Policing and Crime Bill

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak to Part 7 of the Bill, relating to alcohol and the Licensing Act 2003. It is not a major part of the Bill but the misuse of alcohol carries a huge cost to the country in a whole variety of different ways, particularly in the context of policing, crime and alcohol-related poor health.

The Minister mentioned it in his opening address, and I have been interested for some time in the way in which alcohol is being presented and now sold in a different way from the traditional liquid form—as powdered and vaporised alcohol. I have been asking the Government how they will deal with this development. Powdered alcohol is being manufactured in the USA and the best-known product there, Palcohol, has been legal since March 2015.

It has not been welcomed everywhere there because it can be taken easily to places where alcohol should not be consumed. It can be added to existing liquid alcohol drinks, thereby substantially increasing their strength. The biggest risk is that it can be, and in practice is being, added to the wide variety of soft drinks that minors and children consume. There is great concern about that. These are some of the reasons why to date, while it has been legalised in the States, 25 individual states have now banned the sale of the product. For all intents and purposes it is a psychoactive substance. It is mind altering and, as the Government document recognised, it can be vaped, as can other psychoactive substances. Ethyl alcohol is, of course, a drug. We talk about drink and drugs, but it is actually drugs and drugs if we look at it technically. I should like to know from the Minister why the Government are differentiating this from the other drugs that were recently banned under the psychoactive substances legislation. Why is this different from what has been banned under other legislation? Is it not really a legal high that is little different from the others?

Can the Minister also say what the Government think about the concerns and objections that have been raised in the States? If they intend to press ahead with the proposals to extend the definition of what constitutes alcohol to the Licensing Act 2003, does this in effect formally legalise the sale of powdered and vaporised alcohol in the UK from the time that this Bill becomes law? It is a little unclear at the moment. I have noticed that some websites are already preparing to sell powdered alcohol for vaping in the UK but they are waiting, as they put it, for the Government to legalise it. I presume that the Government are taking a step to legalise it, whereas it has hitherto not been seen as legal. Yet there is evidence in the States that where it has been legalised there are problems with it.

I should also like to know—I introduce the health element here—what consultations there have been with the health authorities on this change. The noble and learned Lord, in his introduction, also referred to your Lordships’ Select Committee which is currently reviewing the operation of the Licensing Act 2003. I declare an interest as a Member of it. Part of this review, which has just got under way, is that a department of the Home Office has recently presented what is in effect post-legislative scrutiny to the Committee. It runs to 80 pages and, for anyone interested in reading it, it is Command Paper 9278 and was published in June. Generally speaking, it gives a rather glowing report of what has developed over the years since the Act came into force in 2005. It points to the reduction in the amount of alcohol now consumed, which is true, particularly among young people, where there has been a decline in recent years. It points to the fall in crime and disorder in alcohol-related incidents, but there are some negatives that some of us see arising from the Act. For example, late-night opening has shifted alcohol-induced problems to later in the night, with some consequences for public order and certainly consequences for the police and their resourcing. It has also had quite a major impact on A&E and emergency services.

There has also been a growth in off-licence sales, where the number of licences and sales have gone up, while in on-sale premises, such as pubs and clubs, sales have gone into decline. We now see that more than 70% of alcohol sales are coming from the off-sale trade which is changing very significantly indeed, with very major players such as Amazon now selling alcohol online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

That sort of change has probably increased preloading, where people buy cheaply in supermarkets, drink it at home and then go out later in the evening. That in turn has led in the opinion of some of us to a really major problem that has not been recognised so far by the Home Office—in particular, in the paper that it presented to the Select Committee, which I have just mentioned—about the ever-increasing number of NHS hospital patients with alcohol poisoning or other alcohol-related illnesses. There is conclusive evidence of more than 64 of these so-recognised alcohol-linked problems, including liver disease and cancer—breast cancer in particular. Strong evidence has now come through about the effect of excessive drinking by women and the risk of breast cancer. Notwithstanding the statistics available about hospital admissions, I suspect that if some more research is done on what is happening at GP level and the extent to which GPs are looking at alcohol-induced illnesses being dealt with there, on which relatively little research has been done, we will see that there has been a growth in that area, compared with what life was like in 2003 when the Act first came into place.

Among the 80-odd pages of the post-regulatory review the Home Office submitted to us, I found a couple of lines about health problems generally. When I checked up on it I discovered a two-line reference, which I researched, that there is now evidence from the Health & Social Care Information Centre that in 2014-15 there were more than 1 million alcohol-related patient admissions to hospital—to be precise, 1,059,000. That was a 5% increase over 2012-13. But going back to 2005, when the 2003 Act was first put into place, the figure was as low as 493,760 admitted to hospital. While there has been a decline in alcohol consumption and fewer incidents of violence reported to the police, the other side of the coin is a massive change, with a 115% increase in alcohol-related admissions to hospital. This is a significant factor and change in the ethos that we have to take into account when looking at the 2003 Act.

I would not want to repeat all these arguments in Committee. The health authorities have long been arguing that a major omission from the 2003 Act was the requirement to take into account the health implications arising from alcohol consumption. It has already been taken into account in Scotland, where a change has been adopted. I will seek in Committee to move an amendment. Even though this is a relatively small item in the context of the size of the Bill we have before us, it is an important element with very substantial costs attached to it for the country as a whole. Given we have a change in the Home Office, with a new Minister in charge, I hope we might perhaps look for a more positive response from it to the idea that the health objective should be imported into the criteria required before licences are granted for people to sell alcohol. I tried to do this previously with a Private Member’s Bill without any success, but I hope, given the weight of evidence now accumulating, that there will be a positive response from the Home Office to this and we will see a way forward that will certainly delight many people in the health authorities too.