Oral question asked in the House of Lords, by Lord Imbert (Crossbench). It was answered on Thursday, 2 February 2012.

Alcohol

Question: In the light of the 60,000 alcohol-related calls answered by the London Ambulance Service alone and the 18,500 alcohol-related crimes of violence in London alone in one year, does that not mean that we should introduce a compulsory alcohol sobriety testing scheme which magistrates can use to sentence in order to reduce this awful number of offences?

Answer: The noble Lord is right to point that out. Proposals of the kind he suggests should be considered. As I am sure he will recognise, there is no single solution to the complex challenge of alcohol misuse. We need to look at licensing, pricing, health promotion, the criminal justice system, the role of local authorities, early engagement by the NHS and labelling, and the list goes on. But I am very happy to feed in the noble Lord’s ideas to my department in the work that it is doing.

Secondary information