THE ban on smoking in pubs was an over-reaction to the threat posed by passive smoking and symptomatic of MPs’ failure to understand the concept of risk, a House of Lords committee has said.

The Lords Economic Affairs Committee accused the Government of kneejerk reactions to scare stories about health, saying it did not weigh the risks. Ministers placed insufficient weight on available scientific evidence and relied instead on “unsubstantiated reports” when formulating policy.

The committee disputed a principle underlying the work of the Health and Safety Executive: that society has a greater aversion to an accident killing ten people than to ten accidents killing one person each, and that safety spending should be allocated accordingly.

The committee cited the smoking ban as an example of a policy based on bad science, it having been sold to the public as necessary because of the apparent dangers of passive smoking.

Committee members questioned whether the Government had a scientific basis for the claim after Caroline Flint, the Health Minister, told the committee: “In relation to deaths from smoking and second-hand smoke, the most serious aspect is smoking in the home. Ninety-five per cent of deaths are related to smoking in the home.”

The committee heard that the “main risk” over passive smoking concerned children who are exposed to cigarette smoke in the home — which the Bill was not designed to address. The report said: “It may be that the unstated objective of policy is to encourage a reduction in active smoking by indirect means. This may well be a desirable policy objective, but if it is the objective it should have been clearly stated.”

The committee also criticised the Government for spending less on road safety than rail safety, when there are far higher number of deaths proportionately on the roads.

Until 2003, the Department for Transport spent three times as much preventing accidents on the railways than on the roads, which the committee called a “potentially serious misallocation of resources”. This gap has subsequently narrowed.

This difference was based on a theory, contained in the Health and Safety Executive’s Principles and Guidance document that: “. . . society has a greater aversion to an accident killing ten people than to ten accidents killing one person each.” The Lords said that three surveys of of public opinion suggested otherwise.

The committee heard how risk-aversion is endemic in the public sector. While the private sector is motivated by profit, there are greater incentives for civil servants to avoid getting things wrong rather than taking reasonable risks.

The inquiry was set up after the Prime Minister said in 2005: “We are in danger of having a disproportionate attitude to the risks we should expect to run as a normal part of life”, adding that this was putting pressure on policymakers “to act to eliminate risk in a way that is out of all proportion to the potential damage”.

The report challenged the idea that Britain is developing compensation culture. While evidence from the Medical Protection Society indicates that the value of claims in the area of clinical negligence has risen, the absolute number has fallen from 10,890 in 2000/01 to 7,196 in 2004/05.

This mirrors a 5 per cent fall in accident compensation claims over five years and evidence from the Better Regulation Task Force which indicates that UK spending on compensation claims is among the lowest in Europe and significantly lower than that in the United States.

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