Clause 3 - Exemptions
Health Bill
2:00 pm
David Kidney (PPS (Mr Elliot Morley, Minister of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
Congleton is a wonderful part of the country, Lady Winterton, and we are very lucky to have its representative chairing our proceedings.
This is a brief plea to the hon. Member for Northavon to give a little more detail about the figures for the dangers of many deaths from smoking if we proceed with the ban proposed in the Bill rather than a total ban. It is a matter that I am most anxious about and I want to get to the bottom of it.
When the hon. Gentleman made his claim of 5,000 or 7,000 deaths from a partial ban compared with a total ban, I immediately went to the regulatory impact assessment to see whether that is where the figures come from and I do not find any such figures there. Pages 14 and 15 contain a table of the deaths averted. Option 2 is the full ban and option 4 is the ban with food/non-food exception. For averted deaths from customers the option 2 figure is 350 and the option 4 figure 150 to 250. I accept that a significant number of customers are at risk. For averted deaths from smokers giving up, the figure for employees is 1,600 for both options 2 and 4 and for customers it is 180 for both options. Then, in the category
“Averted deaths from reduced uptake of smoking”
the figure for both options is 550. Therefore, the figures are nowhere near 5,000 to 7,000.
I then looked at the House of Commons briefing. Briefings from the House of Commons Library for Bills such as this are always brilliant. At page 69 there is a reference to a study published in the British Medical Journal, which says:
“Passive exposure to tobacco smoke at work might cause more than 600 deaths each year in the United Kingdom, including over 50 people employed in the hospitality industry.”
Clearly a partial ban saves some of those lives, and neither of those figures is anywhere near 5,000 or 7,000.
Finally, I find in a briefing that we may all have received from the Smoking Control Network, dated November 2005 and headed, “The Risks to Health of Secondhand Smoke”, a claim that ending smoking in the workplace could save an estimated 5,000 lives each year. There now is a figure of 5,000. It ignores whether it is a partial or a total ban. The reference is at footnote 8, which says:
“This is an expert prediction and is based on applying the prevalence reduction seen in other countries to UK smoking figures. Not published.”
It is not the best of sources, but I am concerned simply that our decisions are based on accurate figures.