Meeting of the Parliament 17 December 2015
As we round off our work on the bill, I add my thanks to the witnesses who gave both written and oral evidence to the Health and Sport Committee as we scrutinised the bill. I particularly thank the committee clerks and the Scottish Parliament information centre team for their help in bringing together that evidence for our committee report. As we near the end of the parliamentary session, the Health and Sport Committee is—as Jim Hume indicated—dealing with a particularly heavy legislative agenda, and we simply could not get through it without the hard work of the people I have mentioned.
I congratulate Jim Hume on the work that he has put into formulating the bill and on securing the Government support without which it would not have come to fruition.
There is no doubt that, in the decade since the legislation to ban smoking in public places was enacted, we have seen a transformational change in attitudes to smoking and an increasing public realisation of the harmful effects not only of the active smoking of tobacco but of the passive inhalation of tobacco products. That, I am sure, accounts for the widespread support that the bill has received from the public, with 85 per cent of Scottish adults agreeing with it, including 72 per cent of smokers themselves.
There is also no doubt that levels of passive smoking in cars can be very high—as we heard from Jackson Carlaw in relation to his childhood experiences—because of the restricted area in which smoke can circulate. It has been shown that air conditioning or opening the windows does not remove the associated risks to the people who are shut into that confined space.
As children are particularly vulnerable because of their developing respiratory systems and rapid breathing, it is right to protect them from smoke inhalation when they are in vehicles with adults who may be smoking tobacco products. Our concern has not been with the principle of protecting people under 18 from the harmful effects of second-hand smoke; rather, our concern has been with the possible problems that we foresee in enforcing the legislation, as John Mason suggested. That is why we sought to have the impact of the bill assessed by Parliament a few years after it is enacted—the Law Society of Scotland shares that view—to ensure that young people are in fact being protected by it.
In a Parliament without a revising chamber, and with the pressure of work on its health committee being such that post-legislative scrutiny of the laws that we pass is well-nigh impossible, it will become increasingly important to include provisions in public health legislation that will enforce the examination of that legislation’s impact on modifying public opinion. However, it is clear that Parliament is not yet prepared to accept that reasoning. In the case of the bill, that will certainly not preclude us from supporting efforts to protect young and vulnerable people from secondary smoke inhalation. I hope that the bill will have the success that it deserves.
Once again, I congratulate Jim Hume on his successful efforts to bring Scotland into line with other parts of the United Kingdom and those countries that have similar legislation in place, such as Canada and Australia.
There is a general acceptance that the legislation that we are passing today will not be a panacea but that it has the potential—if reinforced by appropriate and on-going education, together with the other anti-smoking initiatives that the minister mentioned—to be of significant benefit to the health of Scotland’s children by changing people’s attitudes towards smoking in cars while children are present. We will therefore join the rest of the chamber in voting for the bill at decision time.
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