---

Alcohol

I congratulate the Health Committee Chairman, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr. Barron). It was a privilege to serve under his chairmanship when I was elected to the House, and I know that he achieved a personal ambition with the robust report on smoking in enclosed public places. He was right about that issue, and he is right in his ambition to make a similar impact on alcohol. However, I differ from him on some of the ways in which it can be achieved. I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Poole (Mr. Syms) on highlighting the wider context of the debate and, in particular, the issue of access to alcohol: "Your granny's got a bottle in her cupboard," that's for sure. He made an important point and mentioned the value and increasingly important role that parents and parenting plays. He mentioned also the drinks industry and those who are more responsible than others. In that vein, I pay tribute to the licensees in my constituency, who have gone to considerable lengths to be responsible. Many have joined in with efforts to ensure that people can go out and have a good time in Guildford while also maintaining law and order and not letting things get out of control. The hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins), who is not in his place, talked at length about foetal alcohol syndrome, and about the licensing laws. Foetal alcohol syndrome has not had much of a mention, and I do not think that it was mentioned in the report, but it has been a long-standing problem and continues to be a serious one. As the hon. Gentleman said, it is about damage that women are doing to their children, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly. They may be unaware of the impact of alcohol. The hon. Member for Wyre Forest (Dr. Taylor) made a valiant effort to scare us. His description of tubes was quite effective for some of us, and I congratulate also the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) on his real passion. I do not profess to know a great deal about Scottish politics, but I have learned a little more today. The hon. Member for Selby (Mr. Grogan) and many others mentioned the significant issues for pubs, given the huge discrepancy between their prices and the supermarkets', and the impact of that on pubs. I know, and I think we all know now, that my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) feels very strongly about this issue—about the nanny state and the public health police. The issue is about balance—[Interruption.] I am an eternal optimist, so I always try to achieve some balance. My hon. Friend is right about one point, however: we often have a knee-jerk reaction to such issues. It is terribly important to ensure that measures are robustly supported by evidence, but it is very easy to take the simple route and think, "Oh well, that's all right, we've now done something about it." If the evidence does not bear out the measure, however, we end up having no effect at all. Some time ago, my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) wrote to the chief medical officer—he has not had a response to that letter—asking why he had specifically mentioned a 50p minimum price for alcohol. Although I agree, and Conservative Members agree, that pricing and taxation can play a role in market changes, there appears to be no real—