Deregulation Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2015 Lords Chamber

I suggest to the Government that they have the chance to run a trial here in a limited area with willing victims who want to operate it. At the end of the day, we could end up with a win-win situation for everyone concerned. If that works well, it could then be extended over a wider front so that we could endeavour to meet the desire that so many organisations believe is desperately needed. I hope the Minister will respond as positively as he can and give answers to some of these points that have been made incorrectly in defence of the current position by other Ministers. Otherwise, I will come back again at Third Reading. I beg to move.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, for introducing this group of amendments so clearly. They are amendments to which I wanted to add my name because alcohol is putting an intolerable strain on the NHS. There is no getting away from that.

We have 1 million hospital admissions a year related to alcohol. We all know that there are peak times in A&E departments when alcohol problems swamp departments. It is not at all times of the day but we also know that other parts of the NHS are put under chronic and severe strain because they have to deal with alcohol-related diseases. In fact, there are about 60 different medical conditions where excessive consumption significantly causes morbidity and premature death in the UK.

I declare that I am president of the BMA. At a recent BMA meeting a breast surgeon came up and begged me—I do not exaggerate—to do something about excessive alcohol consumption because he has seen more and more middle-aged women who have chronically high levels of alcohol consumption and then develop obesity and breast cancer. He said it is reaching epidemic proportions and that he has seen a significant change over recent times.

I return to the topic of the amendments. As well as the strain on the NHS the cost to the whole country is significant. The cost to the NHS has been estimated to be almost £4 billion a year, which equates to about £120 a year per taxpayer. The overall cost to the country is nearer £26 billion a year, which is between fivefold and sixfold, so I have estimated that this is probably about £750 per taxpayer, because we do not have a really comprehensive and effective alcohol policy at the moment.

The ban on selling alcohol below cost price, which came into force last May, is not, as far as we have been able to see, significantly reducing drinkers’ mean annual consumption. It is not really surprising. It was calculated that mean annual consumption would decrease by less than 1% overall. Minimum unit pricing has been shown in different models to have an effect and it stops higher alcohol-content drink being sold disproportionately cheaply and you get a more balanced spread of the way drinks are purchased and taken. The relative underselling of cider against beer, where cider has a higher alcohol content, becomes balanced out and the high consumption of spirits in particular, which have a very high unit content, then becomes spread across the spectrum of price.

It has been suggested that minimum unit price would unfairly impact responsible drinkers. There does not seem to be any strong evidence for that at all, but it will impact on irresponsible drinkers. It has been estimated that a minimum unit price of 50p would have major benefits. For example, it has been estimated that there would be more than 97,000 fewer hospital admissions a year, more than 42,000 fewer crimes, nearly 30,000 fewer cases of unemployment and more than 442,000 fewer episodes of absenteeism from work, which is frequently an alcohol-related problem. As we all know, it tends to occur on the days after high days, holidays and weekends. The saving on healthcare costs alone has been estimated to be £1,591 million a year. That is a significant amount of healthcare funding that can then be diverted to meet the needs of others.

There has also been evidence that increasing the price of alcohol reduces the rate of alcohol-related harms including violence and crime, deaths from liver cirrhosis, other drug use, sexually transmitted infections and risky sexual behaviour, as well as drink-driving deaths.

The impact of drinking is not only on the individual, of course, but also on all those who are bereaved, such as children who lose parents at a premature age. It also affects those who are on the receiving end of abuse and of violence and high alcohol consumption is also associated with high rates of suicide.

As a doctor, I fail to see why any Government have not grasped what would seem to be a fairly straightforward solution to a major social problem by implementing minimum unit pricing so that responsible drinkers could buy their drinks as they do now but those who want to buy to binge—and who then end up in A&E incurring large costs or damaging others through their irresponsible behaviour—would be deterred from being able to do so. The chronic overconsumption we are seeing in today’s world would also be affected because if you make alcohol a bit too expensive you build in a deterrent to drinking too much.