Foster parents smoking in Essex

The Evening Standard reports that a couple's attempt to foster children has been foiled following the husband's revelation that he had smoked two cigars within an 18-month period.

The report states that the parents were told specifically that prospective parents must not have smoked for a year prior to fostering, and the two cigars rendered the couple ineligible to be foster carers. This information is not given in the Essex Adoption Service Policy Statement (2008):

It has been shown that children’s health is adversely affected by passive smoking. The adoption service will not exclude smokers as prospective adopters, but is very unlikely to place babies under the age of 2, or place any children who have asthma or respiratory conditions, with people who smoke.

(So passive smoking is very risky to children's health, but in most cases we won't let that stand in our way. We'll just make you feel bad about smoking.) Nor is it given in the relevant guidelines on becoming a foster carer (2010):

If you smoke, you will not be allowed to care for a child under the age of five or a child who has any kind of respiratory problem.

Nothing is stated in either document about not having smoked for at least a year prior to adoption or fostering.

Essex County is quoted: "We are not able to comment on individual cases but deciding not to pursue an application is not a decision that is taken lightly." 


This decision, based on two cigars, seems to have been made very lightly indeed. 

Breached the ban?: trade in half your fine for a course on secondary smoke!

Great Yarmouth Borough Council has offered a course to people fined for breaching the smoking ban. If they attend, they are let off half the fine.

I wonder who designed the course, who it was designed for (not only for people who breach the ban, surely? I thought everyone loved the ban!), how long it goes on and how much nonsense is peddled in it. It's almost bound to say that there is no safe level of secondary smoke and that ventilation never works. (Although it seems that ASH is retreating from this impossible position in the context of outdoor smoking bans.)

Nice to know that someone can make money out of the ban being breached, and all in the name of 're-education' too. When I was at school people used to think that kind of education was a sinister form of brainwashing.