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Health Bill

I have a clutch of four quite disparate amendments grouped here and, if I may, I shall take each in turn, beginning with Amendment No. 13, which refers to hospitals. On the face of it, it may seem very strange to be suggesting that hospitals should be exempt from the provisions of Clause 2 because, as a generality, hospitals are not places in which people have their home. Indeed, they are perhaps the very last place where we want to encourage smoking. I raise the issue simply because, in certain situations and for certain people, hospitals become the equivalent of home. I am thinking in particular of special hospitals and in-patient units of mental health trusts. In those sorts of environment, it could well be a good idea therapeutically to allow smoking—perhaps not in communal areas but in individual patients’ rooms—because not to do so could impose unnecessary additional stress on the patient and, indeed, on the staff. If, all of a sudden, you interrupt the ability to smoke of a person who has mental health problems that he is trying to overcome, you can make the process of recovery doubly difficult. Clearly, it would have to be up to the hospital management and clinicians to define precisely the circumstances in which smoking was to be allowed, but I suggest that if there were to be an exemption of this sort—I hope that the Minister will be sympathetic to the idea, even if it is not written into the Bill—it should not matter whether an individual was being detained forcibly or being treated under his own volition. In both situations, the hospital is every bit as much the equivalent of home and, in both situations, denying the patient the ability to smoke could have an equally adverse impact. Amendment No. 15 would exempt specialist tobacconists from the scope of the ban on smoking in the workplace and in premises open to the public. Specialist tobacconists are retail shops that specialise in selling cigars, pipe tobaccos, snuff and smokers’ accessories. There are very few of them; the estimate I have is that there are 46 in the entire country—that is to say, England and Wales. Almost always, they are small, family-owned businesses that have been established for very many years. When a customer comes into a specialist tobacconist’s—I speak not at first hand, but following a description that was given to me—he will often want to try out a particular cigar or pipe tobacco to see whether it is to his taste. Therefore, smoking not infrequently takes place in the shop itself. Equally, the shopkeeper needs to be able to smoke on the premises, so as to be able to speak authoritatively about the products that he is selling and to communicate effectively with the customer. One example of this is in the blending of pipe tobaccos into new mixtures, which must inevitably involve the tobacconist trying out the taste of each kind of tobacco that the blend comprises. The stock in the shop has to be kept fresh and saleable. Not infrequently, there are quality control checks on cigars, for example, which have to be kept in controlled conditions of temperature and humidity. Once again, these checks involve actually smoking the product. Smoking, in other words, is an integral part of the way in which these tobacconists conduct their business. The customers who frequent them are predominantly mature, adult men who smoke. Children and young people are not drawn to these establishments. There are therefore two main reasons why I believe an exemption for these specialist businesses is warranted. The first is that, as small businesses, they would be disproportionately affected by a smoking ban, because smoking on the premises is part and parcel of the way in which they operate. The second is that an exemption would have no significant public health consequences, because specialist tobacconists are so few in number. We already have an exemption for them under the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002, so it would be quite simple to implement and enforce a similar exemption under this Bill. I hope that the Minister will look favourably on that proposal. Let us move on to Amendment No. 16. Developing new brands of tobacco product, modifying existing brands and assessing competitors’ brands are essential components of a tobacco business. Adult smokers need to be able to evaluate new tobacco blends, and tobacco companies, or consumer research companies acting for them, need to be able to obtain input from adult smokers about their taste preferences and their perceptions of different cigarette brands. Against that background, I am proposing in this amendment that a tobacco company or a market research company working on its behalf should be allowed to permit smoking indoors for the purpose of evaluating and testing tobacco products in designated areas or rooms. In addition to consumer research, scientific research involving tobacco products is important. The organisations that conduct this type of research need to be able to do so with informed adult smokers who have agreed to participate in certain kinds of evaluation—for example, to gain understanding of how, by varying the behaviour in smokers, one can affect their exposure to the constituents of smoke. In those sorts of case, a controlled indoor environment is necessary for an objective and valid evaluation. Tobacco companies—love them or loathe them—are legitimate commercial enterprises and we should not put unfair or unreasonable restraints on them or their trade. That is why I believe that the Government should agree to make an exception to the ban on smoking in the workplace for the purpose of limited and carefully defined tobacco research, whether such research is carried out by tobacco companies themselves or whether it is done for them by independent agencies. An exemption of exactly this kind is included in the regulations governing the smoking ban in workplaces in Scotland. I believe that it would be consistent, as well as right in principle, to allow for an equivalent exemption in England. Finally, and very briefly, I have tabled Amendment No. 21 as a probing amendment in order to seek the Minister’s confirmation about what is intended as regards Clause 3(4). My reading of the subsection is that any living accommodation occupied by the manager of a set of licensed premises could be exempt from the provisions of Clause 2. As we all know, it is not uncommon for a pub to have a private flat above it where the landlord lives. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will definitely exempt that kind of living accommodation and that where the accommodation is occupied communally by a number of people—who are all, let us say, employees of the pub or club—the exemption will apply? During pub opening hours, will someone who lives in a flat above a pub be free to allow into it any pub customers who smoke? If he does so, will he have to make it clear that this is a purely private arrangement, or will he be legally free to treat the flat as an extension of the pub in this sense? Anecdotally—and I stress ““anecdotally””—I understand that some pub managers in the Republic of Ireland have done exactly this in order to accommodate their smoking customers. Will there be anything to stop pub managers doing the same here if they want to?