Health Bill

The Committee should be indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, for summarising extraordinarily well what is effectively—I hope that he will not mind my saying this—the opinion of the tobacco industry against the provision of the Bill relating to second-hand smoke. It reminds me of nothing so much as the industry’s attempts 30, 40 or 50 years ago to deny that smoking itself was dangerous. When Richard Doll first came forward with his thesis that smoking killed, the industry denied it and attempted to cover up its own research which proved it conclusively. Subsequent to that, the industry denied that nicotine was addictive—the driver which makes people buy cigarettes even when they want to give up. It denied that for years and years but, again, it was proved that nicotine was addictive. It is now attempting to argue that passive smoking is not dangerous, even though there is an admission on the Philip Morris website that passive smoking is injurious to health. The degree of objective evidence from around the world on this is overwhelming. For example, the United States Environmental Protection Agency classifies second-hand smoke as a class A substance—a known human carcinogen along with asbestos, arsenic, benzene and radon gas. Around 50 international studies of second-hand smoke and lung cancer risk in people who have never smoked have been published over the past 25 years. Most recently, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer reviewed the literature and concluded that second-hand smoke was cancer-inducing and that non-smokers living with smokers increased their lung cancer risk by approximately 20 per cent for women and 30 per cent for men. For non-smokers exposed in the workplace, the risk of lung cancer increased by 16 to 19 per cent. The Government’s own advisory committee on the effects of smoking—the Scientific Committee on Tobacco and Health—concluded that there was an increased risk of lung cancer for non-smokers of about 24 per cent. I could go on: there are many more statistics. Indeed, it is to the great credit of the noble Earl, Lord Howe, that, when he now speaks on the subject, he agrees that passive smoking is dangerous. That is absolutely at the heart of Clause 1; indeed, it is at the heart of all the tobacco-control provisions in the Bill. If you accept that second-hand smoke is dangerous—it is certainly unpleasant; no one would disagree with that—then the Government are entirely justified in coming forward with this legislation. When I hear arguments about liberty, I believe that I have a right of freedom to enjoy smoke-free air, and I think that the right that I have to enjoy smoke-free air overrides that of smokers who want to pollute the atmosphere around them.