Health Bill

This is an important issue. I understand what the noble Baroness said about charities and their responsibilities. They could be put at great risk, if they are not very careful, for doing what is usually an onerous unpaid job. There are difficulties here. I go back to my experience in 1959 and 1964, when I fought the Newbury constituency, which contains about 38 hamlets and villages. Like good democrats, they expected the candidates to visit every one of them and to speak, and, of course, we went to the village hall. But there were no staff, and so someone said, ““Here’s the key. Help yourself””. What will happen under those circumstances where you have a public meeting in which people are interested. I was going to say they do not seem to be interested in public meetings now. The problem is that they are not offered them, so we do not know whether they still like them or not, but such meetings were certainly very well attended in my time. How do you stop them lighting up if there is no one on duty to say, ““You cannot do this””? You cannot expect the parliamentary candidate to do that, or his agent. It is not his responsibility. So whose responsibility is it? If the ““No Smoking”” signs are up, is it the responsibility of the owner of the premises or the person who has let them out—the person in charge—or is it the responsibility of the people who actually smoke? There is a great difficulty about these voluntarily-run organisations. They have very little money and cannot pay people to supervise. An important point has been raised and I hope we can get a satisfactory answer.