Alcohol Labelling Bill [HL]

I am afraid I cannot, my Lords. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, can enlighten us when he winds up. The problem, in my view, is how to achieve a message that reflects the current state of scientific knowledge and does not run the risk of alarming women without due cause. The fact is that many women when pregnant can have a couple of units of alcohol once or twice a week without any apparent detriment to the health of their baby. Indeed, the current official advice from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists says that drinking alcohol at that level has not been shown to be harmful, even though it makes it clear that the safest approach for a pregnant woman is to choose not to drink at all. The guidelines also warn that episodic binge drinking around conception and early pregnancy is especially harmful to a woman and her baby, and this line is echoed by the Royal College of Midwives. I do not think that anybody disputes the advice about binge drinking. The real question is whether we can justify a message as drastic and uncompromising as the one contained in Clause 1. We must be guided, surely, by the science. There is no consensus atthe moment about the threshold below which consumption of alcohol causes negligible damage in the expectant mother. Nor is there consensus about the causal mechanisms which lead to foetal alcohol syndrome. We know that some populations are more prone to alcohol-related disorders; for example, those in lower socio-economic groups and ethnic minorities. The prevalence of these disorders also seems to be a function of maternal age, poor nutrition, drug use and use of tobacco, so the picture on causation is not wholly cut and dried. There is scope for further research into these issues to enable us to explain why some babies are more affected than others. The research that we do have suggests increasingly that if we err at all it should be on the side of caution. In the 1990s, Ann Streissguth, at the University of Washington, established that children of mothers who had drunk seven to 14 standard drinks per week in pregnancy tended to have specific problems with arithmetic and attention, as well as behavioural difficulties when older. These results have been confirmed by the work of Sandra and Joseph Jacobson at Wayne State University, Detroit. At the same time, what is important is not just the number of drinks you consume: it is when you are drinking them, whether you have eaten beforehand and how fast your body metabolises alcohol. Drinking all seven units at one session during a week would amount to a binge which potentially puts the baby at risk. What do we know about very low levels of alcohol consumption? The Jacobsons found that children of mothers who drank fewer than seven drinks a week had no detectable mental deficits. But a study by Hepper at Queen's University, Belfast, indicated that fewer than seven drinks a week can have a measurable effect on the developing nervous system of an unborn baby. John Olney, a neuroscientist at Washington State University, has performed studies on rats. These show that cell death in the brain can occur when developing rats are exposed to only mildly raised blood alcohol levels equivalent in humans to50 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood for a period of only 45 minutes. This level would be sufficient to delete 20 million neurons in the brain of a foetus—not enough to translate into a detectable effect on a child's cognitive abilities, but nevertheless a measure of damage. What does all that say to us? It says, rather messily, that we cannot as yet convert our current scientific knowledge into categoric blanket advice for all women about how many drinks they can have when pregnant. But we appear to know that the less alcohol she consumes, the better it is likely to be. Meanwhile, the noble Lord's approach in this Bill is to adopt the precautionary principle. In the circumstances, it is hard to disagree with that approach. It is right that we should think carefully about the precise wording of the warning message and whether it could be improved on, but I would not wish to suggest to the noble Lord that the general tenor of the message he has proposed is misplaced. If I have a worry at all, it is on an associated issue—the vagueness of alcoholic measures, to which the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, referred. If we are to talk in terms of units of alcohol, people need to be aware of the true number of units they are consuming. A 125 millilitre glass of wine contains roughly one unit. But a glass of wine that you pour at home is likely to be larger. It may also have a stronger alcohol content, so a glass of wine at home may be far more than one unit. The lack of awareness of these basic things needs to be addressed every bit as much as the matters covered by the Bill. Naturally, I hope that the Minister will look at the Bill in a positive light. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, well with its future progress.