Outdoor smoking ban is not an attack on the hospitality industry, Labour’s Commons leader Lucy Powell insists
The government is “not attacking the hospitality industry” with proposed plans to ban smoking in pub gardens, a cabinet minister has insisted.
Lucy Powell told Sky News’ Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips that Labour wants to create a “smoke-free country” and measures to achieve this will be done “in consultation” with businesses that could be affected.
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The new government had already pledged to resurrect Rishi Sunak’s flagship smoking bill, which intended to ban anyone aged 14 and under from ever buying cigarettes, but this was shelved before the election.
However, this week Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said he could go further and also ban smoking in outdoor venues to reduce the number of preventable deaths linked to tobacco use.
Asked about criticism this move could “kill business”, Ms Powell said: “We’re certainly not attacking the hospitality industry. We support the hospitality industry. It’s vital to our communities, our high street, our economy.
“I’m not going to pre-empt what is or isn’t going to be in a future piece of legislation, but what I would say is that any such measures to extend some of these issues around smoking will be done in full consultation with hospitality business.”
She added there has been “a consensus for a long time now that we want to see a smoke-free country” and the health and economic benefits “would be huge”.
Smoking claims around 80,000 lives a year and estimates suggest it costs the NHS in England about £2.6bn a year.
While health campaigners have welcomed the latest plans, industry leaders in the hospitality sector have warned it could be a final nail in the coffin following the difficulties of the pandemic and cost of living crisis.
Sir Keir said the ban could include pub gardens, outdoor restaurants and outside sports venues, hospitals, nightclubs and some small parks.
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Kate Nicholls, chief executive of trade body UKHospitality, said this “comes with the prospect of serious economic harm to hospitality venues” that have “all invested significantly in good faith in outdoor spaces and continue to face financial challenges”.
Michael Kill, CEO of the Night Time Industries Association, said: “This raises the critical question: Are we on the brink of becoming a nanny state? What is next?
“While these measures may rightly be driven by public health considerations, they risk dividing opinion and imposing yet another regulatory burden on businesses already facing considerable challenges.”
A number of Conservative MPs also spoke out against the plan, despite their own proposals to curb smoking for younger people, with shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins posting on X: “We want to protect our children from taking up smoking and vaping. Our smoke-free generation legislation was designed to do that.
“Stopping adults from smoking in the open air, however, was not part of our plans. Labour is putting our hospitality sector at risk in the process.”
Reform leader Nigel Farage told one newspaper he would “never go to the pub again if outdoor smoking was banned”.
Nigel Farage made his views known outside a pub in Westminster on Thursday. Pic: PA
A smoking ban inside of pubs and other enclosed public spaces was brought in by the last Labour government in 2007.
It led to a 2.4% reduction in hospital admissions for heart attacks and a 12.3% reduction in hospital admissions for childhood asthma within a year, according to Action on Smoking Health (ASH).
ASH said they support the government’s proposals, but it is important for people who smoke to have somewhere outside to do so to prevent them from smoking indoors.
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
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The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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