---

Health Bill

My Lords, I have a certain degree of sympathy with the noble Earl’s objective. As somebody who loves reading, pubs are interesting places if you ever find yourself stuck without a book or newspaper; there is an awful lot to keep one’s attention. My point for the noble Earl, which I put to the Minister for his reply, is about the length of time it takes to bring about cultural change. I am endlessly fascinated when I go to France and see signs saying that people on a roundabout have the right of way. They changed the law more than 20 years ago, when I started driving in France, and the signs telling people to ““cedez le passage”” are presumably still there because people are driving who first drove when conditions were different; they will presumably be there for quite a long time, because longevity is going up. While I can see what the noble Earl is trying to do, and understand that there will come a time when such signs are perhaps unnecessary, I wonder whether three years is long enough to cover a change. Might we not need to think in terms of a generation of people coming along, for whom what is being proposed becomes the norm? Perhaps there may be a happy compromise to be found.