Alcohol Strategy

Kelvin Hopkins Excerpts

Friday 23rd March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Sadly, many towns and cities across the country have felt the impact of Labour’s Licensing Act in the same way as Bournemouth. We will enable local authorities to take into account the density of licensed premises in a town centre when they are determining applications. One of the problems in Maidenhead in my constituency was that application after application was given permission. Many residents felt that things started to go wrong through that. All too often, the sort of bars to which problem drinkers went were in our town centres.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

As a former chair of the all-party group on alcohol misuse, I think that I was the first Member to table an early-day motion raising the problem of cheap alcohol and its impact on our society. However, the Home Secretary has not mentioned the more than 6,000 babies every year who are born damaged by alcohol consumed by their mothers during pregnancy. In America, every drink canister and bottle has a label warning pregnant women about drinking. Will the Home Secretary take that into account in her consultation?

[Mrs May]

We do indeed. The hon. Gentleman will find that we refer in the alcohol strategy to the issue of pregnant women drinking and the impact on the foetus and therefore on the babies when they are born. The drinks industry—for example, Diageo—has taken several initiatives on research and other aspects of the problem. The hon. Gentleman and I do not often agree on issues, but I am very happy to agree with him on the importance of the matter that he raised.