Health Bill

I am a smoker, but I consider myself to be a very considerate smoker. I would not smoke in someone else’s house, car or office, or near anyone who was having a meal. It is because I have that consideration for others that I find the parts of the Bill that relate to smoking totally objectionable. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) when he suggested that it would impinge on his liberty if someone else’s cigarette smoke reached his nose. I entirely agree with that, and there is no reason why the rights of smokers and non-smokers cannot be accommodated. The hon. Member for Sunderland, North (Bill Etherington) mentioned extractor units, which can be installed in pubs and can do a very good job. We live in a society in which people can make choices. Many hon. Members have quoted figures relating to the number of people who want smoking to be banned in pubs. I think that those figures are probably exaggerated, but if we accept that they are right, and if there is such a large demand for non-smoking pubs and restaurants, the market will deliver those places, as it will in any other line of business. We will then end up with pubs in which people can smoke and have a meal, and pubs in which people do not smoke. We will also have pubs in which smoking is possible in some areas, and banned in others. In those circumstances, it seems to me that everybody would be happy. The Government, however, make a play of protecting staff. In today’s debate, nobody has asked how many people behind the bar of pubs smoke themselves. I have asked the Minister a parliamentary question about that, and the Government have not carried out such a survey. We are therefore trying to protect people from smoke who, in many cases, already smoke. I also draw an analogy with people going down coal mines. I understand that there are 400,000 outstanding claims by miners or their families relating to people injured in coal mines, many of whom have died already. I do not know of a proposal to stop people going down coal mines, however. When I raised the issue with the hon. Member for Northavon (Steve Webb), he said that it is not necessary for people to smoke in pubs, but it is necessary for people to work down coal mines—I paraphrase him, but I think that that it is what he said. That is not true. People do not have to work down coal mines—we do not have to generate electricity through burning coal, as there are many other ways of doing so.