Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 6:"Page 2, line 14, leave out from ““person”” to ““, or”” in line 15 and insert ““at one and the same time””" The noble Lord said: I can be reasonably brief on this amendment. Under Clause 2(2), a place of work is to be a smoke-free place at all times if it is"““used as a place of work . . . by more than one person (even if the persons who work there do so at different times, or only intermittently).””" We will all be very conscious of hot-desking. Indeed, when I came to your Lordships’ House I hot-desked up on the Second Floor with a noble Lord who has now, as he is a hereditary, been removed. Hot-desking is something we are familiar with. In the fields of architecture and all the professions you find people coming in and out and sharing desks. While I understand why there needs to be a restriction on workplaces where there is more than one person, in the case of what is normally a one-person working environment—in other words, two people are sharing a desk but they are never there together. Why can that not be excluded? The purpose of my amendment is to allow smoking in a workplace where only one person works at any one time. I would have thought that was eminently sensible. I beg to move.