Executive to adopt smoking ban after 54,000 speak out

ALMOST 54,000 people and organisations contributed to the Scottish Executive’s consultation on curbing smoking, it emerged yesterday.

Of those, the vast majority are understood to have been in favour of banning smoking in public places. The sheer number of responses, and the weight in favour of a ban, have persuaded ministers to adopt a smoking ban as Executive policy, and this will be announced on 10 November.

The smoking consultation ran from June until the end of September, and the response is almost 40 times higher than any previous Executive consultation. First Minister Jack McConnell’s ambition to ban smoking in Scotland was given a boost when Frank Dobson, the former health secretary, gave his full backing to a Scottish ban and warned the UK government not to settle for a "pathetic compromise" on the issue.

Speaking to a conference of global health experts in Edinburgh, Mr Dobson said he had been a supporter of a ban on smoking in public places for a long time.

He refused to criticise Dr John Reid, the current Secretary of State for Health, by name, but he made it clear that he feared his successor would fail to implement a total ban.

"There is a danger we will come up with some stupid, pathetic compromise," he said.

Mr Dobson said afterwards that he was totally behind the First Minister’s plan to ban smoking in Scotland, and that a total ban was the only possible way of making a ban work.

He said: "Strength to your arm, Jack, get on with it. It will be popular, it will work and it will save lives, particularly here in Scotland where the general level of health, among a large part of the population, is poor."

The effectiveness of a smoking ban has divided the administrations north and south of the Border, with Mr McCon-nell’s Scottish Executive slowly warming to the idea, while Tony Blair’s government has remained sceptical. Dr Reid said earlier this year that it was wrong for middle-class politicians to tell the working class what to do, particularly in banning something which was the only pleasure for many people - comments which underlined his scepticism about a ban.

Dr Reid is due to bring forward a white paper on smoking in the next few weeks, but it is expected to fall some way short of a total ban.

Instead, Dr Reid is expected to give local authorities the power to decide on the implementation of a ban in public places, a move Liverpool pioneered last week.

Mr Dobson said he would have hoped to have introduced a total ban in England had he still been health secretary. He said he would oppose anything that was not a total ban and dismissed as "unworkable" the idea of giving local authorities the power to decide.

Mr Dobson said: "The tobacco industry would try to influence people locally, getting together with some bar owners, financed by zillions of pounds, to make it impossible."