Government Alcohol Strategy 2012

Chris Philp Excerpts

Wednesday 18th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I start by thanking the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden) for securing the debate and for his thoroughly prepared, thoughtful and considered remarks. In the past, he has spoken about his personal experience of this topic, so I thank him for bringing it to the attention of the Government and, through these proceedings, to the attention of the House.

The hon. Member made reference to the 2012 alcohol strategy, which sought to reduce the harms caused by excessive drinking without disproportionately affecting moderate drinkers. It is important to say that, although not all the measures set out in the strategy were introduced, many have been, including creating more powers to deal with problem premises; doubling the fine for persistent under-age sales; strengthening the mandatory licensing conditions; tightening the law on irresponsible promotions; enabling local councils to collect a late-night levy to contribute to the cost of policing; and introducing new powers to tackle alcohol-related issues, including closure and dispersal powers. All those were in the 2012 strategy, which the hon. welcomed, and they were delivered.

Some measures have not been taken forward, and the hon. Member mentioned some of those. One is minimum unit pricing for alcohol in England, where there was a feeling that the evidence base was not sufficiently strong. Minimum unit pricing was introduced elsewhere, including in Scotland. A report will shortly be published that assesses the impact of the minimum unit price for alcohol in Scotland, and we will study it extremely carefully to find out what lessons can be learned. If there is clear evidence on the effectiveness of minimum unit pricing in Scotland, we stand ready to respond to it. We are open-minded on the question, but we do want to see the evidence.

It is worth setting out some of the facts and figures around alcohol-related problems, because the picture is perhaps not as unrelentingly bleak as may have been suggested. In terms of violent criminality and incidents relating to alcohol, back in 2009-10 the crime survey for England and Wales said there were just over 1 million alcohol-related violent incidents. By 2019-20—just before covid—that number had fallen to 525,000—it had dropped by roughly half from 2009-10 to 2019-20.

The percentage of adults consuming alcohol within the last week stood at 64% in 2009; by 2019 that number had dropped to 54%, so there was a 10 percentage point reduction, from 64% to 54%. Binge drinking—defined as drinking at least twice the recommended limit on a given day—stood at 20% in 2009, which is quite a high proportion, but by 2014 it had dropped to 15%. The proportion of under-18s consuming alcohol and suffering alcohol-related harm has also decreased significantly in the last 20 years. All those things are worth putting on record.

The Office for National Statistics publishes numbers for alcohol-specific deaths. There was a slight decrease from 2008 to 2012, but the numbers were fairly stable; they were pretty much constant through to about 2019. There was then an increase in 2020 and 2021—just in those last two years, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton mentioned—and that is of concern. However, there is a feeling—perhaps more work needs to be done on this—that that was connected with increased alcohol consumption during the covid lockdown by people who were already at risk. We probably need to look at that more carefully. I am looking at the graph now, which is available on the ONS website, and it is striking that the mortality rates are flat over the last eight or nine years until the last two years, when they go up considerably.

I will mention one or two other important initiatives. One relates to the criminal justice system; sadly, having problems with alcohol is one of the things that leads to offending. It is not the principal driver of offending, but it is one of the drivers. Changes brought in recently—a year or two ago—introduced alcohol monitoring and abstinence licence conditions for prison leavers. They became effective just a year or two ago, and since November 2021 over 900 such conditions have been imposed.

Community sentence alcohol abstinence monitoring requirements ban offenders from drinking alcohol for up to 120 days, with tags used to monitor compliance. Over 5,000 orders have been imposed, and offenders have complied with the tag 97% of the time. Those licence conditions and abstinence monitoring requirements are quite significant and are clearly having a positive effect, and we can do more in that area.

The other important area the hon. Member mentioned was treatment, and he rightly made quite a few remarks about it. As he said, the drug strategy was published in December 2021, and it was backed by record funding. The focus of that strategy was on drugs, but the commissioning and delivery of drug and alcohol treatment services are integrated in England. In practical terms, that means that the implementation of the drug strategy and, critically, the funding that goes into treatment will also benefit people seeking alcohol treatment through mechanisms such as the new commissioning standards, the plan to build back the workforce—which the hon. Member also mentioned—and new investment to rebuild local authority-commissioned substance misuse treatment services in England. As I said, those are integrated, so they cover alcohol as well as drugs.

This current year—2022-23—we have made £86 million of funding available to local authorities to invest in treatment and recovery services, with a further £10 million to increase the availability of in-patient detox beds, to help those requiring medically assisted withdrawal. In addition, as part of the NHS long-term plan, we are investing £27 million of national funding in an ambitious programme to establish specialist alcohol care teams in the 25% of hospitals with the highest rates of alcohol harm and socioeconomic deprivation. We think that those fully optimised alcohol care teams can significantly reduce accident and emergency attendances, bed days, readmissions and ambulance call-outs. It is estimated that that NHS programme will prevent 50,000 hospital admissions over five years. As the hon. Member alluded to, there has been a significantly increased focus on treatment in general over the last couple of years.

I am concerned that we should do even more to get people with alcohol problems into treatment, especially where that gets them into criminal offending. In that regard, the three kinds of medical challenges that often present are drug addiction, alcohol addiction and mental health problems. Estimates vary, but somewhere in the region of 50% of offenders, or possibly more, have one or more of those challenges. However, only about 2% or 3% of sentences, or maybe less, contain community treatment requirements, which might be a drug treatment requirement, an alcohol treatment requirement or a mental health treatment requirement. There is a huge opportunity to work with the Crown Prosecution Service, the probation service, which prepares pre-sentence reports, and the judiciary to get a lot more people referred into mental health, drug or alcohol treatment as an alternative.

[Dan Carden]

I am grateful to the Minister for his response. He has covered every part of government and society, from the health service to criminal justice. I think alcohol takes up around half of all police time. What I am asking for is a strategy and an independent review. The Government have taken their eye off the ball over the last 12 years. They published the strategy, but it was never fully implemented. What we need is something that looks across Government at alcohol, in the way Dame Carol was able to do with illicit drugs. Our constituents know that this is a problem up and down the country. It costs society tens of billions of pounds, and the money that the alcohol industry pays in taxes does not cover the cost of alcohol harm.

[Chris Philp]

I am not going to make a commitment in this debate to initiate a review, for reasons that the hon. Member will understand, but I will give the issue some consideration and careful thought since he raised it.

In concluding, I reiterate that there has been a significant increase in investment in drug and alcohol treatment in the last one or two years. We have the new alcohol abstinence monitoring provisions in place, and we have seen the consumption of alcohol decline. We have also seen the number of alcohol-related violent incidents halve over the last 10 years or so, and much of the 2012 strategy has been implemented, so there is a lot to be pleased about. I will give some thought to the suggestion the hon. Member made, and I will of course happy to work with him going forward, given his obvious expertise and interest in this area.

Question put and agreed to.