Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 44:"Page 65, line 29, at end insert—" An authorised officer of an enforcement authority must, when giving a penalty notice to a person, make clear to him the consequences of making a false or misleading statement, as set out in section 11(3).”” The noble Earl said: This group of amendments focuses on enforcement. I will speak also to Amendments Nos. 46 and 47. Under Clause 10 it is for the appropriate national authority to make regulations that designate exactly who will act as the enforcement authorities for the smoke-free provisions of the Bill. It is rather surprising that this matter should have to be left to regulations. The Explanatory Notes tell us that local authorities will in practice be charged with enforcement and that the enforcement officers of a local authority will be environmental health officers (EHOs). But we are also led to understand that health and safety officials will have enforcement responsibilities alongside EHOs, and that the responsibilities of EHOs and health and safety officials may well overlap. I find the point about overlap particularly interesting and a little disturbing because, above all, we need legal clarity about who is supposed to be doing what. If there are two groups of people, each with identical powers, there will either tend to be over-enforcement or the opposite problem, where each finds an excuse to leave it to the other to shoulder the enforcement burden. I am therefore in considerable sympathy with Amendment No. 45, tabled by my noble friend Lord Naseby, which would make it crystal clear in the Bill that it is local authorities alone whose officers will do the enforcing. The only trouble with the amendment is that it pre-empts any decision that may be taken by the National Assembly for Wales about who the enforcement authorities in the Principality should be—strictly speaking, that should be the Assembly’s affair. All this means that we need to have published guidance at the earliest opportunity so that everyone knows precisely where they stand and what is expected of them. I contend that no such guidance can reasonably be produced without close consultation with those on whom the duty of enforcement will fall, which is the thrust of my Amendment No. 46, not only because of the practical considerations which need to be factored in, but because enforcement carries with it a cost, as my noble friend emphasised. What are those costs likely to amount to, and how are local authorities expected to cover them? I have seen estimates of between £4.5 million and £13.3 million; suggesting that no one really has any idea. If more accurate estimates are not available, a lot more work needs to be done on this area quite rapidly. We are looking at having not only more environmental health officers, but proper training for them in what will be a very new situation. Going into a pub or bar and facing down someone who is wilfully smoking and is perhaps the worse for drink is quite a different sort of job from inspecting the hygiene standards in, say, a restaurant. It will require a different sort of people skills. The reason for Amendment No. 47 is that I simply do not understand what lies behind subsection (4). In what circumstances would the national authority assume enforcement powers itself and remove them from local authorities? The other question that hits you as you read subsection (4) is how it relates to subsection (5), which defines who an authorised officer is, and subsection (6), which refers to an authorised officer’s qualifications for the job. If in circumstances that are as yet unclear the national authority has decided to act as its own enforcement authority, who will its authorised officers be and what will be their qualifications for performing their enforcement functions? Where will these things be laid down? Amendment No. 44 relates to the issuing of fixed-penalty notices. There is something rather obvious about the area of our daily life in which fixed-penalty notices are most commonly issued—motoring offences—that does not apply to the kind of situation envisaged under the Bill: when you are caught speeding or parking in the wrong place your identity can be independently verified by reference to the number plate of the car that you are driving. The registered keeper of the car might not have actually committed the offence; but the system can deal with that in various ways so that the guilty person is held to account. If a fixed-penalty notice is served on someone smoking in a pub, what is to stop that person from giving false information to the enforcement officer? There is no independent means—such as the DVLA in Swansea—of verifying who he or she is. Under Clause 11(3) it will be an offence to give a false or misleading statement, but in practice what is to stop someone from telling a load of fibs about their name and address? An enforcement officer might ask you to produce evidence of identification, but what happens if you are not carrying any? The whole system of fixed penalties runs the risk of being unenforceable; and if it is unenforceable, or seen to be so, it will rapidly become discredited. That has to be a worry, and I should be glad if the Minister could tell us how he sees these problems being overcome in what will—I say again—be a very unfamiliar area for environmental health officers. I beg to move.