Health: Alcohol Minimum Pricing

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My noble friend makes an extremely important point. We estimate that alcohol harm costs the NHS around £2.7 billion a year. Forty per cent of all accident and emergency admissions are in some way connected with alcohol—I think a higher percentage on Friday and Saturday nights—and 7 per cent of all hospital admissions are accounted for in some way by alcohol. This is a very serious problem: 8,500 people die from alcohol in the UK every year and there are over 1 million hospital admissions relating to alcohol.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords—

[Baroness Jolly]

My Lords—

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, now that the Minister and the Government have accepted that raising the price of alcohol is one of the ways in which we can minimise harm to those who are abusing alcohol, why have the Government’s recent proposals been so minimal? The cost of a can of lager will be increased, or minimised, to 38p under the new arrangements. This is hardly going to make any change whatsoever. We have to wait for the White Paper in the summer, but in the mean time why could a more positive approach to raising the cost of alcohol not have been taken and more fundamental changes made to the ever increasing easy access to alcohol, which is another problem that needs addressing?

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, we view the decision to ban below-cost sales of alcohol as very much a first step. We have announced a number of other measures, as the noble Lord may know, particularly a rise in the rate of alcohol duty by 2 per cent above inflation over each of the next four years, additional duty on high-strength beers and greater powers for local authorities over local licensing decisions. As I mentioned, there is no single solution to this problem, but we are looking at a number of additional measures.