As weekends go, this Bank Holiday wasn’t the hottest on record. But with temperatures soaring on Sunday beer sales will have shot up leaving many supermarket shelves empty…….and A&E departments overstretched as an ever growing number of patients were admitted to hospital with alcohol intoxication.
Our report, Hitting the Bottle, estimates that alcohol excess this May Day Bank Holiday weekend
cost the NHS £25 million and identifies alcohol misuse as
one of the major public health epidemics of
the 21st century. The scale of the problem is huge: 7.6
million people in England are drinking at hazardous levels; 2.9 million are
showing evidence of harm to their own health, including 1.1 million people who
have a level of alcohol addiction. Between 2001 and 2007, the direct costs to
the NHS nearly doubled, increasing from £1.47 to £2.7 billion. So what’s
to be done?
Well, first we need to recognise
that people buy and consume alcohol in standard measures of drinks – pints and
cans, bottles and glasses - and not by counting units displayed on packaging or
calculated on a website. If the ferociously complicated UK alcohol duty
regime made this connection too then a
reduction in overall alcohol consumption, and therefore alcohol-related harm,
could be achieved with little or no detrimental effect to the profitability of
the ‘drinks industry’. Include in this phrase your favorite pub
struggling to stay open in a recession.
We have proposed that duty
should be cut on beer and cider where the alcoholic strength is less than, or
equal to, 2 units per pint whereas duty should be raised for beer and cider
where the alcoholic strength exceeds 2.5 units per pint. If this simple measure could achieve a 1% abv reduction in the strength
of the average pint of beer this would
reduce total pure alcohol consumption by about 10%. Although it should be
stressed that the complexity of the UK duty system is matched only by the EU drinks directive which hampers any
form of progressive structure across all alcoholic products.
But tackling alcohol misuse
needs more than just re-thinking and re-structuring the (EU) duty system.
It needs better enforcement of existing legislation. Our analysis shows
that more people suffering with alcohol excess are now admitted to hospital
than are dealt with by the police. That can’t be right. So we’d also like
to see more cautions and fines issued to those that are excessively drunk – to
help prevent them turning up at accident & emergency later in the night -
and then feed these people into ‘brief
intervention’ alcohol education and awareness courses, as currently happens
with speeding tickets.
There will inevitably be a small number of people that are admitted to hospital because they’re simply too drunk – because they’re abandoned face down in the gutter - and often they’re released home later the same day. We believe these people should be charged the NHS tariff cost of their admission – as currently happens with road traffic accidents – but offered a reduced fee to cover the costs of participating in an alcohol education and awareness course. Such ‘brief interventions’ are proven to reduce both alcohol consumption and future healthcare costs.
Henry Featherstone is Head of
Health & Social Care at Policy Exchange.
