Health Bill [HL]

My Lords, having listened to a number of noble Lords speak on this amendment, I should like to say that my noble friend Lord Howe is absolutely correct. As colleagues know, I have had the privilege of serving as Deputy Speaker and Chairman of Ways and Means and I have checked on what happened that evening. To be frank, the House was in a fair degree of turmoil. It was not a considered decision made on evidence. Indeed, some of the evidence was wrong because Ian McCartney said that no product considered dangerous other than cigarettes may be vended, but alcohol can still be vended today. That was an inaccuracy in his speech. However, that is not the point, rather it is the one made by my noble friend Lord Howe, which is that the House did not give a view one way or the other. Further to that, my friend the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours—I call him that because for many years we served on the Public Accounts Committee together—is right, and indeed I have been aware of the report for a while. It is based on completely new technology, and what I find confusing is that this has been done in consultation with the Department of Health. The department has been consulted and encouraged the tobacco industry, following our Committee stage, to go for this sort of development. Trading standards, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Walton, has been consulted and is in favour of this. To my knowledge, there are no trading standards officials who are not saying that this is a major development that will restrict almost entirely the underage procurement of cigarettes from vending machines. The technology is based on radio frequencies, and I am willing to lend my copy of the report to colleagues who wish to read it. If the Department of Health, following our Committee stage and encouraged by the Minister, is co-operating on this work, and if the vending machine companies which now have not far off 1,000 of these units out in the trade, and the trade is not 80 per cent against it—they are almost 100 per cent in favour, based on a much bigger sample than the 200 involved in the British Heart Foundation research before this was even mentioned—then this is a changed situation. My noble friend Lord Howe is correct; the other place does need at least to consider these developments and the Minister needs to make matters clear to us, because when I made an intervention the other afternoon—I think it was on 2 November—she said that the Government has allowed operators more than 10 years to, ""tighten up their operations to prevent underage sales of tobacco to children and young people. That is the context in which the decision was taken in another place".—[Official Report, 2/11/09; col. 3.]" It was not. It was chaos. The Minister is wrong, because she told us in Committee, and I believed her, that there was now to be a two-year period during which the Government would observe what was happening. They have joined in producing some amendments and new technical developments which are very encouraging. I hope the Minister will answer this because it seems to me that there is a terrible danger of the Department of Health having totally misled this industry, if it is not going to pay any attention to a major technical improvement of the situation. It is not just a few people that we are talking about. We are in the middle of a recession and we are putting at risk 200 companies. Yes, they are small companies, SMEs, but nevertheless directly employing 650 people and indirectly, nobody knows exactly how many, but there will be a couple of thousand. What is the point of slavishly saying, the Commons voted, they did not know what they were voting about and we will put at risk all these people? The Minister has a responsibility, frankly, not to play with people’s lives, at least to weigh up what her own department—and she, I had thought—was encouraging. You cannot, in this day and age, kill off people’s livelihoods because an amendment is inadvertently voted on in another place. I plead with the Minister to recognise this situation. My noble friend Lord Howe has put forward what I think is a very reasonable suggestion and one that I think the industry would understand. It is for the Commons, in the end, to make the decision. It is not for this House to make it when we know from the facts that it was not properly considered in another place.