Zubir Ahmed MP: speeches 2025

Speeches

• 7 Jan 2025 · Tobacco and Vapes Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  Q Thank you, Sir Chris—your anecdote about the vascular war resonates strongly with me as a practising vascular surgeon; many of my patients leave hospital with fewer legs than when they entered. The comment I want to make is on the chronic disease burden. As you all know, there is a rising epidemic of chronic disease in our country, and it will probably require various public health measures to get back under control. I wonder if I could ask you to comment on how you feel this legislation might impact on the chronic disease burden on the NHS going forward, not only in the short term but in the long term? Professor Sir Chris Whitty: I will give a view, and I think Sir Gregor will want to add to it. It will make a very substantial difference. The thing to understand is that not only does cigarette smoking cause individual diseases, but many people as they go through life have multiple diseases from smoking. They will start off with heart disease, for example, as a result of smoking, and will go on to have a variety of possible cancers, and they might have chronic obstructive airway disease, and they will end up potentially with dementia. All of these would have not happened at all or would have been substantially delayed had they not smoked. Of course, this is heavily weighted towards areas of deprivation, people living with mental health conditions, and other areas where I think most people would consider it really unjust in society. All of us, and anybody who has looked at this in public health terms, would say that if you could remove smoking from the equation, the chronic disease burden would go down very substantially, and be delayed, and the inequalities of that burden of disease would also be eroded. The arguments for this are really clear. To give some indication of the numbers involved, we have thousands of people every year—millions over time—going into hospitals and general practices only because they are smoking. Had they not smoked, they would not have to use the NHS, and they would not have the chronic disease burden that disbenefits themselves, disbenefits their families and, of course, because of the impact on wider society, disbenefits everyone else as well. Undoubtedly this Bill—if it is passed by Parliament—will reduce that burden and have an enormous impact. Professor Sir Gregor Ian Smith: Thank you for raising this as a question, because it is a very important point to understand. I will speak to the experience in Scotland. The Scottish burden of disease study published by Public Health Scotland suggests that from now to 2043 we are going to see a rise of 21% in overall burden of disease across our society in Scotland. That burden of disease is very much weighted towards a number of conditions such as cancer, dementia including vascular dementia, cardiovascular disease, and others. There is no doubt in my mind that smoking contributes to those. Chris’s point about the multimorbidity that people experience is really important in this context. There are more people in Scotland who experience multimorbidity under the age of 50 than those who do over the age of 50, and much of that is related to smoking. Anything that we can do to reduce that burden of disease on people will not only make their own lives so much better, but make them more productive—they will be able to spend more time with their families, they will be economically active for longer, and they will also use health services less. So there is both a compelling health argument and an economic argument here on the preventive nature of stopping smoking and stopping people from beginning to smoke, which is really important to understand in the context of that projected increase in the burden of disease. The last thing to remember is that our experience of disease can sometimes be cumulative. As Sir Chris alluded to, people who have developed diabetes for other reasons but who smoke as well, will have accelerated disease as a consequence. Removing as much as we can, step by step, the risks that are associated with the development of that accelerated disease—you will have seen it very clearly in your role as a vascular surgeon—has to be a step that we take to maintain both the health and the economic prosperity of our nation. Professor Sir Chris Whitty: The numbers that I was looking for—

• 7 Jan 2025 · Tobacco and Vapes Bill (First sitting) · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest as an NHS transplant and vascular surgeon. My wife is a lung cancer doctor.