Health Bill

moved Amendment No. 33:"Page 4, line 45, leave out ““or descriptions of person”” and insert ““specified or persons of a description””" The noble Earl said: The amendment raises a very simple point. Clause 6(2) states:"““The duty is to be imposed on persons or descriptions of person specified in the regulations””," but I cannot help feeling, simply in terms of good English, that the wording could be more felicitous. Surely you cannot impose a duty on a description; you impose it on a person. I am sure the Minister will tell me that the wording is hallowed by long usage, but I still think it is a little odd. If we can improve it, then we should. I make a similar point with Amendment No. 40 but also ask the question: who exactly are the people on whom the duty to act as policemen in Clause 8 will fall when it comes to smoke-free vehicles, for example? What precisely will that duty amount to and how will enforcement officers set about fulfilling it? What will constitute a failure to fulfil it? We simply do not know and I hope that the Minister can enlighten the Committee on these issues. Returning to Clause 6 and the regulations foreshadowed in subsections (2) and (3), it does not seem at all satisfactory to me that these regulations will be introduced via the negative resolution procedure. These may be matters of detail but upon them depends a set of new criminal offences. They are, therefore, substantive matters, and yet the face of the Bill contains only the barest details about them. Perhaps the Minister will consider my Amendment No. 104, which proposes a compromise that the first set of regulations implementing Clause 6(2) and (3) should be by the affirmative procedure. I do not suggest that it is necessarily appropriate to repeat that procedure for every subsequent set of regulations, but the first ones will contain prescriptions of very considerable interest and they ought to be guaranteed the chance of a debate. I shall reserve my general comments about Clause 6 to the next but one group of amendments. I will pre-empt them only to the extent of saying that I have enormous difficulty with Clause 6 as a totality. It seems to me that, if it is to stay in the Bill, the way in which it is implemented really matters. I beg to move.