Children and Families Bill

Kevin Barron Excerpts

Monday 10th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I have said I am not going to give way. The hon. Gentleman can listen for once.

Moreover, this is totally and utterly unenforceable. What on earth are we doing saying to the police, whose resources are already stretched, that all of a sudden this should be a new priority for them to undertake? Have they got nothing better to do than go up as close as they can to a moving car to see whether there happens to be a small child in the back seat? Of course, this is not just about small children but all children. How on earth does the driver prove that the person in the back of the car is over 18 rather than under 18? What happens when the driver throws the cigarette away and the police have to try to prove whether they were smoking when they were pulled over? The whole thing is completely unenforceable. It is gesture politics of the worst kind, with Ministers and shadow Ministers trying to flex their health zealotry at all these health organisations and saying, “We’re tougher on these matters than the others.”

Standardised packaging—it is not plain packaging, as some people say—is also nonsense. In many cases, the standardised packaging is more colourful than the existing packaging, so this measure will not do anything for the people who say that all the colourful packaging encourages people to smoke. It is already the case that cigarettes cannot be displayed in large shops. What on earth is the point of having plain packaging for products that are already behind a counter and cannot even be seen? Again, the whole thing is complete nonsense.

All these arguments are arguments for banning smoking altogether. If people had the courage of their convictions and said, “We should ban smoking altogether”, I would at least have some respect for them, but they dare not say that that is what they want to do, even though we know it is their real agenda. While cigarettes are a legal product, brands should be free to use their own branding on the packs. Standardised packaging would simply be a triumph of the nanny state that would presumably soon be followed by plain packaging for alcohol, sweets, crisps, and all the foods that supposedly lead to obesity. Once we have gone down this road for one thing, why would we not have plain packaging for everything? We know, particularly given the current Ministers and shadow Ministers, that that is what it would quickly lead to.

I have tabled three amendments to Lords amendment 124 to try to make it more sensible. The Lords amendment states that the Secretary of State can make regulations if he believes that they

“may contribute at any time to reducing the risk of harm to…the health or welfare of”

children—I repeat, “may” contribute. This gives the Secretary of State the authority to make a decision on a whim just because he happens to think that it might make a difference. My first amendment would change “may” to “will” so that he would need to have some evidence for making a change rather than just doing it on a whim.

The second amendment relates to regulations. Under Lords amendment 124, the Government are saying that they can make lots of provisions and as long as some of them are capable of having a positive effect, that is fine. They can propose 10 ridiculous things and two sensible ones, and the regulations allow them to do it as long as some of them are sensible. My amendment says that “each” provision that they want to bring in should be capable of making a difference, not just the odd one or two in a whole series.

The Minister said that it would be a constraint on the Minister’s power to accept my amendments. Well, I make no apology for trying to constrain the Minister’s power. That is what the House of Commons is all about—trying to make sure that sensible decisions are taken based on evidence, not just on the latest whim of the nanny state brigade whom she has listened to. We are supposedly here to try to defend the freedoms of people in this country. This Government want to trample over every single one of those freedoms. It makes me wonder what is the difference between having Labour or this Government in charge. I expect no better from Labour, but I did expect an awful lot better from a supposedly Conservative-led Government.

[Kevin Barron (Rother Valley) (Lab)]

Listening to this debate, I could have heard the same things said in 2006 when the House came to a decision on smoking in public places. That is public health legislation which the Prime Minister says is good legislation, although he did not vote for it at the time. I hope that Members will bear that in mind.

I hope that Members will also bear in mind, as we always must when considering such legislation, that currently in the UK over 100,000 people a year die prematurely from smoking tobacco. I support the amendment, which will, I hope, further restrict the use of tobacco not just by young people but, in turn, by adults. As the Minister said, two thirds of people who start smoking are young when they do so, and it is addictive.

One of my points relates to what the Minister said about e-cigarettes not being sold to people under the age of 18. Some people argue that e-cigarettes are a gateway to tobacco use, but the organisation that I have worked with on this over many years—Action on Smoking and Health, which the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) clearly admires—says that there is no firm evidence for that at this stage; it is doing another survey this year. The important thing is that over 2 million people are using e-cigarettes, some of them so that they smoke less tobacco and some so that they smoke no tobacco. I agree with the Minister that we should view them as a medicinal product—as part of the family of nicotine replacement therapies. That should be our approach in stopping these awful deaths from smoking. VAT on nicotine replacement therapy products is currently 5%. If e-cigarettes were also licensed and charged at the same rate, that would benefit everybody.

I support what the Minister said about proxy purchasing. This has not yet been addressed and it should have been. Alcohol and tobacco are harmful, depending on how they are used, although alcohol is not as bad as tobacco.

We have debated standardised packaging many times in the House and heard the arguments about printers being affected, and so on. The hon. Member for Shipley said that standardised packages are very complicated, and of course they are. I hope that we will have better safeguards to stop people engaging in contraband activities. There is no way that this measure will do anything other than stop people advertising on cigarette packets the products that cause all these premature deaths.

I support the Government and the Opposition on banning smoking in cars with children. Enforcement is always an issue, and we accept that. When I first started driving, people had to have seat belts in cars but did not have to wear them, and only one person in four did so. When the law was changed, 90% of people started wearing them practically overnight. This is about changing habits. We could not have a worse situation than somebody in a confined space like a car smoking cigarettes when children are there.

Everybody said that the ban on smoking in public places would never be enforced. I was on the Health Committee when we had that debate and we went to Dublin to look at what had happened in Ireland. A guy there tried to get publicity by saying, “I’m going to be smoking in this pub tonight. Will you come down and get me?” However, there were very few problems with enforcement and the same is true of us now. We have not seen all the details, but, as far as I am concerned, the provision is a further step towards protecting young people and future generations from premature death as a result of ill health, and we should support that.

[Mr Charles Walker]

My concern about the Lords amendment is that we are in danger of criminalising otherwise very loving parents. We should guard against that. It would be appalling if people who have been good parents in every other way found themselves being criminalised as a result of smoking in a car when their children were present.

I hear the argument about seat belts and it is perfectly and entirely reasonable for the Government to set the terms of their use on the road. If the Government decide that someone who wants to drive on a road has to wear a seat belt, that is highly reasonable. I suggest that, if the Government really are determined to press ahead with banning smoking in cars, that is exactly what they should do: they should ban the consumption of alcohol in cars by any person of any age and ban smoking in cars by any person of any age. That would be a much more honest approach, because, as I have said, if we go down this road we will be criminalising hundreds of thousands of parents. Will a repeat offender—someone who has been penalised three or four times—have their children taken into care because they are deemed to be an abusive parent?

There is an enormous degree of hypocrisy in this House. I am pleased to say that I am a teetotal non-smoker. There are many people in this place who want to ban smoking because they think it is not done by very nice people, but they are much more relaxed about alcohol because of their own habits. If Members are genuinely concerned about the welfare of children, they need to realise that alcohol is the problem, not tobacco. Hundreds of thousands of children have their lives blighted by alcoholic parents and the problems associated with alcohol, yet we never talk about that in this House, because some Members think, “We, as nice people, drink.” I am extremely concerned about the direction of travel.

My final point—I know that others want to speak—is that we will drive another wedge between the police and those they are policing if we implement this provision. It is nonsense. We will expect the police to intervene and that will further widen the gap between them and those they are policing. That should be avoided and we should be very careful about widening that gap.