Alcohol Harm

Jonathan Ashworth Excerpts

Thursday 2nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Buck. I congratulate everyone who has contributed to a well-informed and powerful debate. I pay particular tribute to the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who opened the debate with a comprehensive overview of the issues related to alcohol harm. I cannot do her speech justice—she was superb—but a couple of points struck me. Her point about attacks on emergency services workers was well made. I do not know whether she is aware, but there is currently a campaign to make such attacks a specific criminal offence, which I would support. I believe that other nations in the UK currently have, or are looking at, such measures. Perhaps the Minister would reflect on that. It was a superb speech, and I congratulate the hon. Lady on the way she made her remarks.

Other right hon. and hon. Members also gave impressive speeches. I pay particular tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) for his personal speech about working with children with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, including his own story about his adopted children. The detail he went into shows how deeply he has thought about it. He will campaign on alcohol harm for the weeks, months and years ahead.

I hope that through the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central and of other hon. Members, such as my hon. Friends the Members for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) and for St Helens South and Whiston (Marie Rimmer), who raised similar issues, we can see a change of public policy on such matters. I hope that the Minister will respond to some of what has been said today. If she cannot give us reassurance today, perhaps she will take the subject away, put it through the various policy-making machines behind the scenes in Government and get back to us with some proposals, because the points that have been made today, in particular by my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central, were very powerful.

The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson) brought us the Scottish perspective. I sensed that she might be suggesting or hinting that my colleagues in the Scottish Labour party are not entirely supportive of some of the policies that the Scottish Government are pursuing. Her argument, however, was well considered. As Labour’s shadow Health Secretary in Westminster, I will look into what she was talking about. I enjoy political argument as much as anyone else, but we must learn from best practice, even if it comes from our political rivals.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) delivered an incredible, powerful and staggering speech, for which I pay full tribute to him. The way in which he put his personal experiences on the record was incredibly courageous. For most of my speech I will focus on the children of alcoholics, but at the outset I want to say that his bravery and his work for the APPG inspired me to tell my story as well, which I did over Christmas. I will go into that in more detail. My right hon. Friend made a fantastic contribution—I think your father would be proud today. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]

I will now run through some of the figures—they have been rehearsed already, so I will not go into great detail. We know that the effects of alcohol have a huge impact on society and a huge financial cost, whatever the figure—some have suggested £21 billion, while others say it could be as high as £50 billion. The cost to our society is not only to our health, to the emergency services and through crime and antisocial behaviour; there is also the drag on our economy and economic growth, because of the drag on workplace productivity.

Alcohol abuse and harm is the third biggest health problem after smoking and obesity. Ultimately, it can have devastating consequences. About 307,000 admissions are attributed to alcohol and 65% of those are male. It is estimated that about 35% of all A&E attendances at peak times at weekends are alcohol-related. The number of hospital admissions with a primary diagnosis for alcohol-related diseases has increased about 100% in the past 13 years. Alcoholic liver disease is the most common cause of death, according to recent statistics. The number of deaths related to alcohol has fallen since a peak in 2008, but it remains considerably higher than it was in the mid-1990s. I therefore join the call that others have made for the Government to come forward with a renewed alcohol strategy. I hope that the Minister will tell us whether that is in the offing.

In recent weeks in my own Leicester constituency I have had the privilege of seeing specialist GP services supporting people with alcohol and other dependency issues, and to visit and learn about the Anchor Centre, which is dedicated to supporting people with alcohol problems. However, they tell me that they are worried about the future commissioning of those services, because decisions are made locally and they might not be able to be made in future because of tight budgets. Will the Minister therefore assure us that adequate resources will be put in place to ensure that such specialised alcohol treatment services are at least maintained, or even built on in future? We also heard about the Scottish experience of minimum unit pricing, so will the Minister update us on the Government’s position on that at the moment?

My right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill made a powerful point about football team posters in people’s bedrooms—people obviously want a poster of the Leicester City side, although perhaps not this season, but they might have done last season. His argument was about marketing, and we ought to reflect on that. The previous Prime Minister was prepared to take radical action on the marketing and advertising of sugary foods. If we are to believe the rumours in the newspapers—I do not always believe them—this Prime Minister has crossed all of that out of the obesity strategy. I am interested to know what the Government’s position is on the advertising and marketing of alcohol, particularly as it affects an audience of children. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us a little about that.

I said that I wanted to focus on the children of alcoholics. As the shadow Secretary of State, I have chosen to speak in today’s debate, although the usual practice is for another member of the team to speak, because I, too, am the child of an alcoholic. My parents divorced when I was about seven or eight years old. To be frank and candid, they divorced because of the strain that my father’s alcoholism placed on the marriage. I am an only child and I lived during the week with my mum and at weekends with my dad. My dad would spend the whole weekend drunk. In fact, from the age of eight I was in effect the carer at the weekend. It was typical for my dad to pick me up from school, but literally to fall over because he was so drunk. This was before the days of mobile phones, and I recall going to a phone box to call a taxi to take us home. The walk was not far, to be fair, but he could not walk up the street and I was a child.

