Clause 8 - Displays
Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Bill [Lords]
12:30 pm
Mr Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
Indeed, and one to which the Select Committee quite rightly drew our attention. The clause is an unnecessarily complex piece of drafting. Obviously, we have to know which sort of adverts, or set-ups, should be treated as displays, and which as
advertisements. I have no difficulty with the idea that certain sorts of display should be treated as advertisements for the purposes of the Bill, or that regulations should be framed to define the circumstances in which that will happen. We do not dispute that. However, I do not understand why we need to complicate matters by going further.
Surely, any display-cum-advertisement that cannot be categorised as an advertisement must, ipso facto, be a display. However, I have considered the wording carefully, and it does not appear that that is the result that has rather pedantically been achieved. It is particularly interesting that the clause admits the possibility that certain sorts of advertisement should not be treated as such for the purposes of the Bill. We agree with that. When we discuss the clause that deals with brand sharing, we will argue for explicit recognition that the use of a company's name and logo on its own stationery should not be treated as an advertisement even though, strictly speaking, it is exactly that. The clause envisages the framing of the definition of particular types of advertisements that should not be treated as such under the Bill. That is the very thing that we were told that legislation should not attempt to do.
The Bill enters complex territory when defining terms, or rather—as we have seen on many occasions—passes the buck for defining them. It appears that, yet again, the Minister is happy for the matter to be resolved by challenge in the courts at a later stage. Our proposals are probing amendments, because we are leaving a confused situation about when a display is an advertisement and when it is not.
Given that the clause is the Minister's own, I ask that the definition be made tighter. Otherwise, we are at liberty to strike out subsection (4), which reads as complete nonsense, and introduce a requirement rather firmer than the use of the word ''may'' under subsection (3). In previous Committees, the use of the words ''may'' and ''must'' has been a thorny subject, and we will not discuss the semantics of the particular term in any detail, other than to say that it needs to be beefed up so that ''place'' must be defined in subsection (1). I await the Minister's response with interest because I am completely confused by the clause, as I think most people are. That is why I am proposing the two amendments.