Festus Akinbusoye: The generational smoking ban is a disaster waiting to happen | Conservative Home

Festus Akinbusoye was the Conservative Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner from 2021 to 2024.

When I was elected as the Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) in 2021, I realised I would be fighting two battles. One, against the criminals and the second, against demand pressures often not understood by lawmakers.

I gained this insight on the frontline as a special constable dealing with so many competing priorities that I sometimes wished everything would just stop for a second. I saw first-hand what happens when laws are made in Westminster, often with good intentions, but also with little understanding of the real-world consequences these laws will have down the line.

It seems so many politicians draft legislation purely just to grab today’s headlines – forgetting, perhaps not caring, what the effects the laws they’re subjecting society to will have in the years to come. By the time these laws come into effect, and those consequences have come to pass, they may well have moved on to other jobs and have gained a degree of distance, and the root cause is long forgotten.

Being a PCC taught me that the unintended consequences of poor legislation, especially when implemented without real thought for how it will be enforced. There, the classic politician’s fallacy seems to still be the order of the day: “We must do something. This is something. We must do it.”

The latest illustration of this sort of thinking is meandering its way through the House of Lords at the moment, the Tobacco & Vapes Bill. A bill designed to stamp out youth smoking, a noble goal.

I’m no fan of smoking – in fact, I have never smoked anything apart from a barbecue in my life. But the Bill is a disaster waiting to happen.

Never mind that youth smoking is already in its death throes as it is. The Office for National Statistics just announced that we now have the lowest proportion of current smokers since records began, and it’s the young that are driving this reduction; the largest fall in smoking between 2011 (25.7 per cent) and 2024 (8.1 per cent) has been those aged 18 to 24 years.

So smoking is officially already on its way out, but this isn’t stopping the Government from slapping us with some over-the-top new laws. Yet another example of a nanny state that ought to focus on growing the economy, not number of things to ban.

The bill contains the generational smoking ban, meaning anyone born on or after January 1st, 2009, will never be able to buy tobacco products. So, in the future, shopkeepers will have to ask thirty-year-olds for ID or risk a £200 on-the-spot fine for selling to an underage person. In this case, an underage person would be twenty-nine or younger.

At the very least, this will create a grey market where those of age will just resell their cigarettes to their moderately younger mates.

What’s more is that this might not even be legal; the former Solicitor General Robert Buckland KC published a legal opinion saying that, due to the Windsor Framework, the ban can’t be implemented in Northern Ireland as it goes further than current EU laws, which Northern Ireland is bound by. The Government really hasn’t thought this through.

Forget the legal objections, though – think of the practical. Do we really want to burden our overstretched police officers with having to enforce this? Having to check the birth dates of fully grown adults? I can tell you the officers themselves don’t; they’d rather be catching burglars and phone snatchers.

By criminalising the demand for cigarettes, we risk sparking a huge black market and giving organised crime the potential to make huge amounts of money.

Consider Australia, which introduced stringent anti-tobacco laws to stamp out smoking. Now, contraband tobacco accounts for 64 per cent of all tobacco sales, which equates to about AUD 9.8 billion, all going directly into the hands of criminals. Police raided one shop that was money laundering AUD 83,000,000. The sums are eye-watering!

Naturally, when so much money is at stake, turf wars start. In Victoria State alone, there have been over 100 fire bombings of shops. Innocent shopkeepers’ livelihoods are destroyed because they refuse to play the criminal’s game. The Australian government has been throwing good money after bad by ploughing AUD 345 million extra funding into the police to tackle the problem, but they just can’t stem the flow.

The problem exists in the UK too; just this summer, 300,000 illegal cigarettes were seized in the county of Bedfordshire, where I served as PCC. We will see more and more of these stories as Illicit tobacco is fast becoming one of organised crime’s biggest money maker.

Worse, these gangs aren’t just involved in just one criminal enterprise: they’re the same gangs that traffic drugs to our streets and people into our country. The BBC just recently uncovered a Kurdish criminal gang that enables illegal migrants to work in more than 100 local shops, barbershops and car washes across the country, selling contraband tobacco and vapes to underage children.

They destroy the fabric of our society to make money, and we’re making laws that make it much easier for them.

The Government needs to look beyond just grabbing some positive headlines and see the actual implications this bill will have on the country. They don’t think about the shopkeeper being threatened by tobacco smugglers or the police officer tackling contraband cigarettes when burglary victims are waiting for an officer to come and investigate.

If the aim is protecting our youth, why aren’t vapes included in the ban? Surely a more sensible solution would be to raise the age of buying both vapes and cigarettes to 21. This, I can fully get behind.

The Government need to start listening to those who have to live and work with the consequences of their decisions, people like shopkeepers and police officers. If they keep making laws that only make sense in Westminster, the people on the front line will always keep fighting those two battles as I did.