Alcohol Strategy: Role of Drinks Industry

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Tuesday 10th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, for promoting the debate this evening. I commence, too, by declaring an interest: as trustee of Action on Addiction and several other charities which are in the business of trying to help people who have suffered the consequences of alcohol abuse.

I shall not go through the usual litany of problems which arise from the continuing massive overconsumption of alcohol in this country and its widespread abuse. It is true that the level of drinking has declined marginally in recent times, but, compared to 15 or 20 years ago, it is still extraordinarily high and the price of alcohol in this country is still quite low. As the noble Baroness concedes, 1.2 million alcohol-related hospital admissions were recorded in 2010-11 alone. The level of binge-drinking among young people, particularly among 15 and 16 year-olds, is still very high compared with what we find in other European countries. My first question to the Minister is: when will the Government not only review advertising targeted particularly at the young but ask the drinks industry also to stop doing it, especially through increasing use of social media? Social media are heavily populated by the young these days and that is an area where the drinks industry feels that it can make the biggest impact. If we are truly to bring about a change in culture, it should come from the young, from targeting them positively and from not encouraging them to drink.

I congratulate the Government on the steps that they have taken to try to tackle the problem. The noble Baroness did not mention the Government’s announcement to tackle the issue of minimum pricing. I congratulate the Government on the bold steps that they have taken there. I know that they are consulting at the moment, but I hope that they will stick to their guns and not be persuaded by those who will come with counter-arguments to shift their policy.

I thank the Government for the changes which they have made to local licensing laws, on which we had some extensive debates last year. One of the factors which many of us believe lead to excessive drinking is our easy access to alcohol these days compared with 20 or 30 years ago. While the Government are working through the changes in licensing arrangements, I hope that they will continue to keep them under close review. I hope, too, that they will review the possibility of a change being made to the criteria used in granting licences locally to take into account the effects on public health of excessive drinking in particular areas and locations. They should use localism to benefit people who are suffering from some of the adverse consequences of abusive drinking in their areas.

It would be churlish on my part if I did not concede that some substantial changes have been made by the drinks industry in recent years. Drinkaware is making good headway in certain areas, but its communication with the wider public is in many respects fairly limited. The number of people who visit its website is fairly small by comparison with the millions of people communicated with, for example, by wide-scale Carlsberg adverts shown during preparations for the Olympics.

It is important that we do not disregard the position which the BMA has taken on Drinkaware and the joint initiative taken by the Government in the form of the Responsibility Deal. It felt inclined in the light of the way that conversations were going to withdraw from that. I hope that the Minister will say whether the Government are taking any steps to try to bring the medical profession back into partnership. The report produced 12 months ago by this House’s Science and Technology Select Committee on behaviour change raised very serious questions about the extent to which the Responsibility Deal could work.

I recognise that I am running out of time. I wanted to press the Minister on why there has been no movement on changing drink labelling to give coverage of the calorie levels and contents of alcoholic drinks. I have done a blog today, so if the Minister is kind enough, he can go away afterwards and read it, because the Government need to take action. Regardless of what is happening in Europe, we could move on that front. That would be a way of communicating on a mass scale with many drinkers.