of seeking to enshrine it in statutory to legal bounds. If the hon. Lady or Puffin Books can show that the use of the puffin symbol contravenes the text that I quoted from the 1986 voluntary agreement, without being bound by court procedures and legal niceties and technicalities, we have a system deliberately designed to be sufficiently flexible to allow action to be taken and new barriers which will not be allowed to be broken. We will not extend the limits of what is acceptable.

I have stressed that there is no disagreement between the Government and the Opposition about the importance of reducing tobacco consumption or of reducing access to tobacco, especially among children, as a contributor to that objective. If the House is to take that objective seriously and then to deliver that objective, we need to consider what influences tobacco consumption among children.

Mr. Nigel Griffiths

rose—

Mr. Dorrell

I have only two minutes and I want to make some more points. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that the biggest single influence on whether children smoke is the parental influence. First, it is a mistake to imagine that access to tobacco for children is an entirely discrete subject. Advertising directed at reducing tobacco consumption by parents has a substantial secondary knock-on effect on children. The second point to bear in in mind when we consider what influences children's consumption is the question of access and the tightening of that access. Hence our support for the Bill last year. The third is to ensure that children understand the health hazards that they run. One of the most encouraging aspects at the moment is that the Health Education Authority recently found that 87 per cent. of schoolchildren between nine and 15 think that smoking can kill. Therefore, the education message is getting through.

Our most important priority is to secure the agreement of the industry to effective voluntary agreements and then to police them robustly. Evidence from the continent and comparison of our record with that of other European countries show that that is the route which delivers a substantial reduction in tobacco smoking.

The motion having been made at Ten o'clock, and the debate having continued for half an hour, MR. DEPUTY SPEAKER adjourned the House without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned at half past Ten o'clock.