MPs voted in February by a huge margin to ban smoking from all pubs and private members' clubs in England.
The proposed ban is based on the premise that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) or so-called 'passive smoking' is a risk to health.
In an interesting turn of events the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has just published a report on the Government's Policy on the Management of Risk.
The report has reached the conclusion that environmental tobacco smoke is not the risk it is purported to be and does not justify such a ban.
The report says that greater attention should have been given to scientific evidence, which it says suggests that passive smoking in public places is a relatively minor problem compared with passive smoking in the home.
The report calls on ministers to pay more attention to the risks to personal liberty posed by new legislation.
Lord Wakeham, chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee, said the government had failed properly to apply guidelines on risk assessment.
This is of course great news for the Tobacco Manufacturers' Association (TMA) which has always taken the view that the scientific evidence, taken as a whole, does not demonstrate conclusively that ETS presents a serious risk to health.
The chief executive of the TMA, Tim Lord says the findings of individual studies of the health effects of ETS are inconsistent and inconclusive.
He cites the five largest studies on the statistical association between ETS and lung cancer, where one reported a small increase in risk, three reported no statistically significant increase in risk, and one reported a statistically significant decrease in risk.