Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)

My Lords, I have not always historically been an enthusiast for experts dictating policy, but I am enthusiastic about this amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. Particularly in relation to policy or legislation related to public health, there is an awful lot of evidence swapping, people citing data, and so on and so forth, then accusations of not being able to trust that data. It would be very helpful to have a genuine independent academic body looking at some of these things, that we could maybe all trust a little—or even look sceptically at—but which actually digs into the evidence. Many of my friends are academics; any research can be advocacy research. None the less, it has to be there in the public arena for us to examine it. It is not just data and numbers. This is important because earlier today, the Minister rightly said that we are going to follow the evidence, yet we had a serious conversation about whether there should be regulation to ban second-hand vaping fumes. The explanation for the fact there is no evidence of that being harmful was that it is evolving evidence, evolving evidence being the unknown, unknown approach, as far as I can see. I want to Cancer Research here because this is what you do when you are not quite sure how to counter somebody saying this is evidence. It said: “Further research is needed to understand the health effects of vaping”, which I accept, “however”, there is currently no good “evidence”, that “second hand vapour is harmful”. However, we have managed to have a conversation as though, even though there is no evidence, it probably is, or it could be. I think that discredits the notion of evidence-based policy. There are also different kinds of academic studies. I was pleased to hear the idea of behavioural studies. At Queen Mary University, for example, they have done a lot of work on vaping, and all their studies suggest that vaping is not a gateway to smoking. I think that the Government need to consider such things. There are a large number of qualified specialist academics who are researching not just the health impacts of vaping but a whole range of how vaping is used. I would like that somehow to be acknowledged in the Bill and for that group of people not to be ignored. As we are at the end of Committee, sometimes in this Bill I have argued in defence of vaping as a smoking cessation tool, because that is how I have used it. However, I have felt a little uncomfortable about the way that it is assumed that, unless it is a smoking cessation tool, there is something wrong with it. I wanted to query whether that is true. Have the Government got a view of a recreational habit? Why would the Government choose to try to overregulate something that is just a recreational choice? Some people might start vaping who have not smoked. It might be that, by vaping, they will not start smoking.