Dr. Helen McAvoy:

Regulating avenues of online supply and age verification is difficult and I do not have huge expertise in that area. An element of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill is under consultation at the moment. The first part of that Bill was about setting up regulatory structures around online media and safety, with an immediate focus, quite rightly, on child protection and child exploitation.

There is also scope in the Bill to think about regulating the marketing and advertising of tobacco products and nicotine-inhaling products to children and young people. Under EU legislation there is a stipulation that there should be no e-cigarette marketing on channels where more than 25% of the audience is under 18. I have not seen any independent evaluation to indicate that is happening but in small qualitative studies done on children and young people accessing cigarettes, they talked about Snapchat, Instagram and those sorts of channels, which I view as primarily youth channels. There is work to be done on online marketing and age verification for the online supply of e-cigarettes to children and young people, irrespective of whether we go to Tobacco 21.