Clause 2 - Smoke-free premises
Health Bill
11:45 am
Steve Webb (Shadow Secretary of State for Health, Health; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
This group of amendments touches on the issue of separation and segregation. As I said in my opening remarks, now that there is not to be a total ban, there will be parts of premises and categories of buildings where some smoking is allowed, which might be adjacent to areas in which smoking is not allowed. Therefore, we must consider how the distinction between smoking and non-smoking areas should be drawn, how to ensure that smoke in smoking areas is not detrimental to non-smoking areas, and how they should be separated.
Amendment No. 40 would amend clause 2(3), which concerns premises that are described in the explanatory notes as
“someone’s home as well as their workplace”,
such as someone’s home in which music lessons are given or from which financial services are offered.
Subsection (3) seems to say that areas into which the public may come or in which they are served will be smoke-free, but that other parts of the premises do not have to be smoke-free. Suppose that music lessons are given—or some other service is provided—in the front room of a house; that does not mean that the person who owns the house or provides the service from home cannot smoke in the kitchen. Amendment No. 40 is about the distinction between two parts of the same premises. Is it sufficient to say, “We provide music lessons in the front of the house, so there is no reason why we shouldn’t smoke in the back of the house,” considering that if the smoke travels it will be detrimental to people using the public place, which is a workplace, at the front of the house? What are the dividing lines? How are such places to be cordoned off?
On the theme of music lessons, I play the oboe in my spare time. My oboe teacher was a pipe smoker, and the small practice rooms in our school were constantly full of pipe smoke, although the teacher never smoked while I was in there. That probably was not an ideal environment in which to teach a pupil to play a wind instrument.
We are talking about a situation in which smoke from another part of the house or premises could waft in to where people are having a lesson or receiving a service. What segregation should there be? The amendment suggests that there should be some standard to determine that set down by the appropriate national authority. Clearly, circumstances will differ in private houses, but we want to avoid a situation in which the letter of the law is followed so that there is no smoking in the immediate place in which the service is provided, yet there is smoking elsewhere on the premises, which, because of the inadequate segregation, is detrimental to the public and anyone else who works in that environment.That is the thinking behind the amendment. [Interruption.] Excuse me; that is not a smoker’s cough, I assure you, Mr. Illsley.
Amendments Nos. 46 and 48, which would amend clause 3, concern similar issues. Amendment No. 46 is also about segregation, but in relation to pubs and similar environments. The amendment provides that areas designated as smoke-free should be substantially separated by a wall, door, or similar. Relevant issues that we touched on briefly in our previous discussion include the 1m-from-the-bar rule.
The Secretary of State said on 26 October that
“smoking in the bar area will be prohibited everywhere ... We shall consult further on the best method to achieve this, including on discrete smoking rooms or areas to protect staff.”
The amendment shows that whatever may come out of the process, we do not think that an arbitrary distance with no physical separation achieves the goal. I accept the Minister’s point that custom and practice—good form, decent employers, people who do not want their bar staff to have someone puffing a cigarette straight in their face—might have come up with the standard of one metre, but I hope that the Minister will accept that there is no health basis for it. Smoke circulates; the second that somebody opens the door to come into the pub, smoke wafts around. It is hard to say that a separation by distance will achieve the public health and safety goal that should be the purpose of the legislation. If the Government insist that there should be areas where smoking is permitted—we remain of the view that there should not—they should be clearly separated by some physical barrier.
I shall now move to amendment No. 48. There will continue to be places where workers will be exposed to second-hand smoke; the non-food pub is a classic example of that—albeit not within a metre of the bar. To say that people who work there will be thrown to the wolves might sound slightly hysterical, and I would never want to do that, but essentially they will be abandoned beyond the existing health and safety legislation. Workers in private clubs will, essentially, have to lump it. The amendment says that that is not good enough. If the Government insist on some workers still being subject to second-hand smoke, we should none the less beef up the health and safety protection that they get. We suggest that even for them, there should be restrictions on the
“deployment of staff in smoking areas.”
One possibility is that the Government will come up with a “smoking carriages” idea: in pubs that do not serve food, smoking will be permitted in sealed rooms. But who has to work in those sealed rooms? Will cleaning staff have to go in? Will bar staff have to take the drinks away? What happens if a fight breaks out? Who will have to go in then?
Amendment 48 asks for clear restrictions so that workers know what they do and do not have to do in terms of deployment to smoking areas. Essentially, they are being asked to go into an unhealthy environment. It is not good enough to say that that will be done by negotiation with the employer. In the past I have given the example of Sunday trading, when people may have a theoretical right not to be forced to do something, but when the individual employee, relative to their employer, can be in a vulnerable position. If the Government were to say that the remaining workers have no protection beyond the existing health and safety rules, that would be unsatisfactory.
So our third amendment would set out in clause 3 requirements for segregation and ventilation. As I understand it, the ventilation required to get rid of all the particulates would be something of a whirlwind, which is not credible. There should at least be some regulation so that if staff have to go in and clean, or take glasses away, they know where they stand. If this is a Health Bill about the health of workers, they need enforceable rights. They need to know where they stand, what they can be reasonably expected to do and how often. It is not a private matter or a free collective bargaining issue. It is about their health and safety, and we believe that the amendment would provide the opportunity to protect workers who have otherwise been neglected by the Bill.
I will now draw together the threads of the three amendments. Our focus is on concepts of separation and segregation in the imperfect world that the Government want to take us to. We want to deal with the fact that smoke drifts, and that a 1 m exclusion zone, or anything else of that kind, will not work. We want to give the workers who will, residually, still suffer from the Government’s timidity some rights to protect their health.