Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of changes in the rates of (a) alcohol-related crime and (b) binge drinking since the introduction of the Licensing Act 2003.

It is difficult to draw causality between the Licensing Act 2003 and changing behaviours. The Licensing Act 2003 came into force in November 2005. Data on offences which are ‘alcohol related’ are drawn from the Crime Survey of England and Wales, which asks victims of violent incidents whether they perceived the offender to be under the influence of alcohol at the time of the offence. By this measure, the number of violent incidents considered to be‘alcohol related’ has fallen from around 1.02 million incidents in 2005/06, to around 0.88 million incidents in 2012/13 (a fall of 14%).

The definition of binge drinking used by the NHS is drinking more than double the lower risk guidelines for alcohol in one session – more than 8 units for men and 6 units for women. The Opinions and Lifestyle survey, published by the Office of National Statistics provides our best measure for this. The data shows that in 2005, 23% of men and 15% of women drank over twice the lower risk guidelines on at least one day in the week before interview. This fell to 19 % of men and 11 % of women in 2012.