It sounds unlikely and somewhat bizarre, doesn’t it? And yet this could be true if the Welsh Government has its way.
No doubt you are familiar with the current ban on smoking. You’re probably also familiar with the fact vaping is also now being banned in some locations. These include trains and railway stations across the country, not to mention some pubs and other locations.
Yet the idea of banning vaping at home – well, that’s just bizarre, surely?
The idea is easy enough to understand. The Welsh Government wants to make sure vaping is banned in all workplaces by the time 2016 comes to an end. There is some controversy over this idea alone, since vaping is clearly not on the same level as smoking, in terms of the risk of passive smoking. However, more and more establishments are looking to ban vaping in public and in enclosed spaces.
How would it work?
Whatever you might think of that, let’s consider how this law would work if you were working at home. Let’s say you have a home office and you work between the hours of, say, 10am and 5pm every day. Now, at the moment, you can vape to your heart’s content whenever you’re at home. Yet if this new law does come into force, you will no longer be allowed to vape when you are working.
That literally means you can vape at home outside of working hours, but between the hours of 10am and 5pm you would literally be breaking the law by vaping in your own home. And more than that, you could technically be breaking the law if you were going through work emails at home while vaping.
According to recent reports, a Conservative spokesperson said the measures were “unenforceable”. We would have to agree on that point. After all, how is anyone going to know when you were vaping and whether you were working or not? The only way it could work would be if someone called you at work and you happened to make some comment about vaping at the time. They could report you, you could be hauled into court… yes, it does sound crazy, doesn’t it?
And yet this is surely the only conceivable way anyone would ever be prosecuted under these proposed new measures. It is one thing to lay out a series of measures that are quite clear on when you can and cannot vape in your home while working there. But it is quite another to work out how such a rule could ever be enforced.
Surely then this is a giant waste of time, when there are other far more important things to be focused on? We expect work-at-home vapers to be amazed and incredulous over this new proposed measure. It remains to be seen whether the legislation will come into play, but it looks as though the Welsh Government wants vaping to come into line with smoking – and as soon as possible.
