Alcohol Duty Bands

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My noble friend is right that the Government’s preferred approach has been to reform alcohol duties and align them all based on the strength of alcohol. As I have said to other noble Lords, that is an approach that has public health at its heart.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, alcohol has become 72% more affordable than it was 35 years ago. Increasing alcohol duties in line with inflation, as was planned last October but cancelled last December, would bring in approximately £1.4 billion annually. Would this not help to pay for the costs to the NHS of alcohol-related harm, and for people such as the nurses who have to treat people with alcohol-related issues, including the many victims of alcohol-related crime?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, one of the big changes that we are making to alcohol duties is to ensure that higher-strength alcohol is taxed at a higher rate. This puts the points that the noble Lord makes at the heart of our approach. The normal process is to review alcohol duties on a yearly basis and take a decision in the round, and that will continue.

Health: Duties on Food and Drink

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Monday 6th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

We have made the changes in the juice rules that I mentioned and have had a number of representations, including perhaps from the noble Baroness, about white cider in the context of the Budget. I would add only that the UK cider industry is an important part of the rural economy and uses almost half the apples produced in this country.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, the Sheffield Alcohol Research Group has suggested that a 50p minimum unit pricing for alcohol, together with the duty escalator, could prevent around 700 deaths a year from alcohol-related causes. Would it not therefore be in the interests of the country, the NHS and the Treasury to introduce such policies?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

We have already banned sales in England and Wales below duty and VAT, but the minimum unit pricing introduced in Scotland is subject to an appeal in the Scottish courts. While that is continuing, the introduction of unit pricing in England and Wales has to remain under review.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard (LD Ind)]

My Lords, when I was involved in preparing the proposed Liberal Democrat responses to the gracious Speech in previous years that preceded a general election, it was often easy to describe it as being only half a Queen’s Speech. It was clear in those years that the parliamentary programme was expected to last only half a Session and that even quite a few of the proposed Bills were never likely to reach the statute book. The uncertainty over the timing of a general election did not make for good planning of the legislative timetable. I believe that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act should help the legislative process in future.

I was, however, disappointed to hear last week the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, describe the Fixed-term Parliaments Act as gerrymandering. The principle of fixed-term Parliaments has previously been accepted by the Labour Party, and should it form a Government again I expect the principle to be retained. There are good reasons for keeping the term at five years, which I would like to explain.

The most controversial issues with which I have been involved during the course of this Parliament relate to parliamentary boundary reviews and electoral registration. Widespread concern was expressed during the many lengthy debates that we had on those issues about the millions missing from the electoral register—perhaps as many as 6 million in this country—who are effectively denied the right to vote because they are not on the electoral register. This caused major problems in our debates when it came to deciding how to redraw constituency boundaries in order to make them more equal in terms of the number of voters in each seat.

It is understandable that these issues will not be addressed again in this Parliament, but we must all learn lessons from the arguments that we had previously if we are properly and fairly to address those issues in future, as we must after next May’s general election. Therefore, a proposal that I would make to help the process of redrawing constituency boundaries would be to combine the electoral registration process and the census when it takes place every 10 years. The effort and the expense put into conducting the census would be more justified if the data were also used in that year to help compile the electoral register. Of course, many other things should also be done to improve both the completeness and the accuracy of the electoral register each and every year. The annual canvass, in my view, will remain very important; but if we have the most accurate and complete electoral register every 10 years, we should conduct the constituency boundary reviews every 10 years as well, based on those data.

It is my belief that one of the first things that Members of Parliament will want to change after the next general election is the idea of a review of parliamentary boundaries every five years. The current legislation means that no MP, when elected, can be sure that their constituency will still exist at the following general election. Conducting boundary reviews every 10 years and every two Parliaments would make much more sense, but this will also require maintaining the fixed-term Parliament principle at every five years.

I believe that all those currently involved in drawing up their parties’ proposals for the next general election and a future Parliament should look at this idea and help to try to avoid the acrimony that we saw over the issues of parliamentary boundary reviews and electoral registration earlier in this Parliament. Draft legislation that can be properly examined in advance of its introduction to both Houses would help to avoid many of the problems we saw when debating these issues and help us provide for fairer and better outcomes in the future.