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Health Bill

That is accepted. But the point is: how much death, disease and disability are involved? That is the issue. I am quite independent enough to reject any lobbying from the tobacco groups. This is my own independent judgment. How much death, disease and disability do you need to have a Bill that totally bans smoking in public places? My contention is that you do not have enough as a result of passive smoking to justify this Bill. There is some increase in risk but not enough, and that was the Government’s initial view. Moreover, whatever the imperfections of ventilation and separation, the more there is, the lower the risk. A whole unexplored issue is the amount of contact that non-smokers have with passive smokers. The intensity of the contact—the number of hours or minutes that they have with smokers—affects the degree of risk. If you set up public places in which there is as good a separation as can be achieved by our modern technology, you diminish the risk to absolute insignificance. That must be so. Why have the Government rejected that route?