Health Bill

I thank the Minister for his apologies, which are of course accepted. My only difficulty is that I asked some pertinent questions in the letter, and, not having seen the Minister’s answers, I cannot possibly weigh them up. They may be absolutely valid but I cannot bring them into today’s proceedings. I therefore reserve the right to return to the two particular issues that I raised in the letter. One was the validity of the evidence on passive smoking. I understand that that can be controversial, and I imagine I have a lengthy answer from the Minister. The other one was pretty simple: it asked what the cost of the Bill will be when it becomes an Act. There must be some government estimates. Even the Treasury must be interested in that. I should have thought that that was a simple question to which I could have had a pretty quick answer. I understood that if Ministers in any government were unable to send a reply in time for a Committee, then it was normal courtesy at least to make a phone call. We have a very good message system in this House. Everyone else rings me. It is disappointing that this department of state was unable to do so, very much in contrast to the Foreign Office, which has been extremely good at responding to queries I have raised over the tsunami and things such as that. That department sets an example of how to handle Members’ questions which could be passed on to the Department of Health. The Minister says that, so far as concerns the human rights issue, he takes responsibility for the Bill being compliant and he recognises that responsibility if and when it is challenged. The Committee cannot argue with that. That is a pretty fair commitment, it is on the record and he will have to live with that. The Minister also referred to the exhaustive time he said the legislation was taking to go through the Commons. What he did not mention was that a session in the Commons can take precisely one minute, so the number of sessions is irrelevant; what is important is the time taken on an argument and the question of how many of those sessions were guillotined. My suspicion is that the vast majority were, but we will check—maybe they were not. Maybe they were totally open and Members had a fulsome debate. We will check and come back to that. As I say, I cannot really comment on passive smoking at this stage because I do not have the Minister’s response, and I will come back to that later. A number of my noble friends on this side and a number of other Members must have thought in their own minds: when exactly are the regulations coming? What my noble friend said is logical. Before we have Report stage, even if we cannot have the final regulations, at least we could have an outline of them. After all, the regulations will tell us what is not in the Bill but what the Government think should be the method of implementation. I hope the Minister—if not today, then at our next sitting—will be able to come to us and say, ““It is our best intention to table these regulations before Report stage””; or, if he is not able to do so, to give us reasons why not and tell us how long it is likely to be after Report stage. Of course, to understand the importance of that, we need to know when Report stage will be, which would be helpful. The Minister ignores, in a sense, the problems of those who have to implement this Bill and suggests that it has been painfully clear to licensed premises, members’ clubs and everyone else that this is going to go through on the nod. That is the implication of what he was saying. But that was not clear to members’ clubs; indeed, such clubs, which have about 10 million members, still hope and believe that the Government will see sense and recognise that those clubs, which we will come on to in a subsequent amendment, are quite different from commercial licensed premises. Staying with commercial licensed premises for a second, no business can move forward until it knows what the regulations are. Armed with that information, it may have to go for planning permission to its local authority to get changes made to its premises one way or another. It is unfair and totally unrealistic in today’s modern world to expect someone who owns a small or large number of licensed premises to react overnight. It takes time, as it should, and, if this Bill is ultimately to be accepted by the general public with a willingness to go with what the Government want, it must be done properly. I hope that the Minister will allow a proper length of time for the legislation. I reject the farcical liberal idea of implementing it on National No Smoking Day next year, when it will probably be desperately cold. That is a typical liberal approach to these things. At any rate, I welcome the Government’s statement that, whenever the regulations are laid, they will be subject to affirmative resolution. That is all that I want to say at this stage. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment, with the proviso that I will come back to some aspects of it on Report.