§ Mr. AmosTo ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on the progress of his Department's negotiations to date with the tobacco industry on the control of tobacco advertising.
§ Mr. Waldegrave[pursuant to the reply 11 March 1991: I am pleased to announce that the Health Departments and the industry have reached agreement in principle on a revised voluntary agreement for the next three years on the advertising and promotion of tobacco products. The new agreement will be published and come into force in the next few weeks when final drafting has been completed and the agreement has been approved under the Restrictive Trade Practices Act 1976.
In a major addition to the voluntary agreement, the industry has agreed to remove 50 per cent. of shopfront advertising over five years. The change will start once the agreement has been concluded and will apply to all external permanent advertising material on shops. In making this reduction, the industry will act in consultation with the retail trade; it will seek to apply the reduction evenly over time by type of sign and by geographic location; priority will be given to reducing the number of those permanent advertising signs on shops clearly visible from schools; the reductions will be validated annually by independent audit; the results of the audit will be submitted to the monitoring committee and will appear in the committee's annual report.
A major change in the agreement is that from 1 July all external signs on shops will carry a health warning; under the existing agreement signs erected before 1983 have not been required to carry a health warning and this has caused confusion to the public and has been commented on in reports of the monitoring committee.
The new agreement will also extend the present ban on poster advertising which is visible from schools to children's playgrounds.
Other parts of the existing voluntary agreement will also be updated and anomalies, which have come to notice through the reports of the monitoring committee, will be removed.
235WI am also pleased to announce that, following the resignation of Sir Peter Lazarus as chairman of the monitoring committee, the Government with the agreement of the industry, have appointed Sir John Blelloch, formerly permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, to be the new chairman of the committee.
The Government welcome these steps to maintain and develop the system of voluntary agreements, to which they remain committed.