Alcohol (Minimum Pricing)

Tracey Crouch Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd February 2011 Westminster Hall

[Tracey Crouch (Chatham and Aylesford) (Con)]

I am delighted to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. I congratulate the hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) on securing this important debate. As vice-chair of the all-party group on alcohol misuse, I believe that this is an incredibly important issue for all hon. Members, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to tackling the serious issue of alcohol abuse. The proposal to introduce a minimum price for alcohol is undoubtedly a small step in the right direction, although I say that having listened to the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Greg Mulholland), who says the opposite.

I want to say clearly and early in my contribution that minimum pricing is just one aspect of what must be done to deal with increasing dependency on alcohol. I look forward to future statements by the Government on their alcohol strategy. In my view, treatment and rehabilitation services in this country are poor, availability is limited and service is disjointed across agencies. Little is done to help individuals and families ripped apart by alcoholism. The availability of cheap alcohol has undoubtedly encouraged the kind of drinking and antisocial behaviour that blights town centres each weekend. A culture, which is exclusive in many respects to British streets, has emerged in which it is fashionable to drink more than one is capable of. As a consequence, ill health and antisocial behaviour have become common.

The cost to the NHS of alcohol-related harm resulting from that culture is alarming. The statistics are well known, but one indication of strain on the NHS can be seen in the proxy services dedicated to treating binge drinkers. An SOS bus patrols Medway towns on Friday and Saturday nights, providing services to inebriated revellers. I visited it recently, albeit early in the evening, as I did not particularly want to see the consequences of heavy drinking. The dedicated volunteers are amazing and divert pressure away from the blue-light services, keeping vulnerable and very drunk youngsters safe. I certainly intend to try to protect that service during these financially constrained times, but it is a sad indictment of our weekend drinking culture that it is needed in the first place.

On minimum pricing, evidence points to a link between cost and sales. The theory is, obviously, that as cost rises, demand will fall. That might be a basic economic mechanism, and in principle it should make minimum alcohol pricing an effective policy for driving down dangerous levels of alcohol consumption, but the decision to set the base at the low rate of duty plus VAT is clearly controversial, and it remains to be seen whether it will work.

I share the concerns expressed by colleagues and others that such a policy will do little to help our beleaguered public houses, which must now compete with supermarkets rather than each other. I was interested to hear the price statistics quoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths), but I do not believe that the proposal will help tackle long-term alcohol dependency. It will be a small step in the right direction, if its aim is solely to clamp down on aspects of binge drinking such as pre-loading, which other hon. Members have discussed and the sole motivation of which is keeping the costs of a night out to minimum. Most leave their homes already very drunk, which prompts the question why they are allowed to continue consuming alcohol in licensed premises having already drunk enough before they arrive. As others have pointed out in this debate and others, one of the good things about public houses is that responsible landlords tend to prevent overly drunk and disorderly behaviour by stepping in and refusing to serve those whom they believe have had enough to drink.

As my hon. Friend, drawing on his experience, has pointed out, minimum pricing will, in theory, abolish the deep discounting that encourages that kind of drinking, thus equalising the cost of a night out and driving down alcohol consumption. However, the low minimum price proposed will only stop the very worst cases of discounting, and it may play out differently in practice. Therefore, bolder proposals should still be considered, targeting specific drinks associated with binge drinking, such as strong lagers, white ciders and alcopops.

It is important that we in this Chamber give credit where it is due. I was pleased to learn that Heineken, which produces White Lightning, recently discontinued the product due to its binge-drinking connotations. It should be commended for acknowledging the need to reinforce its stance on responsible drinking.

We must consider the limited scope of the policy and the likelihood that it will make headway only with a certain type of drinker. There is a growing dependency culture, and it is often hidden behind the closed doors of houses throughout the country. They are difficult to identify and affluent enough to absorb any increase in price, especially something as low as duty plus VAT. However, just because the minimum price does not impact upon them directly, that does not make them any less of a concern or any less dependent on alcohol and at risk of serious health issues in years to come. Current research reinforces that concern, because wealthy districts dominate the top of hazardous-drinking league tables. Although minimum pricing will target the binge drinkers who do it on the cheap, it is clear that it will do little to tackle alcohol dependency as a whole.

I appreciate that the Government have to balance their strategy of introducing a policy that meets their stated aims of reducing dangerous levels of alcohol consumption while not penalising the vast majority who enjoy alcohol sensibly. The question is: does this minimum price do that?

The pricing of alcohol is only part of the problem. It must be introduced in conjunction with a review of the late-night licences available to establishments, stricter alcohol-control zones and a close examination of the quality of treatment and rehab offered to those with a high dependency.

[David Simpson]

Will the hon. Lady join me in congratulating the Scottish Health Minister, who introduced a price structure in relation to vodka last September? As has been mentioned, the minimum price used to be £7.97, but it is now £11.81 under the new structure, which also applies to some beers. We encourage all the regions, including the Northern Ireland Assembly, to do the same.

[Tracey Crouch]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I have read about the new proposals in Scotland, which are currently being debated. We should look at what is happening in Scotland. Indeed, we should have looked at what was happening there in relation to the 24-hour drinking culture before it was introduced here. The evidence that the police had gathered in Scotland should have been made available to the previous Government before they introduced the licensing extension.

In conclusion, we need to engage with the professional classes and young adults who regularly drink to hazardous levels, and target those establishments that prop up the binge-drinking culture through irresponsible sales and business practices. If we can in any way reduce the weekend strain on the NHS, the police and the local authorities that clear up the mess created by binge drinking, we can certainly hail this as a small step in the right direction. However, in order to reduce dependency on alcohol across the board and to stem the devastating effects that it has on the lives of individuals and families, let alone its financial cost to society, so much more needs to be done.