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Electronic Cigarettes

Answer

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) published an impact assessment (IA) on the regulation of nicotine containing products (NCPs), including electronic cigarettes, on 12 June 2013 which provided estimates of the costs associated with medicinal regulation of NCP. A copy of the IA has been placed in the Library and is available on the MHRA website at:

www.mhra.gov.uk/home/groups/comms-ic/documents/websiteresources/con286834.pdf

The IA estimates that there are several hundred companies offering e-cigarettes for sale in the United Kingdom. One company in the UK is known to be developing UK manufacturing capability and there is growing interest amongst other companies. Regulating these products as medicines would likely result in short term transitional losses for some stakeholders, not least any current importers of unlicensed products unwilling to invest in gaining the necessary authorisations and licenses. In the long term, however, we would not expect owners of the capital invested in the manufacture and supply of NCPs to suffer losses.

The IA makes the assumption that it is likely that manufacturers, European Union marketing authorisation holders, and all other participants in the supply chain would seek to pass their incremental costs onto their buyers, and ultimately to consumers. The extent to which UK consumers would bear the incremental costs is unclear. Pricing of NCPs seems to be constrained at the upper bound by the pricing of tobacco products. The IA suggests that NCP consumers would be unlikely to suffer from substantial price increases if these products were regulated as medicines.

The UK Government's position is that the right form of regulation will support and stimulate the NCP market.

The available evidence is that electronic cigarettes are likely to be substantially less harmful than smoking tobacco cigarettes, however, there remains a paucity of scientific evidence on the long term health effects of using these products. The value of the health gains associated with a single successful quit attempt is very substantial—the Department estimates it to be £74,000. The orders of magnitude of estimated compliance costs suggests that a policy of licensing e-cigarettes would have to create very few additional successful quit attempts for the benefits to justify its costs. It is estimated that implementing policies to reduce smoking prevalence by 1% per year for 10 years in the UK would prevent over 57,000 deaths in that period.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

175442; 571 cc346-7W

Session

2013-14

Related items

Deposited Paper DEP2013-1905
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Deposited papers
House of Commons

Subjects

Regulation Electronic cigarettes

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk