Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 3:13 pm on 19 June 2006.
My Lords, I do not think that anybody has ever had a death certificate with the words "passive smoking" on it. I agree that heavy, active smoking is dangerous—although not everybody is affected by it because it depends on one's genes—but the danger of passive smoking is, as yet, unproven. There is bound to be a slight risk, but I do not think that it is very great.
To return to the amendment, the Minister will no doubt argue that the amendments are too narrowly drawn and therefore somewhat illogical. Why confine the Liberal approach—using "liberal" in both senses of the term—to places where food is served? I would agree, but that can easily be rectified at Third Reading or when the Bill returns to the other place. The principle is the important point. Under the arrangement proposed by the amendment, all employees would be protected from risk because no permission would be granted unless the room was totally segregated and sealed off and there was ventilation. That answers the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Walton. That protection would be at the cost of minor inconvenience to smokers, because they would either have to collect their food from a buffet and carry it to the smoking area, or there would have to be an updated version of the 19th century dumb waiter if they wanted to smoke at the table. Actually, I believe that in 90 per cent of cases people would not wish to smoke at the table and would be perfectly happy to eat their meal with non-smokers and then retire to a separate smoking room for a cigarette or cigar, coffee and, possibly, something stronger. In that way, although the restaurant, pub or hotel would have had to go to some trouble and expense to provide a fully sealed and well ventilated smoking room, everybody ends up a winner and there are no losers.
Rather than tamely following in the footsteps of New York City, California and a couple of other places in the United States that seem to have been seized by a modern form of puritan zealotry in matters of health, reminiscent of the disastrous experiment of prohibition about 80 years ago, we would do far better to emulate the Scandinavians. Indeed, the Government's marginally more liberal original proposals went, to some extent, in that direction before they were messed up on the Floor of the other place. Nobody could accuse the Scandinavians of being politically incorrect or in the slightest degree lax where health and safety are concerned; they are quite the contrary. Yet even the Scandinavians recognise that smokers deserve a fair deal and therefore they allow separate smoking rooms and smoking areas, provided that they are fully segregated. In that way, nobody loses out. That is surely far more in tune with our tradition of fair play than the puritanical absolutism we see across the Atlantic, an absolutism that is quite unnecessary for the purpose of protecting employees.