Children and Families Bill

Debate between Baroness Hughes of Stretford and Lord Walton of Detchant

Wednesday 29th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walton of Detchant (CB)]

My Lords, different views have been expressed by a number of noble Lords and I shall speak very briefly. The accumulated evidence relating to plain packaging of cigarettes that has arisen over the past few years is incontrovertible, and for that reason the Government’s amendment is extremely welcome.

So far as smoking in cars is concerned, there is no doubt whatever that passive smoking is extremely dangerous. The concentration of the effects of passive smoking within an enclosed space such as a motor car is particularly dangerous for children. Again, the medical evidence on this is incontrovertible. The point made by my noble and learned friend Lord Scott, on the issue of people smoking in a pony and trap, is an interesting one but could readily be dealt with by regulations under the amendment to restrict the provisions to enclosed motor cars and so forth.

I listened exceptionally carefully to the very erudite and persuasive speech by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, whose views I normally fully support and accept. Unlike him, who was disgusted by smoking two Woodbines behind the bike sheds, I first smoked a Woodbine in a mining village in County Durham at the age of 10 and I enjoyed it. By the time I was a teenager, I was a regular smoker. When I was in the Army in the late 1940s as second in command of a hospital ship, I could get a can of 50 Senior Service for one shilling and eight pence, which lasted me two days, so I was a heavy smoker. It took me a long time to get over it.

The question I would put to the noble Lord and the noble Earl is this: the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, took a great deal of time to talk about the difficulty of policing this amendment if it were carried into law. But is it any more difficult for the police to recognise someone smoking in a vehicle containing children than it is to recognise someone who is not wearing a seatbelt or using a mobile phone illegally? I do not believe that it is. For that reason, I support the amendment.

[Baroness Hughes of Stretford (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an important but very long debate. However, my name is attached to three of the amendments in the group and I beg the indulgence of the House to make a few comments in, I hope, concluding the debate before the Minister responds. I want to thank the Minister in particular for his role in responding to the widespread support for standardised packaging within and beyond the House. The crucial role that he personally played in the Government conceding on this measure is recognised across the House. I am also grateful for his commitment on the record today that it is the Government’s clear intention to implement these measures as soon as possible, subject to the outcome of the evidential review. I hope that he can further confirm that the action will follow very swiftly in response to the questions raised by my noble friend Lord Hunt and the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, about the timetable.

The Government’s intention to bring forward at Third Reading measures to ban proxy purchasing of cigarettes and e-cigarettes, taken together with this amendment on standardised packaging, will make a significant difference to the exposure to and take-up of cigarettes by young people. However, there is one other distinct and significant health hazard to children from smoking that we should include in this package of measures, and that is in relation to smoking in private vehicles and enclosed vehicles.

Our Amendment 57BB would simply enable the Government to bring forward regulations to make it an offence to expose children to tobacco smoke in cars, once the Government, with others, had reviewed the detailed implications and practicalities that such a measure would entail. That process of review and developing regulations would take account of all the questions raised across the House today about what if, would it mean this and would it mean that. It is an enabling amendment.

When it was first proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, in Grand Committee, I was profoundly struck by the power of her argument about the particular vulnerability of children in this very enclosed situation and the impact on their health and development at their immature stage. It is obvious. I have heard no dissent in the House today about why passive smoking by children in cars is a very bad thing and ideally should not happen. I will not rehearse those arguments, which have been very well made again today by Members across the House.

However, I want to focus briefly on concerns that have been expressed about the amendment and the arguments against it. There have been three main arguments. One is the basic libertarian argument that people should be free to do what they like in their cars because they are private spaces and should not be fettered. But when we are considering freedoms, as we have done in our history, there is always a balance. Freedom for some is often at the expense of freedom for other people. The balance we are considering here is between the freedom for adults to smoke in cars when they like and the freedom for children not to breathe in that smoke in a situation from which they, by definition, as several noble Lords pointed out, cannot escape.

When responding to the noble Baroness, Lady Howarth, the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, for whom I have great respect, as he knows, said that there is a difference between smoking, which is a legal activity, and other things that we have prohibited in the home in relation to children. But the things that we were talking about then, such as neglect of children and the beating of children, have not always been illegal in the home. They were made illegal because they are particularly harmful to the well-being of children. We take it for granted now that such things are illegal but they were not always. We invaded that private space because of the need to protect children. The same argument applies. Because of the degree of damage that we know smoking in cars causes, we should apply the same argument here.