Alcohol Labelling Bill [HL]

moved Amendment No. 1: 1: Clause 1, page 1, line 2, after ““ensure”” insert ““so far as is practicable”” The noble Baroness said: I should like first to thank the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, for being kind enough to rearrange the Committee stage of the Bill so that I could be present to speak to my amendments following an absence of several weeks after an accident. I am most grateful. Before tackling the amendment I should declare various interests. Noble Lords should know that until September 2006 I was the chief executive of the Portman Group, an organisation funded by major alcoholic drinks producers to promote sensible drinking by consumers and responsible marketing by producers. I was also a member of the Alcohol Education and Research Council. I am a paid non-executive adviser to a global wines and spirits company, Brown-Forman, and I have undertaken various projects for other drinks producers in my capacity as an independent consultant. In my earlier career in the voluntary sector I worked and campaigned for several organisations concerned with maternity and infant welfare issues. I also acknowledge the valuable assistance that I have received from the Wine and Spirit Trade Association and the British Beer and Pub Association in preparing the amendments to which I wish to speak. The WSTA represents about 90 per cent of wine sales by volume in the UK market, 80 per cent of imported spirits and all of the major multiple alcohol retailers. The BBPA represents 98 per cent of all beer sold in the UK market. The amendments in my name are also supported by the Scotch Whisky Association, the Gin and Vodka Association and the National Association of Cider Makers. I make that roll call not just to thank those organisations but to demonstrate the willingness of the industry to act effectively on the issue covered by the Bill and to demonstrate their willingness to make it workable in practice. Legislation making it mandatory for labels to carry pregnancy advice is somewhat premature, if I may use that expression, at a time when the voluntary labelling agreement negotiated between government and industry is getting off the ground and attracting significant positive compliance. Nevertheless, my main concern has been to work as constructively as possible with the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, to make sure that if and when his Bill becomes law, it will be as workable and non-contentious as possible in practice. I appreciate that his overriding concern is to see pregnancy advice on labels and that how it gets there is of secondary importance. I am therefore very glad that he has added his name to most of my amendments, which are designed only to acknowledge and honour the voluntary scheme and to keep any statutory provisions as a failsafe mechanism or back-stop. Amendment No. 1 proposes to insert, "““so far as is practicable””," after ““ensure”” in line 2. It is a shame that we have to start with one of the amendments to which the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, has not added his name. I wish to make it clear from the outset that my intention is absolutely not to provide a device that lets companies off the hook. As I said, in general I believe that the Bill’s measures should kick in wherever the voluntary scheme is not complied with. However, some types of package, container or label formats would make it very difficult to comply with the Bill’s requirements. Miniatures are the obvious example. There is a requirement in the United States for pregnancy advice on labels, but I have seen writing on some bottles so miniscule that I question the value of such a format to the consumer. Surely it is a tenet of all UK and EU labelling requirements that the information concerned should be meaningful to the consumer and proportionate to the goal. We certainly should not go for a measure that includes miniatures just because we know that they do that in the United States. After all, there are some very strange rules in the US relating to miniatures that I do not think we would go for here at all. I understand that in Washington DC, for example, it is illegal to sell miniatures singly. They have to be sold in six-packs because it is thought that selling them singly somehow encourages misuse. I should have thought that the opposite would apply, but that is a bit of an aside. The noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, introduced the Bill some time ago and has since changed the wording of the text of the advice to bring it into line with the wording now advocated by the Department of Health and which is in the voluntary agreement. I still hope that I may be able to change his mind and that he will accept this amendment, which would bring the Bill into line with other aspects of, and assumptions behind, the voluntary agreement. There is also the question of disproportion, which I touched on at Second Reading. There are certain packages and label formats where disproportionate cost, even to the point of threatening commercial viability, would be an issue for certain companies if this provision became a mandatory requirement for every single label on every single brand. That would apply, in particular, to small businesses, especially in the wine sector, where thousands of brands are tested each year in the UK market using hundreds of UK agent companies. We are talking about a very small fraction of the market. If this had been government legislation, it would have needed a regulatory impact assessment. However, just because it is a Private Member’s Bill, I do not think we should forget that there are regulatory impact issues for small businesses and, indeed, for consumer choice. As I said, hundreds of companies would be faced with the choice either to comply at cost or simply not to supply the UK market at all. I would not be concerned about these small businesses and their predicament—even if it were a cost predicament—if I thought that, by making the requirement mandatory for 100 per cent of labels on 100 per cent of brands, we would be doing women a favour, but the shortfall that would occur as a result of the kind of exemptions that I have in mind would make no difference at all to women’s awareness of the advice. We do not need 100 per cent of labels to carry this message. Labels are only part of the information stream bringing this vital message to women. The voluntary agreement between industry and government acknowledges that the labelling regime will play, "““a part in supporting a wider government-led campaign””." The word ““practicable”” could also deal with another situation that I have in mind to make the requirement more practical—that is, to acknowledge that it is not reasonable to expect all brands to comply all at the same time with a single enactment date. In practice, I think that it would be reasonable to allow the gradual phasing-in of a labelling requirement for some niche brands with a very small market share but a long shelf life. Many of these brands will be owned by large global companies and so cost is obviously not ultimately a barrier, but the logistics of label production mean that it might be practical to deal with these brands later rather than sooner—for example, within two years rather than two months. Again, the voluntary agreement envisages that those considerations should be taken into account. It says that the Government understand that these labelling changes will happen as part of normal industry cycles for making changes to labels. I did a small amount of research on the way in which the word ““practicable”” has been interpreted by the courts. I was relieved to see that it seems to have been interpreted in a fairly tight way. It is certainly regarded as much stricter than the phrase ““reasonably practicable””. It is regarded as meaning feasible rather than ““if you feel like doing it””. I stress that this is not meant to be a device to let anyone off the hook. If I am unable to persuade the Minister to accept the phrase in my amendment, I would ask him at the very least to consider bringing back an amendment on Report or at Third Reading with a new clause or schedule for the specific exclusion of things, such as miniatures, which it seems reasonable to exclude from the requirements of the Bill. I beg to move.