Health Bill [HL]

I have also added my name to nearly all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and I commend him for the way in which he introduced the amendment earlier. This is one of those cases where the Committee wishes to go a little further than the Government seem ready to, and I rather hope that when my noble friend reports back to her colleagues on how this debate has gone today—and how I suspect it will go again on Report—the Government will be willing to look at the possibility of a complete ban, rather than this halfway house of a system of tokens, age restrictions for the issuing of them and so on. As other speakers have told the Committee, children are extraordinarily ingenious in getting around technical obstacles that to most of us would be insuperable. I have no doubt that the copying of tokens and the begging and borrowing of them would be a great sport for young people who wanted to get their cigarettes from vending machines in future. It would be so much easier if we followed the practice of 22 other countries—which is about to include Scotland as well—and say that cigarette vending machines have had their day and we do not want them any more.