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Alcohol

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron). I congratulate the Committee on an interesting and well put together report. Clearly, the key area that the Committee examined was pricing, and that is certainly one of the elements that should be tackled, as the right hon. Gentleman stressed. We should start by acknowledging that there is a problem with people abusing alcohol. The focus should be on problem drinking. There are various definitions, some of which are helpful. We can have a debate about how many units people should drink per week or over a year, but by problem drinking, I mean drinking that leads to inappropriate, irresponsible behaviour, antisocial behaviour and crime, or drinking that damages health. The Select Committee report focuses, of course, on damage to health and what action the Government—any Government—can take to try to ameliorate that. We should also acknowledge that the problem is not alcohol. I say to the Chair and the members of the Select Committee—I suspect they would agree with me, although this is may not be sufficiently clearly stated in the report—that the problem is not even cheap alcohol. The problem is people abusing alcohol and drinking in an inappropriate way that leads to the kind of problems that we have heard about. That is cultural, and it is all very well saying that drinking patterns have changed, and all very well quoting the figures for how many people are drinking more, but if we look at those patterns, we find that the situation is not as simple as the figures suggest. As my colleague and chair of the all-party beer group, the hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan), knows, beer consumption is declining, so the issue is that of our culture shifting, not just that all Britons are drinking more. A group of people are drinking more than they should, and we must focus on them. I agree fundamentally with the main conclusion of the Committee's report, which is that we should introduce a minimum price for alcohol.