Hansard

I congratulate Jim Hume on introducing the bill, which I am sure that everyone will vote for at decision time.

We went over some of the arguments when we debated the amendments. As I said then, the science in the area is not in doubt. Legislation already works well in countries such as Australia and Canada, and has been introduced recently in England. Most important of all, the bill is an extension of existing provision and, through the course of the debates that took place 10 and more years ago, everyone now accepts the arguments about the consequences of second-hand smoke for those inhaling it but not actually smoking. It would be appropriate once again, in this year in which he tragically died, to pay tribute to Tom McCabe’s work on that legislation. Although I was the Minister for Health and Community Care when the consultation was launched, I know better than anyone that it was he who drove the legislation forward and did the work.

We are told that, as bad as second-hand smoke is everywhere, it is particularly bad in small enclosed spaces such as cars. There is a fairly staggering statistic that levels increase in spaces such as cars to more than 11 times those in a smoky pub. There is therefore a particular need for legislation that relates to enclosed public spaces.

On top of that is the particular problem that children are vulnerable, and the briefing that we had from Cancer Research UK was very useful in that regard. It talks about a cotinine indicator used to measure second-hand smoke exposure. The indicator showed that levels were 70 per cent higher in children than in adults.

Cancer Research UK also referred to statistics showing 165,000 cases of disease among children across the UK caused by second-hand smoke. Richard Simpson may go further into the details, but, as Stewart Maxwell said, a lot of them, although not all of them, are respiratory diseases.

I was on the Health and Sport Committee for stage 2, although not for stage 1. I will briefly talk about the amendments. The amendment on joint enforcement has already been referred to and, to pick up the point about the earlier legislation, the bill now mirrors the provisions of the Smoking, Health and Social Care (Scotland) Act 2005.

I moved an amendment, as Jim Hume said, but I was persuaded by his arguments that it was better to keep the bill simple and the arguments focused on children’s health and the offending smoker, and to keep drivers out of it.

There is an important opportunity now to educate people about the harm caused by second-hand smoke. Clearly, there will have to be a campaign in relation to the specific offence, but, as part of that, the wider messages about the dangers of second-hand smoke can be emphasised. That will be useful in all sorts of ways.

As Jenny Marra emphasised, action on smoking has to be right at the top of the public health agenda, and I hope that the Government is still looking at a range of measures. We have come a long way on smoking, but this does not necessarily have to be the end of the road. We are not going fast enough towards the target of only 5 per cent of people smoking by the mid-2030s—and some people might want to amend that to nobody smoking by that time.

Jenny Marra mentioned smoking in tenements—in what we in Edinburgh would call the stair rather than the close. That has been brought up with me, as it has been with many others, and it is an area that the Government could look at.

Clearly, we talked about other measures as part of the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc. and Care) (Scotland) Bill, but I will not go into those controversies today in case I get into another argument with Stewart Maxwell.

Finally, there is the health inequalities dimension of smoking. Four times as many people in the most disadvantaged areas smoke compared with people in the most affluent areas. Action on smoking is also action against health inequalities, as well as supporting public health more generally.