Health Bill

If I had to pick out one clause in the Bill that grates on me more than any other, it would be Clause 6, the clause that sets out, albeit in skeleton form, the legal requirements that are to be imposed upon the owners of businesses and the managers of pubs, clubs and restaurants around the country to display ““No Smoking”” signs. Regulations will tell us what the rules for the signs are to be, and we know these rules will tell us what those signs should say, how big they should be, how they should be set out and in what colours, and how many of them are needed in a location. Rightly or wrongly, and I sincerely hope it is the latter, I am bracing myself for a highly prescriptive and detailed set of regulations. I seriously think we should recoil at such prescriptiveness. Even without the signage requirements, the burdens the Bill will place on pubs and clubs in particular are significant. The decision of the other place to opt for a complete ban on smoking in pubs and clubs has been the subject of considerable publicity and debate, both within this Grand Committee and outside. Most of us have believed up to now that when something becomes law, ignorance of the law is no excuse for the person who breaks it. When a new law is introduced, those whose job it is to enforce it may choose to do so leniently during the initial period after commencement. People who break the law early on typically escape with a verbal warning, but gradually, as everyone gets used to the new environment, enforcement is exercised with greater rigour and strictness. When the law was changed to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory in cars, it was not thought necessary to pass another law obliging all cars to display notices telling people to buckle up. When the drink-driving laws were passed, the Government did not say that pubs and bars had to display notices forbidding people from drinking and driving. I am afraid I have severe difficulty reconciling myself to a clause in this Bill that takes us into this kind of regulatory dimension. It is officious, and it will prove expensive. The cost of the new signage will be more than £2 million to the pub industry alone. I am not aware, although perhaps the Minister can tell us, what the cost is likely to amount to for all businesses in the country put together. We need to keep reminding ourselves that if we are looking for bad guys in this area, we should not pick on pub or club owners or hoteliers, or indeed business generally. They are not the bad guys, yet under the Bill they will be liable to criminal penalties if they fail to stop a smoker from smoking on smoke-free premises, or if they fail to put up notices of the precise specification in their premises, even if no one in the place smokes or ever has done. Not surprisingly, the pub and hotel trade feels pretty sore about this. If the argument on signage is, as I believe it to be, that people need to be made aware of what the law is lest they unwittingly break it, I respectfully suggest that we need to think again. That argument had some force in the context of a partial ban, where it might well not be immediately obvious whether the pub you had just entered was smoking or non-smoking, and it would be important for a notice to tell you. Now that the ban will in all probability be a comprehensive one, the force of that argument dramatically falls away. Even if the Minister argues that there should be signage in the early period after the Bill’s enactment, there is surely precious little to be said for continuing those requirements indefinitely. I know that my Amendment No. 35 is not grouped with this clause stand part debate, but I am proposing in that amendment a sunset clause after three years, by which time the new law will be well known and well understood. I hope that at very least the Minister will be prepared to go away and reconsider the merits of this clause, which to my mind is both unnecessary in principle and over-burdensome in practice.