Policing and Crime Bill

I am particularly glad that my noble friend has raised the question of the price of alcohol and the effect this can have on overall consumption and on the various indices of alcohol harms such as health and crime. When the Government first introduced their own alcohol strategy in 2003, it was obviously the intention that measures would be adopted to reduce these harms, but they specifically eschewed the use of either price or availability, even though the preliminary study that was used to develop the strategy showed that these two forms of leverage were the only ones that would prove effective. That has turned out to be the case because since the 2003 alcohol harm reduction strategy was first published everything has got worse: alcohol-induced crime, alcohol-caused health problems and alcohol-caused deaths. That is all there in the statistics. My noble friend mentioned specifically the Sheffield University study—which I think was paid for by the Government—which goes into an enormous amount of detail on what the effects would be of particular increases. If I remember rightly, a 10 per cent increase overall showed a reduction in hospital admissions of 50,000 a year and there were commensurate benefits in terms of crime reduction and in other factors such as family breakdown and so on. What is the Government’s intention? How do they intend to apply the lessons of the Sheffield strategy? Have they fully studied these effects and do they think that increases in price now are a lever that should be introduced into the strategy, as it was not in 2003? Will there be an opportunity for your Lordships to discuss the Sheffield study? It has enormously important lessons, not only for crime reduction and health but also, potentially, for plugging a hole in the Government’s revenue by advocating an increase in the taxation of alcohol. That is not dealt with there but the Sheffield model shows that a 10 per cent increase in price would produce another £1.5 billion in government revenue if the whole of the 10 per cent was accounted for by increases in the price of alcohol. It may be that the public are not ready to tolerate such a one-off, huge increase in the price of alcohol, but we should at least talk about it to see whether there are any other alternative measures that can deal with an enormously important problem affecting our society. Not only the young people we have been talking about, but older people, too, are poisoning themselves with excessive consumption of alcohol while we sit back in this House and do nothing. I hope that the Government will pay attention not only to the minimum pricing suggestions in my noble friend’s amendment but to other ways in which increases in the cost of alcohol can be used to minimise the harm it causes.