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Finance Bill

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), although I am not sure that I agree with his analysis. I do not think that when my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was Chancellor, he would have designed the replacement of an income tax rate simply to wrong-foot the Leader of the Opposition. That is a simplistic scenario. I suggest that he might have decided, wrongly, to try to distance himself from the then Prime Minister and establish his own manifesto before a possible autumn election. I shall return to the 10p tax rate, but I turn now to a matter that I have raised in the House on a number of occasions recently—the rates of alcohol duty that are in the Bill and were announced in the Budget. I declare an interest: I am the honorary adviser to the northern Federation of Licensed Victuallers Associations, which, like most people in the pub industry, is concerned about the increases in alcohol duties, particularly that on beer. Duties on other alcohol are not as punitive and are not having the same effect on the pub industry. It is no secret that the pub industry is in trouble. Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have been lobbied on the issue a great deal in the not-too-distant past, and there has recently been a flurry of reports on the industry's problems and the crisis that it faces. Various estimates have been made of the number of pubs that are closing each week in this country, ranging from 30 to 60. Figures have also made the broadsheet press, stating that the last time the volume of beer sold was equivalent to the present was in the 1930s. They also stated that the beer market has fallen by 22 per cent. since its peak in 1979, and beer sales have fallen by 49 per cent. since then. The breweries' profits have decreased by some 78 per cent. There has been a huge decline in beer sales in pubs, and the increases announced in the Budget have increased that problem. One problem that the beer industry faced last year was the smoking ban, which has had an effect on pubs and clubs. The industry has not complained about that and has accepted it, but the Government's increasing of beer duty has put another nail in the coffin of pubs and clubs around the country. The main problem that our pubs and clubs face is the sale of alcohol in supermarkets, which have targeted alcohol sales as something on which they wish to take over from the pubs. They are in competition with pubs, and at the moment they are winning by selling alcohol at less than the wholesale cost, as a loss leader at a lower price than they pay for it. Alcohol is sold to people who drink at home, in an uncontrolled environment, whereas there are controls on them when they drink in a public house. Pub operators and owners have to operate to codes of practice, whereas people drinking at home can drink as much as they like. If alcohol is extremely cheap, as it is in supermarkets, it is easy for them to do that. I am talking not about under-age drinking or sales to minors but about sales to an adult population, particularly those between the ages of 18 and 35, who drink alcohol bought from supermarkets. We have debated the matter before in the House. The phrase used is ““pre-loading””: young people drink at home among their friends before they go out to a pub or club. Unfortunately, the drunkenness kicks in at the last licensed premises that they visit. The pubs and clubs get the blame for binge drinking, yet a lot of this drinking is done at home. There has been a call for controls to be placed on such sales by supermarkets to try to make pubs more attractive, to promote them as controlled drinking areas and to prevent them from going out of business in the face of competition from supermarkets and their loss-leaders.