Licensing Act

Let me start, Miss Begg, by apologising to you, the Minister and my Select Committee Chairman, my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon and East Chelmsford (Mr. Whittingdale), because I will not be able to stay until the end of the debate. I do, however, want to make a couple of points. Once again, I congratulate my hon. Friend, who really is an excellent Chairman of the Select Committee. On most issues, there is a diverse range of views on the Committee, and my hon. Friend is one of the very few people who can bring them together to produce reports on which we all agree. He does not always manage that, but most of the time he manages it very skilfully. My hon. Friend has gone through the issues that the Committee raised on a range of measures far more effectively than I ever could, so I do not intend to repeat everything that he said, but I do I want to touch on two issues. First, I want to elaborate on an issue on which my hon. Friend merely touched. Secondly, I want to reiterate a point that he made. My first point relates to drinks promotions, which were covered in the Committee's recommendations. I feel particularly strongly about the issue. I never cease to be amazed at the number of times the Government accurately identify a problem, only for the solution to be a complete shambles, which does not actually address the problem. We have to recognise that we have a problem with excessive drinking in some of our town centres and that that causes an awful lot of misery for the people who are subjected to it. It also causes an awful lot of problems for the police, who spend a lot of time policing drink-related incidents when they might be better employed doing other things. We have a big problem with excessive drinking, and I am not going to stand here and say that we do not. Indeed, I have spent time at my local police force's custody desk, and I never cease to be amazed by the number of people whose crimes are fuelled by alcohol. There clearly is a problem, but what I want to take issue with is the solution. In Parliament, we tend to thrash around, looking as if we are doing something, because we know that there is a problem and we want to be seen to be doing something. My fear is that the things that we try to do often do not address the problem, but instead make decent, law-abiding citizens suffer even more. That is why I want to touch on the issue of drinks promotions. A head of steam seems to be building up behind the idea that the solution to all our drink-related violence is to ban happy hours in pubs or to ban supermarkets from selling alcohol as cheaply as they do. To be perfectly honest, those things will not make a blind bit of difference to alcohol-related violence on our streets. Whether we like it or not, we have to recognise that some people go out on a Friday or Saturday night with the intention of getting drunk. Ending a promotion here or adding a few pence to the price of a litre of wine in a supermarket there will not change that mindset—this is a much deeper problem than such simplistic solutions suggest. I want to share something from my own experience. Before entering Parliament, I worked for Asda—I should probably say that so that people understand that I have a natural affinity with supermarkets. After work on a Friday, my colleagues and I tended to go to a local pub in Leeds that had a happy hour when it sold two drinks for the price of one—that is probably why we went there. An awful lot of people from Asda used to go along—we always had an eye for a good deal. The implication of banning all these happy hours is that everybody who goes along to them will come out completely hammered. However, I am not aware that any of us from Asda who used to dutifully troop along to the local pub at the end of the day came out completely hammered. We used to drink responsibly and we were just getting a good deal. We all know that many pubs are struggling to survive and that 50 pubs a week are closing. If a happy hour was a way for that pub to attract a bit of extra custom on to its premises, I do not see what harm was being done. People were not going there to get hammered, but to get a good deal. It would be a terrible mistake to think that by banning pubs from having happy hours or similar promotions we would be waving a magic wand and that we would suddenly have no alcohol-related violence on our streets. The same applies to buying alcohol in supermarkets. I do not see why the vast majority of my constituents—decent, law-abiding citizens who drink and behave responsibly, and many of whom are struggling to survive and pay the bills, particularly in the recession—should be forced by people in Parliament to pay extra for their bottle of wine or their pack of four cans of beer at the supermarket simply because a few hooligans cannot hold their drink and are out to cause trouble. Why should the law-abiding majority suffer again and have to pay more for their weekly shop? It seems completely ludicrous.