NHS: New Alcohol Curbs for London?

Another of the British nations is set to lift the price of its cheapest alcohol. Welsh ministers have unveiled plans for an MUP – minimum unit price – in a bid to curb binge drinking and save lives. With Scotland trying to do the same thing recent history suggests it may not be long before England follows suit. So is London’s alcohol about to get more expensive?

The Real MUP

Minimum unit price laws lift the price per unit of alcohol, so that drinks with high-percentages of alcohol cannot be sold at very low prices.

That means your average glass of wine or beer in a pub won’t be affected as it is already sold well above any threshold price. An MUP’s impact on responsible consumers should be minimal.

Instead it targets excessive and harmful consumers who are more likely to buy bigger quantities of high-percentage alcohols at cheap prices. The intention is to cut alcohol-related diseases, deaths and crimes.

The UK already bans below-cost selling of alcohol so a drink cannot be sold for less than the tax paid on it. The problem is that the rates of alcohol duty vary for different drinks and don’t always reflect their alcohol content.

Research into the effects of an MUP by the British Medical Journal found that under current pricing laws, a 2-litre bottle of strong cider (15 units) had a duty of 95p but a lower percentage bottle of white wine (8.3 units) had a higher duty of £2.46. Introducing an MUP of 40p per unit would reflect the percentage, sending the cider tax soaring to £6 and lifting the wine tax to £3.30. The research found that the current UK ban on below-cost selling has “small effects on consumption and health harm” while an MUP of 40-50p would be likely to have a “40-50 times greater effect”.

Statistics suggest that London would be less affected by an MUP than anywhere else in England.

Since the mid-1990s, alcohol-related deaths have increased everywhere else in England while declining in London.

London’s nightlife has little to worry about because the impact is likely to be felt by off-licenses and supermarkets rather than pubs, restaurants and bars. But how likely is it that England will introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol, given that the Government has been vacillating on the subject for years?

Following Footsteps

English legislation has a habit of following Scottish and Welsh footsteps. Recent examples include presumed consent organ donation; Wales introduced this to great success in December 2015 and Scotland announced in June 2017 that it would do the same.

Four months later, Theresa May declared that England would shift to an opt-out organ donation system too. Then there’s the plastic bottle deposits bill: in September this year Scotland committed to placing a deposit fee on plastic bottles.

Wales soon announced it would do the same as early as 2018. Now Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, says he will consider following suit in England.

The examples keep on coming; England emulated Scotland’s harsher cyber abuse penalties in 2014, is still debating whether to copy Scotland’s lower drink-driving limit and is considering matching the new Scottish law against smacking children. So why does England often bring up the rear when it comes to UK laws?

One suggestion, as evidenced in the Brexit referendum, is that Scotland is more EU-minded than the rest of the UK and many of these Scottish laws have been in other EU states for years. Sweden started its plastic bottle deposit in 1994 and was followed by many others. Austria, Spain and Luxembourg had opt-out organ donation years before it moved westward, with France and Ireland recently adopting the same. Even the Scottish drink driving limit was poached from the EU.

England has considered an MUP before: the Government decided in 2012 to implement an MUP but backtracked a year later and banned below-cost pricing instead. The effect has been minimal and there’s fierce support for tried-and-tested MUPs from the police and doctors who have to deal with alcohol-induced problems.

The British Medical Association says the pressure for an MUP is building. “Alcohol-related deaths have risen significantly in the UK during the past decade with around one-in-five UK adults now drinking to harmful levels,” it says. “The association supports a minimum price of no less than 50p per unit of alcohol sold.”

If MUPs in Wales and Scotland – which has been the Scottish Whiskey Federation’s resistance to an MUP since 2012 – prove successful, England won’t be able to ignore the evidence or deny the benefits of an MUP to the public.

by Jo Davey

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