Alcohol
Source: House of Commons Health Committee
From the Introduction:

Over the last 60 years English drinking habits have been transformed. In 1943, a Mass Observation survey noted that young people represented the lowest proportion of pub goers, preferring to frequent milk bars and coffee shops. In 1947 the nation consumed approximately three-and-a-half litres of pure alcohol per head; the current figure is nine-and-a-half litres.[3] According to the General Household Survey data from 2006, 31% of men are classified as drinking hazardously (more than 21 units per week) or harmfully (more than 50 units per week); of these 9% drink harmfully. 21% of women are drinking hazardously (more than 14 units per week) or harmfully (more than 35 units per week); of these 6% drinking harmfully. While the consumption of alcohol has increased, taxation has declined in real terms and even more so as a fraction of average earnings. The rate of duty on spirits per litre of pure alcohol in 1947 was more than the weekly average manual earnings of a woman and almost 60% of a man’s. If the rate of duty on spirits had been increased in line with average manual male earnings since 1947, it would have stood at about £200 in 2002; it was £19.56.

The rising levels of alcohol consumption and their consequences have been an increasing source of concern in recent years. Media headlines emphasise the consequences of binge drinking which are a cause of many serious accidents, disorder, violence and crime. However, long term heavy drinking causes more harm to health. The President of the Royal College of Physicians told us that alcohol was probably a significant factor in 30 to 40,000 deaths per year. The WHO has put alcohol as the third most frequent cause of death after hypertension and tobacco. UK deaths from liver cirrhosis increased more than five-fold between 1970 and 2006; in contrast, in France, Italy and Spain the number of deaths shrank between two- and four-fold. UK deaths from cirrhosis are now above the other three countries.

Since 2000 a number of key studies have examined in more detail the scale of the damage done to health and society and considered the effectiveness of measures to reduce the harm. Among these was the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit’s highly regarded study of the costs of alcohol to the NHS and society entitled Alcohol misuse: How much does it cost?’, which was published in 2003.

Following these studies, in March 2004 the Government produced its long-awaited alcohol strategy: Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy. However, many of those who had pressed for the strategy were disappointed by it. It was thought that there was too much reliance on the provision of information while the most effective policy, increasing the price, had been ignored. Indeed, the duty on spirits was frozen from 1997 to 2007.

After 2004 a series of reports, several commissioned by the Government, increased our understanding of the causes of alcohol consumption and the effectiveness of measures to counter them and threw further doubt on the Government’s strategy. The RAND Corporation’s study, Early Adolescent Exposure to Alcohol Advertising and its Relationship to Underage Drinking (2007) found that children exposed to high levels of alcohol advertising were more likely both to drink and to intend to drink than those with low levels of exposure. KPMG undertook a Review of the Social Responsibility Standards for the production and sale of Alcoholic Drinks (commissioned by the Home Office from KPMG, April 2008), which found that the standards were widely breached and often inadequate. In 2008 work commissioned by the Department of Health from Sheffield University concluded that setting a minimum price of 50p for the sale of a unit of alcohol would prevent over 3,000 deaths a year and reduce the number of hospital admissions by 98,000.

+ Direct link to report (PDF; 1.3 MB)