Clause 15 - Penalties
Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill
11:00 am
Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden, Conservative)
Thank you Mrs. Adams. I suspect that it is because speeches are off limits to Labour Members that we get a sedentary growl instead.
The lack of mirroring of other legislation—which has been more substantially debated than it has been possible to debate the powers of entry in this Bill—is the reason for the Opposition's disquiet about the position of a person whose premises have been broken into. The penalty for obstructing an officer—if it proved impossible to convince a court that it was unintentional—would be £1,000, which is a significant sum of money. It will difficult to prove the intentions, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset said—it comes close to policing people's thoughts, which is an impossible thing to do. The penalty for any other offence on the Bill would be up to three months' imprisonment, or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, and that is £5,000.
These are substantial penalties, affecting often small commercial premises, such as corner shops, newsagents. We are trying to legislate for both the corporate giants of the tobacco industry, and the small businesses that may be displaying a tobacco advertisement, and no distinction is being made between the two.
In the case of a small newsagents, or a specialist tobacconist, who displays a tobacco advertisement, since they are very often a one-man-band, a prison sentence of three months will possibly cause their entire business to fold. In part because it may be impossible to prove intention, one way or the other, and because reasonable cause for failure to comply has not been defined. I would seek in the guidance from the regulations, to have some illustration—which I asked for in the stand part debate on clause 14—of what might be a reasonable cause.
My hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Worcestershire (Mr. Luff) made the point that someone could produce a defence that they had reasonably grounds to doubt the identity of the individual trying to enforce the entry. This is particularly the case as there is some confusion over trading standards definitions, and weights and measures authority definitions, which have remained unclear.
The Minister thinks that there will not be many cases of enforcement, but the beginning is when there are likely to be the most cases and attempted prosecutions for failure to comply. It will take some time for this change in the law to be part of common practice. For many of those individuals, it would take a while to find out what the Bill meant. It is right to ask the Minister about the scale of the penalties and whether it is fair to legislate in this way for both big and small businesses.