Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

If the Committee will allow me, I want to come back on the point about retail organisations. I am more than happy to acknowledge that all sorts of organisations are not quite as independent as they seem. In fact, many health charities over the years feel more like Astroturfed organisations, because most of their money comes from government, one way or another. All I am pointing out is that the idea of a kind of neutral body of representative organisations is something that could be queried. It is fair enough about trade associations, but my general point—rather than trying to imply that there is something dodgy about the associations I mentioned because of any association with tobacco—is that tens of thousands of small retailers are tearing their hair out about the implications of this legislation. That is reflected in a wide range of ways, not just by briefings I have had from trade associations, of which I have not actually had very many. I have investigated this myself; I have talked to quite a number of them and met others, and I have read around. That is why doing research for a piece of legislation matters. There is a danger of saying, “We can’t talk to the trade associations for small convenience stores, because the ones we know of have some association with or get some funding from big tobacco”, but maybe that is because they are often sidelined and ignored by other organisations, and they should not be. The Government could actually take them seriously and not have them treated as though they were a kind of pariah one can ignore. These are the small players; this is your local corner shop. How do they get a voice here? I thought I would try to give them a voice, and it is not appropriate to imply that somehow giving them a voice is something to do with representing big tobacco. It is completely unrelated to the general point I was making and, as I have pointed out, organisations such as ASH get their funding from somewhere. That is not necessarily big tobacco, but it is big government.