Ward: No commercial gain or interest in case
A law firm which specialises in motor finance claims is to launch and fund a judicial review of new legislation which will ban anyone born after 1 January 2009 from buying tobacco.
Sam Ward, managing director of Cheltenham firm Sentinel Legal, said the firm had identified “a handful of lead claimants” and there was “no shortage of very passionate young people” aged 16 or 17 who “want to support this all the way”.
The Tobacco and Vapes Bill, which cleared Parliament this week and is awaiting Royal Assent, would give the government new powers to regulate tobacco, vaping and nicotine products, including flavours and packaging.
Mr Ward, who does not smoke, said Sentinel Legal would fund the judicial review of the lifetime ban “entirely out of our own pocket” and had “no commercial gain or interest” in the proceedings.
“If this costs us a million, but the Act gets repealed, it will be a very cheap price to pay.
“This will be a rallying cry, with Sentinel Legal leading the way, just as we did with the motor finance industry in 2022.”
Mr Ward also said he hoped other law firms would come to Sentinel with “human or capital resource”. He said a formal letter launching the judicial review would be sent out by the May bank holiday.
He argued that the new legislation would create “two classes of British citizen” based entirely on their date of birth.
“Two adults will be able to walk into the same shop, stand at the same counter, and one will be free to make a legal purchase while the other is permanently banned from doing so.
“Not because of what they have done, but because of when they were born. That is not public health policy. That is the state deciding it knows better than its own citizens how they should live their lives.”
Mr Ward said the decision of a competent adult to use a legal product was a matter of personal autonomy protected by article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the right to private life.
“A blanket, permanent, generational prohibition is a disproportionate interference with that right. The government has not demonstrated why education, taxation, and existing age restrictions are insufficient, nor why a lifetime ban on an entire generation is the least restrictive means available.”
Mr Ward said the claimants would also rely on article 14 (prohibition of discrimination).
He said the legislation created “direct differential treatment based solely on date of birth”, which was “age-based discrimination without proportionate justification”.
A further argument would be based on article 1 of protocol 1 of the ECHR (protection of property).
“Tobacco retailers across the United Kingdom face the progressive and permanent destruction of a lawful customer base.”
Imposing a “slow-motion prohibition on an entire retail sector without compensation” constituted “an unjustified interference with the peaceful enjoyment of possessions”.
Mr Ward said Sentinel was “actively speaking” to a “handful of prospective lead claimants” and he imagined “a lot more will come forward as we start to become more vocal in the press”.
He added: “We are not asking whether smoking is harmful. Everyone knows it is. We are asking a more fundamental question: does the British government have the right to permanently remove a personal choice from an entire generation of adults who have committed no offence and pose no threat to anyone but themselves?
“Our answer is no. And we intend to prove it in court.”
Meanwhile, Consumer Voice is to challenge the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) car finance redress scheme under section 404D of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.
The consumer rights group said that, while it supported the need for an industry-wide scheme, the FCA’s “fails to deliver fair, adequate or lawful consumer redress and systematically under-compensates consumers”.
It said: “The formula at the centre of the scheme uses benchmark interest rate adjustments that, in our view, underestimate the true scale of the overcharging. The FCA has drawn a line between older and newer agreements and applied standardised assumptions about what borrowers lost. But that standardisation comes at a price.”
Consumer Voice argued that consumer redress has been minimised “in order to protect lenders in a way which misunderstands and misapplies the FCA’s market integrity objective whilst wrongly minimising the consumer protection objectives of the FCA, which should drive consumer redress schemes”.
Co-founder Alex Neill said: “The FCA has designed a scheme that leaves ordinary motorists hundreds of pounds per claim out of pocket. That cannot be left unchallenged.
“The FCA has treated the Supreme Court’s judgment in Johnson as a rigid benchmark in order to exclude most consumers from receiving full commission redress, even though the court itself acknowledged it was a fact sensitive decision.
“Its methodology relies on APR benchmarks that underestimate the real harm people suffered, and its interest calculations fall hardest on those who could least afford to be overcharged in the first place.”
An FCA spokesman said: “Our scheme is the quickest, fairest way to compensate consumers. It seems contradictory that organisations claiming to represent consumers would seek to delay payouts for millions of people.”
David Greene, a committee member of the London Solicitors Litigation Associate and senior partner of Edwin Coe, commented that the compensation scheme was “cheap and cheerful but by its very nature is likely to lead to under compensation for consumers”.
In the absence of a compromise, the scheme could be significantly delayed, he continued.
“If it succeeds, however, it could lead to marked increases in compensation making the compensation process more attractive to consumers toying with the decision whether to resort to the courts, as many have.”
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