Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what new action they propose to take to halt and reverse the upward trend in the number of English hospital admissions relating to alcohol consumption, and who will be responsible and accountable for the implementation of such actions.

The new UK Chief Medical Officers’ Low Risk Drinking Guidelines provide the public with the most up to date scientific information to help people make informed decisions about their own drinking. A copy of the guidelines is attached.

The Department and Public Health England (PHE) will be reviewing the advice on higher risk drinking, in light of the new guidelines, at a United Kingdom level through a consensus process in partnership with the Devolved Administrations.

PHE is using its One You campaign to motivate people to take steps to improve their health through tackling the main risk factors such as smoking, inactivity, obesity, and alcohol. One You provides a Drinks Tracker app to help drinkers identify risky behaviour and lower their alcohol consumption.

Local government has been given the responsibility to improve people’s health. This includes responsibility for tackling problem drinking and commissioning appropriate prevention and treatment services for their local population’s needs. Over the next five years, we will invest more than £16 billion in local government public health services.

NHS England’s NHS Five Year Forward View commits the National Health Service to support national action on alcohol. The National Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payments framework was set up in 2009-10 to encourage services providers to continually improve the quality of care provided to patients and to achieve transparency. To help deliver their commitment to reduce harmful alcohol consumption NHS England has published a CQUIN to incentivise interventions to reduce risky behaviours, and prevent ill health through alcohol and tobacco consumption. This has a number of components, including alcohol screening, brief advice and referral to specialist services.