Health Bill

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Baroness? I did not quote her; I am sorry if she misheard what I said. I quoted the noble Baroness, Lady Rendell of Babergh. I am sorry that she took my remarks amiss, but they were not addressed at her. Then, of course, there are the dangers to health from vehicle emissions; estimates of deaths in the United Kingdom vary from 10,000 to 30,000 a year. According to the Mayor of London—he is still there for the moment—1,000 people in London alone die from vehicle emissions, not to mention from diseases such as asthma, which are exacerbated by traffic fumes. People will step out from smoke-free pubs and so on into the foul atmosphere of traffic-congested streets, and also risk being one of the 3,500 killed and 45,000 seriously injured on the roads each year. The whole anti-smoking campaign has been driven to the present situation through the creation of fear and hysteria among people that second-hand smoke is one of the greatest health risks, although I have just given two examples to show that it most certainly is not. But people tend to accept the myth of greater danger from second-hand smoking because the medical profession embraces it. We all respect medical practitioners and listen intently to their views, but we need to ask ourselves whether it is more dangerous to go into a smoke-filled bar or a hospital. There are roughly 5,000 cases of medical negligence every year and, according to the BMA, there are at least 5,000 deaths per annum from MRSA. Some 300,000 patients pick up an infection in hospital each year, some of which leads to death or permanent disability. Those are not my figures—they come from a report published by the BMA’s Board of Science and Education on 20 February. Is it really more dangerous to go into a bar than a hospital? Of course it is not, according to those figures. Personal hygiene among doctors and nurses is thought to be a significant cause of these infections, and patients are now being advised to ask their doctors whether they have washed their hands between dealing with patients. That is where we have got to with health and doctors. Then there is the new scare of obesity. When I was a lad growing up in the Rhondda Valley during the depression, we were not worried about obesity; we were worried about almost skeletal children. Now, the new problem, in addition to smoking, is obesity. It is said to be costing the NHS £6 billion a year—that is three and a half times more than the Government say smoking costs the NHS every year. So why are we talking about passive smoking? Obesity is also supposed to shorten the life span. Perhaps House of Commons man will introduce a Bill soon to ban eating in public places. I quoted these figures to try to show that we have got our priorities wrong, that the evidence for a ban on smoking in public places is tenuous and based on estimates rather than clinical certainty, and that the whole argument about smoking has been whipped up by assertions from witch-hunting bigots who pretend that smoking is the most dangerous activity in the world, which it is certainly not. I think that it is a national disgrace that we have a House of Commons that, in a debate of only three hours to discuss this great matter, has stripped people of rights that they have enjoyed for hundreds of years, despite a manifesto commitment not to do so. Separation and good ventilation would produce a solution satisfactory to most reasonable people and, with others—at least, I hope that there will be others—I will seek to achieve this at least by amending the Bill to the limits included in the Labour Party manifesto.