Alcohol Labelling Bill [HL]

My Lords, the Bill before us is based on the concept that one has to do something to address a problem. The noble Lord has made a good job of describing the problem, but the question is: what is the correct action to be taken? An argument between self-regulation and compulsory regulation is going on. What will self-regulation do? How will the Government monitor it to see whether it is successful? About the confusion of information, the Government can do something: they can make sure that one message is coming out. That would help. Let us remember what we would achieve by having labelling on a bottle. It would be part of a drip-drip process to reinforce other messages at other points in the process. It will not be a cure-all. The ban on cigarette advertising took a long time to get anywhere. You build consensus; you then achieve something. I was recently in Brussels, where there is a smoking ban. Everybody lit up in a restaurant because it was not being enforced. How we address that and how we get into people’s minds is something that the Minister can start to tell us about in a few minutes. What is the process? The noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, did a good job in describing the problem. He said that it causes damage. He asked where we were going and said there was no absolutely safe limit in all cases. I am afraid that the answer is that most people will be able to get away with a little, but are we prepared to take the risk? That muddle might be addressed in a better campaign, of which it would be a small part. Without clarification on that, our arguments about self-regulation, when it will be reviewed and updated, about what is going on, about the Government’s current position and the message that must absolutely be enforced will go round in circles. Clarification will help us. We are all worried about alcohol, because it is misused and being consumed by people of younger ages, and because we have managed—I do not know how—to create a culture of binge drinking, which is blamed on 24-hour drinking, despite the fact that it existed long before that was introduced. Binge drinking was helped to be created by the ““get your round in before the pub shuts early”” culture. Anybody who has not seen that was not in a pub when it shut at 11 pm. And if you wanted something to encourage you to be wrecked in the afternoon, it was lunchtime drinking. How do we get the message across to society? If we are going to deal with excessive alcohol consumption, we have to address one of the big players in society; that is, supermarkets and retailers, which often use alcohol as loss leaders. We all saw it on television during the Christmas period: ““Buy X cans at X price, and come in and do the rest of your shopping as well””. If the drinks industry really wants to address the drinking culture, I would take it much more seriously if it did something in that area. That might be a more constructive approach to the problem as a whole. I do not underestimate this element of the problem, but I am afraid that it must be seen as part of a whole at certain points. As the Bill progresses, I hope that the drinks industry and retailers will give me some idea of what they are going to do to address the problem. If you have a pile of cans at home, and your 14 year-old son or daughter grabs them to go out with their friends, somebody who is very young will be drinking out on the streets without any supervision. Many of the horror stories which the press delights in giving us may relate to those situations. The alcopop industry—or, to use the correct name, the pre-mix cocktail industry—initially aimed its products at people whose palates liked them. I have tried alcopops a couple of times and they suggest to me petrol mixed with syrup. Young palates apparently like them. The advertising goes along the lines of, ““Are you a KWV moment?””, which means, ““Are you prepared to wreck somebody else’s evening for a laugh?””. That sort of advertising and culture must be addressed at some point. Can the Government give us an idea about their overall strategy? They are doing something. They have good adverts which demonstrate what happens if you drink too much and what you look like. A friend of mine pointed out that these are great adverts, designed to be shown when people come in from the pub. Showing them slightly earlier might be better. Do the Government think that the industry has moved fast enough to achieve greater warnings in key areas? What is their monitoring process of that voluntary code, and how successful is it? At what point are they prepared to take action if it is not good enough? That would be very helpful to the debate.