Alcohol Harm

Kenny MacAskill Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2020 Westminster Hall

[Kenny MacAskill (East Lothian) (SNP)]

I thank the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) for introducing this debate, and you the Chair for allowing it, Mr Paisley. There is a perennial and universal issue across the UK and Ireland. No nation or region is exempt. Policies may differ, but the challenges remain the same. I declare that I sit on the commission on alcohol harm. Presumably my past experience as Scottish Justice Secretary in invoking legislation on alcohol, including kicking off minimum unit pricing—as opposed to past indiscretions of which I am less proud—have allowed me some focus. We must consider how alcohol harm comes about.

The papers available to me as a result of sitting on the commission on alcohol harm have been revelatory to me, even as somebody who served for seven and a half years as Justice Secretary and has been aware of the harm across huge swathes of our society, as correctly pointed out by the hon. Member for Congleton. The testimony from children in particular—those who have grown up in families with alcohol-dependent parents and where other siblings have been affected by other issues—is quite distressing, to say the least. For that reason, we require a reaction.

I have a personal interest too. Bus passes are issued to people at a lower age in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK. I went to two funerals lately of friends with whom I grew up, neither of whom lived long enough to get their bus pass. Both of them succumbed to alcohol. Nobody sets out to succumb to alcohol and die as a result of it. In the case of those two close friends, it happened because they had underlying issues. They were lost souls and had problems, and indeed had suffered themselves. It was a tragedy, and they deserve our sympathy every bit as much as anybody else who dies from any other aspect. The issues remain universal, and how we tackle them. It is about affordability, availability, and advertising.

I am certain, through my experience of seven and a half years, that more education alone will not work. That was stated by someone in the alcohol industry when I first went into office. Someone said, “What we need is to educate people better.” That is utter nonsense. We have been doing that throughout my lifetime. Do we need to educate better? For sure we do. The idea that we will be able to tackle the problem in our society simply through better education or greater awareness is not capable of being sustained. Action needs to be taken. As the hon. Member for Congleton correctly said, that does not mean that one needs to be a prohibitionist. I most certainly am not, and I enjoy a drink along with my friends and indeed my family. Alcohol is an important part of our economy, and an important lubricant within wider social aspects. As hon. Members said in interventions, it will be affecting how our people deal with matters. It cannot simply be a matter of prohibition.

Affordability is key. Minimum unit pricing is important, and David Cameron supported it when I introduced it in Scotland. England and Wales should take it on board, and Wales, to its credit, is looking at that. Equally, it has to be borne in mind that minimum unit pricing was never meant to be a stand-alone policy; it was meant to tie in with other tax regimes, and that means other fiscal and tax charges. We need the proverbial belt and braces. Scotland cannot deliver all it wants through MUP without being able to control the excise duty, so there has to be action on that. While I support steps to protect the Scotch whisky industry from actions and levies imposed in the United States of America, I am disappointed that we have not seen a continuation of the increase to tackle it hard here.

However, this is about not just affordability but availability. I am always reminded of John Carnochan, the head of our violence reduction unit, who talked about alcohol problems in our peripheral housing schemes. He made the point that if he wanted a haircut, he went to the barber, and if he wanted new shoes, he went to a shoe shop, so why, if he wanted alcohol, could he go to virtually any shop? Within 500 metres of where I live, in both London and Edinburgh, people can go out of their front door to anything upward of 40 outlets that sell alcohol on or off-trade. The likelihood is that as a result of coronavirus, there may be a cull of the on-trade outlets, but the off-trade outlets will remain, and that is where the significant problem has grown. In my lifetime, off-sales have gone up massively and the on-sale trade has declined massively. That is an issue, because alcohol consumption is a learned pattern. People need others there who encourage them to moderate their drinking and make it a social pastime, as opposed to them perhaps sitting at home consuming to excess. That is why even in Scotland, action has to be taken to restrict availability. There are far too many off-sale outlets. We need to encourage licensing boards not to issue licences and, where there is over-provision, to ensure that that does not happen.

Equally, there is the question of advertising. For alcohol, it is becoming almost subliminal. The evidence coming through from young people giving testimony to the harms commissioner is clear: they view alcohol almost as another product, but it is not. We enjoy it and benefit from it, and our economy even requires it, but it is not another product—it is a licensed drug. Therefore, how we make it available and allow it to be advertised is fundamental. We are taking action as a society to ensure that we restrict smoking so that it is no longer the cool thing to do. We need to do likewise with alcohol, because the advertising at sporting events has most certainly had a detrimental impact.

I welcome the steps that the Minister has taken. I look forward to further action from her and the UK Government, but it is also fair to say that those in the devolved Administrations also have to take action, because we are on a journey. We cannot stay as we are. The harm is too great and further action is needed. To sum up, this cannot simply be about education; we need to tackle affordability, availability and advertising.