Health Bill [HL]

Drink, indeed. Not only drink, but chocolate. I have to restrict my intake very firmly, otherwise I would quickly become a chocolate addict. So it is not only nicotine that is addictive; there are all sorts of other things, including, as my noble friend says, drink. I am extremely worried about where we are going. I have to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, for sending me a letter on 24 February. I did say that I would go into some of these matters more deeply in Grand Committee, but the time is getting on so I had better not go through them in great detail. The noble Baroness provided smoking related mortality figures, and I have some things to say about them, but I am not going to say them now; I shall come back to them at the Report stage. She also sought to allay my fears that some retailers would go out of business because of the cost of putting up different displays. She said that it would cost only a couple of hundred pounds to do and would not put them out of business. I remember our last debates about tobacco and the ban on smoking in public places. One of the points we raised was that it would have a devastating effect on public houses. The argument was pooh-poohed. We were told that people would use public houses more; that they would flock to them once we had got rid of the smokers. Well, they got rid of the smokers all right, and public houses are now closing at a rapid rate. Indeed, a parliamentary group called Save the Pub has been set up. What was predicted then has actually happened and the law of unintended consequences certainly operated in that area. We have to be careful about exactly what we are doing in this legislation. When we banned smoking in public places, restaurants and pubs, in spite of the fact that there was an alternative and still is an alternative—that is, to separate the smoker from the non-smoker—we drove the smoker into his house, where he drinks more because it is cheaper than in the pub, and he probably smokes more in front of his children. What is the next step? Are we going to ban smoking in homes as well? Beware of unintended consequences because they sometimes go against what was actually intended. For those reasons, I am against this clause and the other clauses related to smoking in the Bill. No doubt we shall have more to say in Grand Committee and perhaps at length at the Report stage as well.