Minimum alcohol pricing is nigh

Started on the 1st

It comes into effect on Tuesday. The 4th of January.

No you see we just need to spend more money demonising and criminalising it, that will really fix the problem.....

He has what the old people used to call "Hobson's Choice" ie. you appear to be offering a choice but really if he wants to continue to enjoy a few drinks in his retirement he has none.

It's more than a bit harsh to deal with an older person in this way.

A person who is a pensioner today probably has 45 + years of work behind them and came of drinking age when health concerns about drink were relatively unknown.

They worked, raised their families, paid their bills and whatever was left they went and had a few pints.

Now in old age on a State Pension money is tight and pints in pubs are a rare treat (even rarer for the last two years) but many of them like a few cans or "half uns" of an evening at home by the fire.

By introducing MUP the politicians are making these people poorer.

Lol at the thoughts of a dub dad having to pay extra few quid a week. Maybe have 15 vodkas at the weekend instead of 20?

In time this initiative will reduce the drinking culture and save lives from alcoholism. It's not a quick fix.

So our overall consumption has been going down steadily for 2 decades along with price increases while problem drinking has stayed the same if not gotten worse and you think more price increases will fix this? Specifically price increases that go nowhere near public finances or into addiction services and treatments?

It's not sentiment, it's fact.

From Tuesday on people with limited incomes who drink sensibly will be affected by MUP.

Yes, supermarkets were slowly bringing prices down towards the prices elsewhere in Europe (albeit still significantly dearer). That doesn't stop us having some of the most expensive alcohol in Europe already.

We were being robbed blind by vintners when they had a near monopoly on sales (both on and off - the two main chains off-licences in the 1990s/00s were owned by the LVA and VFI respectively). And now that they can't rob us blind, they manage to the get the state to set a floor price that is below their price but above what supermarkets can profitably charge.

This won't reduce consumption - it has already been falling for years. It won't have positive health outcomes. It'll cause more suffering for the families of addicts who spend more money on drink - money they may have to steal. And it'll pour cash in to private businesses; not the state.

If a case of cheap beer is driven closer to the price of a bottle of spirits, would it not drive alcoholics more towards the spirits. Of the 3 alcoholics I knew personally, one was my relation, their motivation was just to get there cheap and fast. Also, as each of those 3 used their dole money exclusively for drink, this won’t change them whatsoever as beer may be too expensive for the return on the “investment “.

British Medical Journal 2019

Abstract

Objective To assess the immediate impact of the introduction of minimum unit pricing in Scotland on household alcohol purchases.

Design Controlled interrupted time series analysis.

Setting Purchase data from Kantar Worldpanel’s household shopping panel for 2015-18.

Participants 5325 Scottish households, 54 807 English households as controls, and 10 040 households in northern England to control for potential cross border effects.

Interventions Introduction of a minimum price of 50p (€0.55; $0.61) per UK unit (6.25p per gram) for the sale of alcohol in Scotland on 1 May 2018.

Main outcome measures Price per gram of alcohol, number of grams of alcohol purchased from off-trade by households, and weekly household expenditure on alcohol.

Results The introduction of minimum unit pricing in Scotland was associated with an increase in purchase price of 0.64p per gram of alcohol (95% confidence interval 0.54 to 0.75), a reduction in weekly purchases of 9.5 g of alcohol per adult per household (5.1 to 13.9), and a non-significant increase in weekly expenditure on alcohol per household of 61p (−5 to 127). The increase in purchase price was higher in lower income households and in households that purchased the largest amount of alcohol. The reduction in purchased grams of alcohol was greater in lower income households and only occurred in the top fifth of households by income that purchased the greatest amount of alcohol, where the reduction was 15 g of alcohol per week (6 to 24). Changes in weekly expenditure were not systematically related to household income but increased with increasing household purchases.

Conclusions In terms of immediate impact, the introduction of minimum unit pricing appears to have been successful in reducing the amount of alcohol purchased by households in Scotland. The action was targeted, in that reductions of purchased alcohol only occurred in the households that bought the most alcohol.

Kantar WorldPanel is self selecting and very biased to middle class participants (see the threads about Irish members over in Consumer for a picture of the usual members. You aren't going to get a problem drinker who is going to go through the Kantar processes).

However even then it still shows the disproportionate impact on those on lower incomes, who continued to buy and spend more.

Also, if that's the study someone tried to use before to claim that sales in Northern England hadn't gone up (by purchase transferrance as will happen in Newry, Strabane etc) they don't understand statistics in the slightest. That may include the abstract writer!

Someone from Scotland buying in England is not going to cause it to appear in England's stats as those are created from English Kantar members.

I'd also suspect theres a lot of off licence purchases that never get scanned by Kantar members out of some feeling of guilt, but there's no way to work that in to statistics. So you'd only get the alcohol bought with groceries, not any offo trips such as a border booze cruise

Younger generations are already drinking less. This is unnecessary in every single way, except to give the least competitive business sector in the country more protection.

AAI et al will take the reduction in consumption that was going to happen in 2022 anyway and insist it was down to this. It won't have been

Why is it unnecessary? I'd prefer to not pay a bit extra for beers but so be it. Its about the big picture surely. I'm not sure you can see that, you seem focused on current picture.

The BMJ didn't write the piece. That's not how journals work.