Feature

The ad gag drags on

What are the chances of a private member’s bill to ban tobacco advertising becoming law? John Connolly reports

Smoking kills 120,000 people in the UK each year, more than 10 times the number killed by road traffic accidents, accidental falls, murder, suicide and HIV combined. It is the biggest preventable cause of death in the country.

Tobacco is a unique product: it is the only freely available consumer product that kills the user when it is used according to the manufacturer’s instructions. It is for this reason that, for many years, the public health community has been campaigning to have tobacco advertising banned. The evidence that a ban on tobacco advertising would cut tobacco consumption and with it disease and deaths is clear. Dr Clive Smee, chief economic adviser to the Department of Health, published the most comprehensive study of the link between advertising and tobacco consumption in 1992.

He reviewed 19 studies, mainly from the UK and the US, correlating advertising spend and total tobacco consumption. Smee concluded: ‘The balance of evidence thus supports the conclusion that advertising does have a positive effect on consumption.’

Smee also reviewed the impact of advertising bans that had been introduced at the time. The most significant were bans in Norway and Finland, which had been in place for over a decade at the time of the report. Smee concluded: ‘In each case the banning of advertising was followed by a fall in smoking on a scale which cannot reasonably be attributed to other factors.’

The government estimates that banning tobacco advertising would reduce tobacco consumption by 2.5 per cent a year in the long term. While this may not sound like much, it would save 3,000 lives a year – the same as the total number of people killed on Britain’s roads each year. In any case, this may prove to be a cautious estimate. The real figure could be more than double this estimate, with the World Bank predicting a 7 per cent drop.

Now, after many years of campaigning, it looks as though we are closer than ever to a total tobacco advertising ban.

On November 2, the House of Lords debated a private member’s bill which, if passed, would ban tobacco advertising. This bill was introduced by Lord Clement-Jones, the Liberal Democrat spokesman on health in the Lords and a long-term public health campaigner. The debate was lively and, interestingly, the house was very much in favour of the bill. Of the 23 peers who spoke 18 were in favour of an advertising ban and one was undecided.

This augurs well for building support for the bill in the House of Lords, as it moves through its parliamentary stages. The real risk to this legislation, however, is that it could run out of time, as the parliamentary time allotted to discussion of private members’ bills is limited. It is unlikely the bill could become law without government support, so its stance on the bill will be the deciding factor.

So far the government’s attitude to banning tobacco advertising has been inconsistent. Legislation to ban cigarette advertising was a Labour manifesto commitment in both 1997 and 2001. Indeed, ministers introduced a bill at the end of last year and pushed hard to get it through. However, this bill ran out of time and was lost in the run-up to the general election. Ministers were, at the time, very bullish in their defence of this legislation.

Last January health secretary Alan Milburn was forthright in his commitment to this legislation. He told MPs: ‘We honour the commitments we have made. The bill will ban tobacco advertising and sponsorship in this country. It will do so to protect public health, to safeguard children and to reduce health inequalities.’

Public health minister Yvette Cooper was equally unequivocal in her support, telling the House of Commons: ‘The bill will not prevent individual choice, but it will prevent the tobacco industry from using its mighty financial muscle to advertise and promote a product that kills. For the sake of the children who will be tomorrow’s victims of lung cancer, coronary heart disease and other diseases, I commend the bill.’

Given such clear commitments, campaigners were disappointed when, after the general election, the bill was dropped from the government’s legislative programme. Instead of emphasising the vital public health importance of this measure, ministers said only that the government ‘remained committed’ to the bill, and that they planned to reintroduce it ‘when parliamentary time allows’.

Now they have that opportunity. It was on the back of the government’s U-turn that Lord Clement-Jones introduced his bill, which is identical – down to the last comma – to the one lost in the run-up to the election. His bill can get through most of its House of Lords stages without taking up government time, but will need ministerial support to get through the Commons.

Ministers should take this opportunity to deliver on a commitment made in two manifestos. A ban on tobacco advertising will save thousands of lives, be popular and cost almost nothing to implement. It has support from across the political spectrum in both Houses of Parliament and the backing of two-thirds of the electorate. If the government does not want to act on a ban now, it makes you wonder if it ever will.