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Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 10:"Page 3, line 44, at end insert—" ““(   )   Subject to prescribed conditions, regulations under subsection (1) may provide that where a vehicle is being used by no more than one person at a time, even if it is a place of work, it is not smoke-free.”” The noble Earl said: My Lords, I return without apology to an amendment I tabled in Grand Committee, which relates to vehicles being used for business purposes,"““by no more than one person at a time””." If we set aside for one moment all the arguments for and against the smoke-free provisions of the Bill and simply focus on our duty to create workable and credible legislation, I worry greatly that if we are not careful we will succeed in making the law under this clause look like an ass. To prohibit smoking in a business vehicle being used by two or more people at the same time has an obvious logic, if we take as read the scientific advice about passive smoking. Some noble Lords may disagree with that advice, but, if one takes it as a given, the logic is there. The logic starts to look thin where we try to argue that someone driving a lorry or farm tractor on his own should be prohibited from smoking because the risk that someone subsequently taking over may inhale his second-hand smoke. To my mind the case for carrying the law this far is extremely thin for two reasons. First, it ignores the substantial dispersal effect on smoke when opening the door of a lorry or tractor cab and letting ordinary air in. To say that there is a potentially lethal health risk from someone getting into the cab after the previous driver has been smoking there seems to me to be ridiculous. If there is any residual smoke present it will disappear rapidly. It is doubly ridiculous to make no allowance whatever for the possibility of there being a substantial interval between one driver leaving the cab and another getting in. We understand that the regulations will make that consideration irrelevant, whereas simple common sense would say that it is highly relevant. In making that point, I do not deny in the slightest that the smell of stale tobacco smoke in upholstery and so on may linger in the cab if someone has been smoking there. But, as I said in Grand Committee, we must be careful to distinguish things that pose a genuine public health risk from things that are merely unpleasant. We are not here to legislate against what is unpleasant. The second reason why the case is thin for banning smoking by lone drivers is the impossibility of effective enforcement. This clause as a whole carries with it huge problems in enforcement, but the problems are magnified several-fold when we examine this issue with any care. If two people are travelling in a lorry cab and one of them is smoking, an obvious offence is being committed within the terms of the clause. If a lone lorry driver is smoking, he is committing no offence if the vehicle is only used by him and by no one else. But he is committing an offence if the vehicle is used by another person at other times. Are we really to imagine that this distinction is one which enforcement officers will be able to verify on the spot? How will an enforcement officer feel confident about issuing a penalty notice to a driver who is smoking if that driver asserts that he is always the sole user of the vehicle? I suggest that it would be virtually impossible and that the enforcement officer would be put into a completely invidious position, which he should not be put in in the first place. When I tabled this amendment in Grand Committee, the Minister did not produce any proper counter arguments He merely asserted that where one driver follows another and the first one has been smoking, the second one would be exposed to the risks of second-hand smoke. I respectfully suggest that that answer ignores reality and common sense. The Minister also referred to the response from the Road Haulage Association to last year’s consultation. The association advised that,"““most of our members do have smoking policies that prohibit smoking in shared vehicles””." I do not seek to discount or belittle that reply in the very least, but it is not a basis for arguing that smoking on your own in a business vehicle should become a criminal offence. Rather it is an argument for saying that activities which are merely a nuisance should be dealt with by means of private codes of practice. The Minister will, I am sure, seek to argue, as he did before, that when someone has been smoking in a vehicle, noxious substances containing carcinogens could still be present when another person gets into it. That is the essence of his justification. I am saying what I said before, that this Bill is not designed—and never was—to protect people from all possible exposure to second-hand smoke, no matter how tiny. There is, or there should be, a common-sense cut-off point in these matters. I suggest that the cut-off point has been drawn in the wrong place and I sincerely hope that, even now, the Minister will agree to think again. I beg to move.