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Health and Education

I confess that I have not read the terms of reference of Lord Laming's review, so I shall leave that question to my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who may want to refer to it later. I return now to the Government's legislative intentions. The Secretary of State for Health announced this week that the Government are going to remove point-of-sale displays for tobacco products. I hold no brief for tobacco—I wish that no one were a smoker—but how can it be legal for a shop to sell cigarettes to adults but illegal for it to put such products on a shelf? What is the point of the Government constantly mandating increasingly alarming labels for cigarette packets—as the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Bristol, South (Dawn Primarolo), did recently—and then require them to be hidden? How can they say that their proposal is aimed at sales in shops of cigarettes to young people, when we legislated less than two years ago to make it illegal for shops to sell tobacco products to under-18s? The day before yesterday, the Government claimed that removing displays of cigarettes can reduce smoking prevalence among young people by 10 per cent., but the evidence from other countries shows that similar bans have not had that effect. It is true that smoking prevalence rates among 15 to 19-year-olds in Canada declined after 2002, but that cannot be attributed to the removal of tobacco displays. The provinces that removed tobacco displays achieved a success rate broadly equal to those that did not, so the ban apparently had no great effect. In Iceland, Government statistics show that the display ban had no impact on the number of 15 to 19-year-olds who smoke—in fact, the proportion rose from 14.4 per cent. to 15.2 per cent. Many small businesses will be hit by the proposal, and it is simply not good enough to say to them that the Government have the best interests of public health at heart when the evidence to back that up is not there. The Norwegian Department of Health and Care Services said last year that"““there is yet no scientific study published that definitely shows the impact that a ban against public display would have on the number of people who smoke””."