Health Bill

No, I want to answer the point of my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Bob Spink) about private members’ clubs. The Secretary of State appeared to accept that we were making substantial progress with self-regulatory solutions but claimed that it was not fast enough. She is not proposing to give the industry any additional time to achieve that. For the industry, the flexibility that is inherent in self-regulatory solutions is important commercially. Whatever may be said about the desirability of limiting the liberty of smokers, private members’ clubs should be treated as an extension of a private home in the sense that a club has members who can make decisions about what happens in their club. It seems burdensome for legislation to interfere in that and to prevent members from taking such decisions.