Clause 4 - Additional smoke-free places
Health Bill
3:45 pm
Andrew Murrison (Shadow Minister, Health; Westbury, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 5, in clause 4, page 3, line 20, after ‘to’, insert ‘significant amounts of’’.
This is a simple amendment. I hope that it will attract the support of the Committee. It would erase an ambiguity in subsection (3). As it stands, it seems that the power to create additional smoke-free places—the Secretary of State may ordain them by regulation, a subject that we have discussed several times today—will allow her to impose restrictions on any place where there might be smoke or the possibility of exposure to smoke.
As several hon. Members have been at pains to explain, smoke can mean many things. In the context of this Bill it is fairly tightly defined as something that is smoked, which is by and large tobacco products. The question is: when does it become harmful to health? We simply do not know the answer. We can make an educated guess that trivial amounts of smoke will probably be a nuisance to us. To a greater or lesser extent, people who do not smoke find it an irritation, but it will not be harmful to health.
It is important to make it clear that if we are giving the Secretary of State powers to impose restrictions and introduce additional smoke-free places, we are talking only about places where there are significant amounts of smoke, and that this is not carte blanche to insist on additional smoke-free places wherever she has a yen to. The Minister will probably say that “significant” has to be defined. That is true. A definition would have to be constructed. I am not a parliamentary draftsman so I am ill-equipped to do so, but I think that common usage would hold that significant means something other than casual or trivial, or exposure to smoke en passant.
I hope that the Minister will accept that the clause gives the Secretary of State fairly sweeping powers to determine pretty well anywhere that she likes to be smoke-free, for whatever reason, at some point in the future. The insertion of “significant amounts of” would limit that power and ensure that she legislated by bringing in regulations geared towards improving public health, rather than for the purposes of amenity or courtesy. As I have said before, desirable though some may feel that to be, I do not think that it should be a subject for a Bill of this sort.
The amendment is kindly meant. I think that it would improve the Bill and tighten an ambiguity. I am sure that the Minister does not want to gather to herself unreasonable regulatory powers. Inserting those words would restrict her right hon. Friend’s power and that of her successors to ordain that parts of country should be smoke-free. There would have to be a justification for that and, by implication, the justification would be public health grounds.