Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

Our general approach to this group of amendments is that we would like education to be used as the first weapon in the fight against children smoking and would prefer that further criminalisation of sections of the community was adopted as an absolute fall-back position. There is a lot of sense in the probing that the Conservative Front Bench is undertaking in this amendment. I am sure that this measure would pose less of a problem to larger retailers as they have more personnel overseeing this area and many more policies in place. However, we are concerned about small shopkeepers. Although they should not break the law and sell tobacco to underage customers, it is essential that they should, as a minimum procedure, be properly notified of the measure. We should bear in mind that they often comprise one-man bands trying to do a thousand different jobs. This is a necessary probing amendment. We certainly support it more than we do one or two others that we shall discuss shortly.