On a Friday I would go back to my dad’s and open the fridge, as people do when they get home from school and want some yoghurt, chocolate biscuits or whatever, only to find it completely empty apart from the huge bottles of white wine—four or five 1.5-litre bottles lined up; the supplies for the weekend. My job as a 10, 11, 12 and 13-year-old was to go down to the shops to get the food in for the weekend and to sort things out. There were loads of such occasions and similar stories. My dad was not bothered about Christmas or with having a Christmas tree, so I would have to go to the shop to get some decorations to make the house look a bit Christmassy, as my friends’ houses were.

On another occasion, my dad played in goal at a works football match—I do not know why, because he was quite short, like me, so not a natural goalkeeper. I was about eight or nine and quite excited to be watching a football game, thinking I was going to a stadium, which it was not—it was an astroturf in Salford. It was the first time I had been to a football game and I was quite excited to watch my dad. I remember vividly his mates in the crowd shouting, “Jon Ash is in goal. All you have to do is throw a can of Stella in that direction, and he will go for that rather than the ball.” That was a joke, just workplace laughing, but I remember thinking, “That’s my dad.”

Dealing with my dad’s alcoholism coloured my upbringing and my life. As I was sitting here listening to my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill, I remember all those feelings that he was talking about: the shame, the embarrassment, particularly as a teenager, and the anger. But I always loved my dad, and he always loved me. We were lucky; he was never violent or abusive. Millions of children—or perhaps hundreds of thousands—are not in that lucky situation.

To be frank, it was only when my right hon. Friend and other Members started speaking out about this matter that I began to realise that I was not unusual, that I was not alone and that other children were going through this. When he started publishing his reports and doing his newspaper articles, I began to look into the subject, too. That was when I learned that 2.6 million children—perhaps more, according to some estimates—are in these circumstances.

I attended this debate because I wanted to speak out, as my right hon. Friend has, and ask the Government to consider putting in place a strategy for children of alcoholics as well as an alcohol strategy. Like him, when I spoke out in the media over Christmas—entirely by accident, by the way; I was asked a question and sort of blurted it out—I was inundated by people getting in touch with similar stories and saying that they remembered leaving their parent in the morning to go to school, never knowing whether they would be the same person when they got home that night. People have also told me that they spent their childhood ensuring that they did not say something off-hand and just wanting to disappear into the background, because their parent had not only an alcohol problem but a problem with violence, and anything that they said or did might cause their parent to turn because of alcohol.

When we read all those stories and study the research, it is clear that something has to be done. My right hon. Friend used a brilliant phrase. He said that children of alcoholics sit at a junction, where it is not obvious which public service should step in to support them, and too often they fall between the cracks. Is it the school’s responsibility? Is it the local GP’s responsibility? Is it the responsibility of children’s social services? That is why I agree that we need a national strategy, and I ask the Minister to consider including in that strategy a statutory duty on local authorities to put in place local strategies, both to deal with alcoholism and to support children of alcoholics.

The arguments that have been made about collecting data are so important. We have heard that an estimated 2.5 million children are affected, but we are not entirely sure—some suggest it is 3.5 million—so please will the Government look at putting in place a way of collecting statistics so that we know the scale of the problem across the country?

I do not want to be partisan—this is not the place for that—but in a lot of communities across the country school nurses are being cut back. It strikes me that if we want to put in place an effective strategy to help children of alcoholics, school nurses would be a good place to start. I appreciate that such services are now commissioned locally, but will the Minister consider whether the Government can offer any more support to our school nurse and community health visitor networks? I also entirely endorse the comments that were made about labelling and support for mothers in pregnancy.

I am perhaps going off my portfolio as the shadow Health Secretary, but when the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned the high density of shops and so on in more deprived areas, I wondered whether a community’s health needs should be taken into account in local authorities’ licensing decisions. Perhaps the Minister could reflect on that, although I appreciate that she is not a local government Minister.

My biggest regret in life is that my dad moved away to Thailand when he was about 59. He literally said to me one day, at Christmas, “I’m going to Thailand.” I said, “What?” He said, “I’m going.” I did not believe him, but he went, and that was that. He just went. Six months later, I got married. He promised me that he would come to the wedding. The day before, he phoned me and said he was not coming. I was so angry I could hardly speak to him. I wanted him to meet my new wife. To be fair, he had met her once, very briefly, but I wanted him to meet the new family. I was so angry that I could not talk to him, as you would expect. A few months later, he was dead. I had to go to Thailand to get the body and deal with the funeral. The friends he had made over there told me he was drinking a bottle of whisky a day. They told me he could not come to the wedding because he did not want to embarrass me. We were from a working-class family in Salford. I had gone to university and become a politician, and posh people would be at the wedding, and he felt that he would embarrass me by being there. I will always regret that.

I am the shadow Health Secretary, so I will do a lot of criticising the Tories, because that is my job, but I say to the Minister that I will work with the Government on a cross-party basis to put in place a proper strategy for supporting children of alcoholics because, quite simply, 2 million children are suffering. Let us send them a message that they should no longer suffer in silence.