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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Jane Ellison)
I thank colleagues for bearing with our rather interrupted debate. I am fairly confident that I will not have time to discuss all the issues in my response, but as some colleagues are aware, my door is always open, and I have a proposal towards the end of my speech for how we might continue the discussion.
First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Byron Davies) on securing this debate and on opening it so authoritatively. We are all aware of the impact of alcohol misuse, which was well summed up by the shadow Minister, who is knowledgeable about that. She reminded us of some of the pressure it puts on our vital public services. It is right that we give this issue our attention.
I know that people have asked why we need new guidelines when alcohol consumption is falling. My hon. Friend, in introducing the debate, talked about some of the areas in which we have had welcome improvements in the statistics. The majority of people drink alcohol in an entirely responsible way. In 2014, 59%—just over 25 million adults—drank within the new guidelines, so it is important to stress that quite a lot of people drink that amount or less at the moment.
As a Government who believe in informed and empowered consumers, we have a responsibility to provide clear information to help people make informed choices about their drinking. The guidelines are not about preventing those who want to enjoy a drink from doing so. Goodness knows, as a passionate remainer, I can certainly say that guidelines of all sorts have been suspended in my household for the past week or so. This is about ensuring that people get common-sense advice and practical information, and some of that will be about things like taking days off from drinking. There is an appetite for that; we know that from the research we have done with people.
The new low-risk drinking guidelines are the means by which the four UK chief medical officers, working together, provide the public with the latest and most up-to-date information about the health risks of different levels and patterns of drinking. Let me clarify at the outset, in case I run out of time, what the guidelines are not. Nobody has said that more than 14 units is considered harmful or problem drinking. It is just not recommended as low risk. To be clear, there is no public policy on abstinence. The guidelines are not about the rate at which alcohol affects men and women in terms of intoxication, but how it affects their long-term health.
Jane Ellison
If colleagues will forgive me, I have very little time. I will not even have 10 minutes. I will give way, but it means I will not get through my speech.
Andrew Griffiths
I have a very simple question. Does the Minister think there is no such thing as safe drinking?
Jane Ellison
I will come on to deal with some of the issues, but I will also make a suggestion for how we take this discussion forward. The issue outlined was about the extent to which alcohol affects people. The second part of the consultation, to which a response has not yet been published—I will come on to talk about that—is about how we express and communicate the new guidelines. That is slightly different from the science that sits behind them. I want to try to pull those two things apart. Clearly we have a job of communication to do, because we want to be helpful to the public.
Perhaps it would be useful to remind Members how we arrived at this review. It was not Ministers who asked the chief medical officers to do it but Parliament. The previous guidelines came out in 1995, and in 2012 the Science and Technology Committee recommended that they should be reviewed because they had not been for so long. It is fair to say that there are a lot of places around the world where such guidelines have not been looked at for a long time, so the evidence base is not as up to date as it could be. There was a lot of parliamentary interest, especially in the previous Parliament, in guidelines—for example, in the harmonisation of the pregnancy guidelines when we had debates about foetal alcohol syndrome.
At the request of the four UK chief medical officers, three independent groups of experts have met since 2013 to look at both the scientific and the behavioural evidence of the health effects of alcohol. Those groups were made up of international experts in the field of epidemiology, public health, liver disease, behavioural science, science communications and evidence-based alcohol policy. None of those people were members of the temperance movement.
To ensure that the guidelines are as practical as possible, after their publication the Government held a public consultation to gather views on their clarity, expression and usefulness. I should clarify something that is important: the Royal Statistical Society supported the evidence review and the conclusions. It was very specific in its challenge about how the Department of Health presented it in the launch. That is exactly why there was then a consultation about how we express and discuss the guidelines. To be clear, though, the RSS did not question the evidence review or its conclusions.
As part of the consultation process, Public Health England has undertaken market research to test understanding and acceptance of the guidelines—just the points that colleagues have asked about. Overall, the results were positive, showing that the language was understood and accepted and the tone appropriately informational. That is the tone we are trying to achieve: informational, not hectoring or nannying. The expert group has now reviewed the consultation responses and market research and has put its final recommendations to the four CMOs for their consideration. We intend to publish the final guidelines and the Government response to the consultation as soon as possible.
We of course recognise that industry has a key role in communicating the new information to consumers, particularly through labelling. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths) for his remarks. As he knows, as a Back Bencher in the previous Parliament I was an active member of the all-party groups on pubs and beer. I had the honour of being the guest judge of the pale ale category at the Battersea beer festival on more than one occasion. To declare an interest, I am a member of the Campaign for Real Ale. I could not agree more that a well-run pub or bar can be a great way to help people to drink responsibly while maintaining social contact.
Nevertheless, the industry needs to enable those who want to moderate what they drink to do so. It has done some really good work on that. The work with the industry in the previous Parliament on alcohol units was very useful. I always have a further challenge for the industry. One thing we can do to reduce the number of units people consume and to develop that wider choice is to put more emphasis on lower-alcohol products. When I have spoken to them, I have always been very honest with industry spokesmen that greater promotion of lower-alcohol drinks can help people to get into healthier habits. Simple switches can help. I want to put on the record that just by swapping from a pint of beer or lager at 6% strength to a pint at 4% strength, people could cut their units by a third—that is, they could take out 1.1 units. They could still enjoy their pint but cut their alcohol intake by a third.
The chief medical officer had a successful meeting with the Portman Group yesterday, confirming willingness on both sides to continue to work constructively together and to deliver benefits to the public and good information to our constituents. There are reasons for optimism in some of the alcohol statistics, but the shadow Minister is right that there are some significant and often highly concentrated problems. We need to give people the best and most up-to-date advice. We recognise that it is not for the Government to tell adults what to do in their private lives, but we do have a role in enabling the public to make informed decisions about their health based on up-to-date guidelines and the best science.
I am grateful to the chief medical officer, who has confirmed that she is happy to hold a parliamentary drop-in briefing for colleagues to discuss the matter further. It simply is not possible to pick up many of the detailed points that have been made on the various international studies in the time available. For the record, the review scrutinised all the available high-quality evidence and covered the findings of 63 systematic reviews from the evidence worldwide. It was a major undertaking. I think it would be useful for colleagues to be able to come along and discuss some of the studies that have been cited. Some of them are in different countries and some, it must be said, are based on different situations in terms of the nature of the national health service and the health support in those countries. I do not have time to go into that factor, but it is relevant for some of the comparative remarks that were made.
I hope I have reassured colleagues that we want to move forward in a sensible way. We want to give people the best information and we want to communicate it with clarity. Change will not happen overnight, but we want to raise awareness of the health risks, particularly around some of the links, such as between breast cancer and alcohol. We have a vastly better understanding of that than we did in 1995, and that has come through in recent years. It is important that we reflect that and continue to communicate it. I hope we can move forward constructively from here. I will set up the meeting that I offered. I sense from the Chamber that there is an interest in having further constructive dialogue. I leave a couple of minutes to my hon. Friend the Member for Gower to close the debate.