Friday 21st October 2011 | 07:30

Caroline Lucas: Tackling the UK’s alcohol problem

Caroline Lucas tells PoliticsHome why the Government needs to restrict the heavy discounting of alcohol.

Alcohol has become such a common feature of everyday life in Britain that it’s easy to underestimate the profound impact it can have on individuals, families and communities.

But from talking with constituents at my surgeries, and with health professionals, the police, Brighton council officials and alcohol campaign groups, I know that the scale of the problems associated with high alcohol consumption is enormous.

Excessive drinking is often a key factor in cases of violent disorder, antisocial behaviour, domestic violence, child abuse, rape and sexual assault. Nationally, far more young people die as a result of alcohol than knife crime every year, yet it rarely hits the headlines in quite the same way.

The costs of alcoholism in terms of lost productivity at work, together with the bill for criminal justice and health, are a vast burden on the budgets of local authorities and on public services across the country. In Brighton and Hove alone, home to my constituency, we face an annual bill of £100 million for dealing with the impact of alcohol abuse.

But while some great work is being done at the local level to open up a debate on the problem – the Alcohol Programme Board’s Big Alcohol Debate which kicked off in Brighton earlier this month, for example – we are not seeing any real progress on an effective national alcohol strategy.

The Government’s approach to alcohol pricing, for instance, has been nothing short of complacent. The Coalition agreement in May 2010 pledged to "ban the selling of alcohol below cost price", yet when proposals for a minimum price were introduced by Conservative Home Office minister James Brokenshire in January 2011, it was so low as to have virtually no effect.

An investigation by the Guardian into the plans to bar the sale of alcohol at below the cost of duty and VAT found that this would only have stopped one cut-price drink deal out of thousands in a three month period. It also revealed that promotional offers such as a Tesco deal of 24 cans of Fosters for £10, or three 15-packs of Strongbow – 89 units of alcohol – for £20, would not have been affected at all.

The Motion I’ve put down this week directly targets this kind of ultra low priced alcohol in supermarkets and off licenses which fuels our binge drinking culture. Pricing measures to prevent irresponsible retailers from offering heavily discounted drink – often bought in bulk for ‘pre-loading’ before a night out – which would also alleviate the pressure on the licensed trade and help to protect local pubs from closure.

I’m also calling on the Treasury to close a loophole which allows super strength white cider – sometimes sold cheaper than bottled water – to dodge the stricter tax regime that applies to high strength beer. Professionals working with homeless and dependent street drinkers, as well as young ‘at-risk’ drinkers, have long expressed concern that white cider has a particularly damaging effect on the health and behaviour of the people they work with.

There is no reason why the new tax rates for high strength beers, which took effect from 1 October, should not apply to high strength ciders as well.

I believe that such measures, together with more control over licensing for local authorities, can help reduce the long term financial burden of dealing with serious alcohol abuse – and end the misery of those whose lives are blighted by it.

Caroline Lucas is a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Drug and Alcohol Harm Reduction.