Clause 9 - Offence of failing to prevent smoking in smoke-free place
Health Bill
5:15 pm
Andrew Murrison (Shadow Minister, Health; Westbury, Conservative)
Clause 9 establishes the offence of failing to prevent smoking in smoke-free places. It could be called the “bang on the nose” clause, because it introduces the possibility of verbal or physical violence being visited on those whose job it is to run licensed premises.
When we discussed the level of management to which the proposal might apply the Minister gave us some comfort by saying that the person who had the potential to commit the offence of not having prevented smoking on the premises must be sufficiently high in the management chain for responsibility reasonably to be pinned upon them. However, the Minister was not sufficiently categorical, so if she will forgive me I will labour the point.
Many people who work in the sector are not particularly well paid. When they take on the job they do not expect to be given much management responsibility because that is not what they sign up to. Yet many of them are given high-falluting titles that suggest that they may have some sort of management function—I suppose the classic example would be the McDonald’s restaurants, where everyone is called an assistant manager. In practice, that means very little, but it implies that the person has some sort of management function and responsibility. Under the Bill, it is possible that individuals who are, in truth, at a very lowly level in an organisation will be blamed for having failed to stop somebody smoking, or at least interviewed about it. That would introduce a whole new angle on those jobs, which is not entirely appropriate.
I hope that the Minister can make it reasonably clear for the record how she expects the offence to work in practice and thereby protect people at the grass roots of the licensed trade and the hospitality sector from any possibility of being charged because they failed to tell someone to put their cigarette out. We should always remember that we are not talking about a normal situation, but situations in which a reasonable amount of alcohol may have been consumed, which may lead to more violence and a greater likelihood that, if challenged, an individual will react in an adverse fashion. By creating the offence, we potentially put people at risk.
We discussed the potential for enforcement officers to be at risk, but I suspect that as, regrettably, we now have 24-hour licensing, most of them will operate throughout the day, perhaps at lunchtime and probably earlier in the evening, rather than later which is when trouble tends to arise. There is a potential for inflammatory and difficult situations to arise in which junior, and perhaps quite young, people may be put at risk. It would be useful if the Minister commented on that matter and gave the Committee some assurance that those people will be protected.
It would be useful to discuss in which situations, other than those involving the licensed trade, the Minister thinks it would be appropriate for individuals to advise those who are smoking that they must put out their cigarettes. I am most concerned about the licensed trade but I suspect that other sectors will be involved, too. We do not want a Cambodian situation, in which we are all expected to tell others to act in a particular way for fear of being censured ourselves.
I am therefore concerned about the provisions, as is the LGA and the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. With that in mind, it would be great if the Minister gave us a little reassurance that the offence created by clause 9 will not be used to criminalise those right at the bottom of an organisation’s management chain and that responsibility will be pinned at an appropriately high level in that chain.