Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to (a) update the policy paper entitled Alcohol Strategy, published on 23 March 2012, CM 8336 and (b) commission a new alcohol strategy; and what recent assessment he has made into the potential merits of implementing minimum unit pricing.

There are no current plans to introduce a standalone alcohol strategy. We have an existing agenda on tackling harms from alcohol, including an ambitious programme to establish specialist Alcohol Care Teams in hospitals.

The Government published ‘From harm to hope: A 10-year drugs plan to cut crime and save lives’ on 6 December 2021. While the focus of the Strategy is drugs, commissioning and delivery of drug and alcohol treatment services are integrated in England. This means that implementation of the Strategy will also benefit people seeking alcohol treatment, through mechanisms such as new commissioning standards, plans to build back the workforce and new investment to rebuild local authority commissioned substance misuse treatment services in England.

We look forward to seeing the findings from the evaluations of impact of minimum unit pricing in Scotland and Wales. We will consider those findings in detail once available.