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Health and Social Care Bill

I think that the noble Baroness is mistaken because in the Bill we have to legislate for things that we do not know about and for artefacts that we, as yet, cannot define. We do not want to find ourselves in the worst-possible scenario, which is a justice of the peace finding himself powerless to act to protect public health because the term that we have used in the Bill is too specific. That is the point. I suppose that we could double the size of the Bill by trying to imagine what every single thing we would want to cover would be to satisfy the noble Baroness, but we still might miss out the one thing that that particular justice of the peace has to address himself to in particular circumstances. The word ““fomite”” is a scientific term meaning an inanimate object capable of carrying infectious organisms. I am impressed by that suggestion, but I have been advised that the term is not commonly associated with things that have been contaminated by radioactive or chemical material. It would be questionable whether ““fomite””—I think that noble Lords have already admitted this—could be extended to animals such as dogs, cats and chickens, which our Section 45H provisions cover. My worry is that using the term ““fomite”” could cause confusion about the extent of the powers and could make the law less accessible to the average person. In this case, we think that we are better off sticking to the everyday term ““things””.