Alcohol Harm

Debate between Fiona Bruce and Kelvin Hopkins

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered tackling alcohol harm.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Flello, and to speak on the importance of tackling alcohol harm. It is a measure of the concern across the House that there are not one but three all-party parliamentary groups concerned with alcohol harm. It was the three chairs of those APPGs who applied for the debate: myself, as chair of the APPG on alcohol harm; the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne), who chairs the APPG on children of alcoholics; and the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson), who chairs the APPG on foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I will leave it to those Members to speak of the harm caused to children and unborn children through alcohol consumption, but as vice-chair of those two APPGs, may I commend and say how much I fully support their work?

We are all here to express, with one voice, our gravest concerns about the harm caused by alcohol consumption to individuals, their families and wider society. As we will hear, one thing is clear: the Government’s alcohol strategy, which is now five years old, must be reviewed. Urgent and much more robust Government action is needed to address the devastating damage caused by alcohol harm. It all too often harms innocent bystanders, whether those injured in road traffic accidents, children and partners caught up in domestic violence, patients needing treatments for serious illnesses—they have to wait because precious NHS resources are being used to tackle the issue—and taxpayers, through the tax bill we all pay.

This is not about saying that people should not drink—like many other hon. Members here, I enjoy alcohol—but about promoting responsible drinking and the need to change our country’s drinking culture and our relationship with alcohol. It is also very much about social justice, because the poorest and most vulnerable disproportionately suffer the most amount of alcohol harm. The Government need to wake up to the urgency of their need to take a lead on this. Urgent words were expressed in the 2012 alcohol strategy, but appropriately urgent action has sadly not followed.

The Minister will doubtless point to a few improvements in recent years, and they are welcome, although with major reservations. For example, although the number of adolescents who drink has gone down, the volume of alcohol that they are drinking has not. That sadly indicates that although fewer adolescents might be drinking, those who do are drinking to excess. A 2012 YouGov report revealed that 41% of 18 to 24-year-olds are drinking at harmful levels. We also hear reports of women of a certain age—around my age—drinking too much, and even of much older people struggling with alcoholism as they try to cope with loneliness and isolation.

The fact is that there is a massive problem in this country resulting from alcohol consumption, both excessive and just above Government guidelines. To evidence that, I refer to the Public Health England report, published in December 2016 at the specific request of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, entitled, “The Public Health Burden of Alcohol and the Effectiveness and Cost-Effectiveness of Alcohol Control Policies: An evidence review”. It cannot be dismissed as just a thought piece; it has more than 200 pages of evidence-based information and conclusions, has been robustly peer reviewed no less than three times and was produced by Public Health England—an executive agency of the Department of Health that

“exists to protect and improve the nation’s health and wellbeing”.

The report paints a bleak picture. Paragraph 1 states that

“there are currently over 10 million people drinking at levels which increase their risk of health harm. Among those aged 15 to 49 in England, alcohol is now the leading risk factor for ill-health, early mortality and disability and the fifth leading risk factor for ill health across all age groups.”

It continues:

“In recent years, many indicators of alcohol-related harm have increased. There are now over 1 million hospital admissions relating to alcohol each year, half of which occur in the lowest three socioeconomic deciles. Alcohol-related mortality has also increased, particularly for liver disease which has seen a 400% increase since 1970, and this trend is in stark contrast to much of Western Europe. In England, the average age at death of those dying from an alcohol-specific cause is 54.3 years… More working years of life are lost in England as a result of alcohol-related deaths than from cancer of”—

there are many of these—

“the lung, bronchus, trachea, colon, rectum, brain, pancreas, skin, ovary, kidney, stomach, bladder and prostate, combined.”

I deliberately read that out as I wanted it recorded in Hansard.

The Institute of Alcohol Studies quotes Public Health England, stating that

“167,000 years of working life were lost to alcohol in 2015”.

That is because alcohol is more likely to kill people during their working lives than many other causes of death—that is, it causes premature deaths. In fact, there were 23,000 alcohol-related deaths in England each year. Alcohol accounts for 10% of the UK’s burden of disease and death, and in the past three decades there has been a threefold rise in alcohol-related deaths.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on everything that she has said. In the mid-1970s, a Home Office report showed that Britain had the second lowest level of alcohol consumption in the whole of Europe; we have risen rapidly while the rest of Europe has been coming down. They have learned from their previous mistakes, and we ought to as well.

[Fiona Bruce]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which reflects his long commitment to tackling the issue. I also thank him for his involvement with our all-party parliamentary group.

The NHS incurs an estimated £3.5 billion a year in alcohol harm costs. Treating liver disease alone now costs £2.1bn a year, for example. However, that is just the financial cost, which I rather suspect is an underestimate. Many other costs are incurred as a result. The all-party parliamentary group on alcohol harm recently produced a report called “The Frontline Battle”, which described the impact on the emergency services—the police, fire services, A&E departments, doctors and so on—of treating or helping people who are inebriated or suffering as a result of excessive alcohol consumption. It found that, on a Saturday night, 70% to 80% of all A&E attendances are alcohol-related.