Call to stub out smoking outside schools

A Perthshire MSP is calling on smoking to be banned outside the region’s schools.

Alexander Stewart wants the Scottish Government to take action.

The Scottish Conservative was reinstalled this month as Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation Scotland’s ‘smoking cessation champion’for a second term in parliament.

A recent survey by Scotland’s leading lung health charity, Asthma UK and British Lung Foundation Scotland, found that four in five of Scots want to see smoking banned outside schools.

Passive smoking, breathing in tobacco smoke from someone else’s cigarette, is harmful to everyone but even more so for babies and children whose lungs have not finished growing.

Mr Stewart, who is a member for the Mid Scotland and Fife region, said:“The pulmonary reserve – which is a person’s ability to withstand deterioration in the lungs – is very much influenced by your smoking or vaping history and it can be compromised from very early years if children are subjected to passive smoking by others.

“In addition to this, children look up to adults, especially parents, relatives or carers and if they smoke, they run the risk of allowing their children to consider the habit as a‘normal’thing to pursue.

“This‘normalisation’has the potential to harm everyone but even more so for babies and children whose lungs haven’t finished growing.

“Scotland has a smoke-free target of less than five per cent of adults smoking by 2034, and in order to start achieving this we need to stop the‘normalising’of smoking around children.”