Contribution
My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Howe, for raising the issue of theatres. This is one of those peculiar issues where “Why on earth would you do this?” is a good question. What is the problem with the present circumstances? It reminds me of the previous group. This could compromise artistic freedom for no good reason. In the previous group, I suddenly envisaged advertising and product designers being rounded up and facing two years in prison at some point. It speaks to the dangers of the state being drunk on power. It is state overreach, where it gets carried away with itself, saying, “We are righteous, on a good cause, on a mission. We are very zealous”, and suddenly all sorts of important norms get thrown out of the window.
I know that the Minister personally is very reasonable, but sometimes legislation gets carried away with itself. I suggest that this legislation needs a fine-toothed comb run through it to get rid of these disproportionate, perhaps unintended, consequences. Once that happens, it encourages others to table amendments that make a virtue of such state overreach. I completely support the previous speech, and I am opposed to Amendment 180, which is a huge hammer to deal with a very small issue that is not even a problem but somehow gets lumped in with everything else.
I am also opposed to Amendment 186, which would introduce the notion that:
“Pavement licences may only be granted by a local authority subject to the condition that smoking is prohibited”.
I remind the Committee that hospitality is absolutely under the cosh. We spend a lot of time worrying about the fate of the high street. I am involved in lots of discussions at the moment about fragmenting communities: people not going out and about and socialising. We worked hard as a society—we had to—to get people back socialising with each other after the terrible lockdown period, and even now, hospitality is finding it hard to recover.
There are all sorts of economic reasons for that, so it seems ludicrous to say that pavement licences—for sitting out, enjoying yourself, meeting your friends and so on—will be granted by local authorities only if smoking is prohibited. Individual establishments might decide to prohibit smoking; that is up to them. They are entirely free to do so, and people who smoke will not go to them. Or, if there is seating outside, a pavement licence can be granted so that in some of the space you are allowed to smoke or vape. In other words, grown-ups negotiate their way round this. I, for one, enjoy that we have found café society in coming out on to pavements, and it is really misanthropic and mean-spirited to try to stamp on that in any way. I therefore completely oppose Amendment 186. It is in the spirit of the relentless, never-ending attempt at banning, regulating and stopping.
I also think that it is a terrible insult to local authorities’ autonomy to tell them what to do in this way. It seems both ridiculously petty-minded and authoritarian at the same time. The evidence is there, and there is a notion around the dangers of smoking outside; this point relates to the previous group. I remind the Committee that Cancer Research UK says, in relation to passive smoking and smoking outside, that
“it will be important to consider how to avoid stigma or accidentally risk pushing people into smoking in their homes, which would increase second-hand smoke exposure to those living with them”.
If you take an approach where the state decides that the public square is its own, and the state imagines that it can sanitise it of all kinds of things it does not want the public to do—that is not a free society, by the way—then, ironically, there can be unintended consequences. You push people into the anti-social home, in some ways, where, if you are a smoker, you will smoke. You might as well let them outside—but, of course, some people here do not want that either.
As I have said, unless you have the courage to make smoking a criminal offence, you have to have a certain sense of proportion and allow smoking outside in some instances. In my case, that is outside cafés if the establishment allows you to.