Chris Snowdon, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, was one of the guest speakers at MCA’s FD Leaders Club yesterday. He discussed the ongoing campaign by the anti-alcohol lobby to pressurise the Government into further regulation despite overwhelming evidence that consumption has been falling for years. He warned the licensed trade that while there are reasons to be cheerful in the Government’s attitude to alcohol, there is no room for complacency and minimum unit pricing is not the answer.
This month saw yet another survey showing that moderate alcohol intake is good for your health.
The study was published in the British Medical Journal and involved nearly two million people – including 280,000 teetotallers, including those who have never drunk alcohol and former drinkers. As usual this was not taken on by Public Health England, continuing a trend that has been going on for 40 years of an unshakeable institutional viewpoint that there is nothing good to say about alcohol.
Let’s look at the facts – alcohol consumption has been falling for years and we’re now drinking exactly the same as we were in 1980. We are below the EU average in terms of consumption and even in the days of so-called Binge Britain we were never that far ahead. If you compare the situation now to the pre- First World War situation, we are not even close to those levels.
When it comes to the current generation – and the one you would imagine would be of most interest when it comes to forecasting the future health of the nation – you can see that they are a remarkably clean living bunch. The 16-24-year-old bracket over the past decade has seen smoking halved, drug use halved, teenage conception halved and alcohol consumption halved. That could be down to being terrified by health advice at school, it could be technology and the wider information available on the internet, or it could be the Absolutely Fabulous theory – that they are so horrified by the hedonism of their parents’ generation.
But still the message from the anti-alcohol lobby remains the same.Quite simply it is the result of a neo-temperance crusade. The starting point of these people is to treat alcohol like tobacco and may of the tactics they use are straight out of the Big Tobacco playbook. That approach is now extending into sugar.
The licensed trade can justifiably feel like it is regularly clobbered by the health lobby, but actually they haven’t pushed it anywhere near as far as they would like to. There’s a whole raft of measures they would like to bring in. Minimum Unit Pricing is still stuck in limbo; we haven’t got the traffic light warnings on bottles; there hasn’t been a ban on alcohol advertising; they haven’t done much with licensing.
They are furious about losing the battle and they’re just waiting for a change in direction which will justify them asking for these things.
The licensed trade definitely can’t be complacent about this situation but there are reasons to be encouraged. The Government at the moment is not particularly interested in alcohol because consumption has been falling consistently and voluntary arrangements on a ground level appear to be working pretty well. They’re also obsessed with obesity so the Department of Health is entirely focussed on their quest to make food smaller and less tasty. They will press on with that - trying to take the sugar out of biscuits – until they finally realise it can never work and they will give up. But while that is their focus, alcohol has been relatively unaffected.
The problem is that presumably alcohol consumption will not keep falling forever. At some point it will rise again. If you think about the amount of noise we have had from the anti-alcohol lobby over the past decade, imagine the cacophony if consumption rises again.
The representatives of the temperance lobby are hand in glove with Public Health England. Ian Gilmour is from the Alcohol Health Alliance but he also co-chairs the Public Health England review of alcohol. You have people from anti-alcohol pressure groups who are intimately involved in these debates about the Government’s approach to alcohol so who can be surprised at the outcomes?
The chief medical officer’s decision to change the guidelines on alcohol intake involved a report from the Institute of Alcohol Studies – formerly the UK Temperance Alliance - before that the UK Alliance for the Suppression and the Trafficking of all Intoxicating Liquors. It’s unsurprising their studies never find a single positive thing to say about alcohol.
While the Government has a pretty consistent message on alcohol, pubs are more difficult. There certainly isn’t an anti-pub movement but if there had been a conspiracy ten years ago to close down as many pubs as possible, they couldn’t have come up with a better plan than has actually emerged spontaneously. Starting with the smoking ban, going through the National Living Wage, the late-night levies and the ridiculous restrictions on the late-night sector where someone losing their mobile phone in a bar is then chalked up as an alcohol-related crime for that venue and used against them in licensing hearings – the industry has had to weather a lot of storms.
Politicians have been very good in recent years at crying crocodile tears about pubs closing down, but they’ve never been as quick to do something practical to alleviate the pressures contributing towards those closures.
I’d like to end with a word about minimum pricing. I know in parts of the on-trade there has been the temptation to support this on the basis that it will close the gap and therefore help pubs. I would caution against that for two reasons – one being that as a general rule you shouldn’t get into bed with people who have historically been your enemy. It is true that the temperance lobby is going after supermarkets at the moment but that’s just because that’s where the majority of alcohol is being sold. If there is a resultant swing towards pubs then they will go after pubs again. In Canada, when minimum pricing was introduced, it very quickly became a minimum tax in bars as well.
In narrow short-term interest, there is also a doubt as to whether it will actually work. There’s a semi-famous economic anecdote that in poorer countries when you put the price of rice up, sales also rise. It seems counter-intuitive but when people are living off rice, meat and vegeatables and the cheapest component of that – namely rice – goes up, they spend more on that and where they make the cuts is in meat. If you substitute rice for off-trade alcohol and meat for on-trade you can see where this could go.
