Alcohol Labelling Bill [HL]

My Lords, first I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, for his persistence in highlighting foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and for keeping his campaign going over the years, and for introducing his excellent Bill. Let me say now that had it been possible to add a second name to a Private Member’s Bill, I would have done that, so convinced am I that this is the right way forward. I am sure that the Minister will tell us more about the voluntary labelling of alcohol that is already taking place. Scottish & Newcastle is the leader, and all credit should go to the company for doing it. However, a voluntary labelling system, however admirable, is not enough. The Minister for Public Health in another place is on record as saying that warning labels for alcohol will be voluntary initially, but if the drinks industry ignores them, the Government will considering legislating. That is absurd. We are asking for labelling that is not punitive but informative. The industry should not be allowed to resist precisely because so many women are ignorant of the possible effects of alcohol on the unborn child, and the duty to inform on the bottle or the can should be comparable with what is done on cigarette and tobacco packets. This is even more important because the level of ignorance in the general population is quite high. My children are what might be described as quite aged now, at 27 and 25. When I was pregnant—which sometimes I think was not all that long ago—no one thought that drinking moderate amounts of alcohol was dangerous for the foetus or the very young baby. Indeed, in my day experienced maternity nurses and health visitors advised drinking a glass of wine before the last feed at night to help the new baby sleep. I do not think they would be saying that now, and that was not so very long ago. Our knowledge of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder has increased hugely, but public awareness has not kept pace. Most young women, especially the less well educated and the very young, do not know about the risks at all. They have not heard forensic psychiatrists talking about the prevalence of foetal alcohol spectrum disorders among young people in prison, and they are not by any means all identified because of a continuing lack of clinical awareness of these conditions in many cases. Only last night I was with Professor Sue Bailey, the Registrar of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who is a child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist at the University of Central Lancashire. She said that signs of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder are frequently missed within prisons, even by those who know about it. Young women who do not know about it have not heard prison governors talk about how prisons are becoming the last closed institutions in this country, and that they suspect that in among the sheer misery of the huge incidence of mental illness among prisoners, there is also a fair prevalence of undiagnosed learning disability within which foetal alcohol syndrome may well figure to a considerable extent. Unlike the case with cigarettes, the public does not know about the risks of alcohol in pregnancy. I am not of the view that we should forbid drinking alcohol in pregnancy or that we should regard the pregnant woman who drinks alcohol as a criminal because I do not want even more of a nanny state than we already have. However, I would like women to know about the risks so that they can decide whether to accept them. Few pregnant women are really willing to add consciously to the risk of having a child with a problem such as foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. All women fear the possibility of having a child with some kind of disability, much as those disabled children are usually dearly loved after their birth. But we all want the best for our children and if not drinking during pregnancy means lowering the risk of some kinds of birth and developmental defects, that is something most women would accept if they knew. So information is critical, and making it widely available—which is why I think it has to be compulsory—is also critical. However, let us not be puritanical about this, as the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, said. I am certainly no puritan about this: I come, on my mother’s side, from a family of small-time wine growers and wine merchants in southern Germany. My grandfather’s drinking companions—and he could certainly drink—in the prisoner-of-war camp in France during the First World War were also the people who went into my grandparents’ apartment three days before the Second World War broke out, just after my grandparents had left for this country, and packed up all their possessions which they then sent them after them. Drinking can provide strong social bonds. This House has its bars, and most of us drink socially. The difference is this: if we knew that by drinking we were risking the development of our unborn children, most of us would stop, just as many of our own young are so much better in many cases about not drinking at all if they are going to drive. We are talking not about abstinence but about abstinence for nine months. Similarly, no one asks for total abstinence from those who are drivers, only that they do not drink when they are going to drive. Some women are fortunate enough to have their tastes change so much during pregnancy that they cannot face even a single glass of wine. But the evidence shows that just under 50 per cent of mothers visiting the teenage antenatal clinic at St George’s Hospital drank more than four units in one go, and 27 per cent occasionally got seriously drunk when pregnant. With an increasing culture of binge drinking among young women, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, drew our attention, we should be all too aware that this will rise. The noble Baroness is right to suggest that warning notices about alcohol when pregnant should also be displayed in bars and pubs. We do not really know the extent of harm. The estimate is that one in 100 of live births is affected with foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, making it the most common cause of learning disabilities worldwide. The acute form of foetal alcohol syndrome occurs in between one and three live births per 1,000. So Dr Raja Mukherjee, one of the UK’s foremost experts, along with Professor Nigel Eastman and Professor Sheila Hollins, the president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, summarised the position when she said: "““The uncertain level of individual risk to the developing fetus, together with the possibility of misinterpreting a health promotion message, mean the only safe message in pregnancy is abstinence””." Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Monson, I think the case is irresistible. I hope that the Minister will agree that this is not about voluntary labelling. We need it made compulsory, because the level of knowledge is low, and, from what we can now see, the incidence of binge drinking and drinking in pregnancy is high and the conditions are preventable. We on these Benches strongly support the Bill.