In November last year, the Coventry Telegraph carried an article under the headline ‘Coventry to ban smoking outdoors’. Alarmed by the evident mission creep, one of our members sent a Freedom of Information request to the council, asking from what source springs Coventry council’s power to make/amend UK law.
Coventry replied: The Council does not intend to ban the general public from smoking in the open air as it does not have the right to amend the law.
Nevertheless, on the advice of Coventry’s Smokefree Alliance, the council is now ‘urging people not to light up in Millennium Place during the [Olympic] Games.’ This ‘low cost campaign’ is in line with current ASH policy of talking local councillors into forcing voluntary outdoor bans on their patch.
This is not about health.
Even ASH concedes that cigarettes smoked outdoors pose no threat to innocent smoke-free lungs. Rather, it is another step along the path to uninventing tobacco. Cue ‘the children’, who are rolled out here by Councillor Joe Clifford, to be used as an excuse for making a quarter of his city’s rate-payers socially unacceptable. The argument goes: if they never see smoking, they will never smoke. How mad is that?
Now that Public Health is becoming the responsibility of local councils, we will see more of these attempts by council employees to push the boundary. The terms of the Localism Bill do not give councils the power to extend or amend existing national Law. If your County/City/Town or Parish Council thinks it can, by banning smoking in outdoor, public places for example, we have a simple, adaptable FoI request template that you may find useful.
And, just in case anyone thinks there is nothing unreasonable about ‘voluntary’ bans, this is what Cumbria Councillor, Bill Wearing had to say on the subject last year:
Once it becomes socially unacceptable, it becomes a lot easier to bring in laws