Health Bill

I want to return to a couple of things that the Minister said. I believe that the intellectual foundation of the Bill is deeply flawed, and that can be exposed very simply. The Minister said that the Government were acting on the evidence of their scientific advice, but the Government had all the evidence, which the noble Lord cited, when they introduced a very different Bill. Were the Government making a mistake then? Was their judgment wrong when they introduced the first Bill? Were they then persuaded by more scientific evidence to move towards a total ban in public places? Of course that was not the sequence of events; it was just that there was pressure on the House of Commons to do that and it did it. The evidence was there for a different kind of Bill, and that was the first Bill that the Government introduced. There was no new scientific evidence during that period. That is my first point. If one is trying to argue that the Bill before us now was produced on the basis of scientific evidence, then I think that the argument falls. Secondly, the Minister talked about—