Health: Alcohol Minimum Pricing

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, as ever, the noble Lord is absolutely right. Overall consumption of alcohol is going down, but we are seeing very alarming rates of consumption among certain groups of young people. As Sir Ian Gilmore has pointed out, liver disease is appearing among the young, which is extremely worrying. The Government are determined to grasp this issue. Public health policy generally is co-ordinated by a public health Cabinet sub-committee. It will work on an alcohol strategy, which we will publish in the summer in the wake of our White Paper on public health. There is no single solution to this problem. The issue of proxy purchases, which for alcohol, I believe, is already an offence, is difficult to police and enforce. However, the noble Lord is right that we need to focus on it in our strategy.

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes]

My Lords, the original questioner mentioned public health in general, but is the Minister aware that alcohol is a cause of great disturbance in accident and emergency departments in all hospitals, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, when ordinary people who go in with injuries are subjected to very unpleasant treatment by those who are brought in following an alcohol-related incident?

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend makes an extremely important point. We estimate that alcohol harm costs the NHS around £2.7 billion a year. Forty per cent of all accident and emergency admissions are in some way connected with alcohol—I think a higher percentage on Friday and Saturday nights—and 7 per cent of all hospital admissions are accounted for in some way by alcohol. This is a very serious problem: 8,500 people die from alcohol in the UK every year and there are over 1 million hospital admissions relating to alcohol.