'Too many retailers getting away with selling booze to under-age customers'

Promises to crack down on teenage drinkers were exposed as a sham at the weekend with figures showing they go unpunished. In the past three years, only 34 children have been prosecuted for buying alcohol. And just seven pub landlords got the maximum £1,000 fine for selling booze to underage drinkers. But a government report this week said that more than half of 15 to 16-year-olds were drinking heavily. Tory Home Affairs spokesman James Brokenshire said: "Retailers selling alcohol illegally need to know that they face tough penalties. Too many people are simply getting away with it." - Sunday Mirror​

Scotland's mothers have been told they should play a key role in tackling the nation's alcohol abuse crisis by drinking moderately in front of their partners and children. Drink and drugs tsar Dr Maggie Watts has called for the sensible drinking habits adopted by many women during pregnancy and breastfeeding to become permanent, encouraging healthy attitudes towards alcohol among children and persuading partners to rein in their consumption. - Scotland On Sunday​

"The drinking culture is so out of control that this week the Government decided to tell parents throughout the land how to introduce their children to alcohol," says columnist Eamonn Holmes. "More of us need to get the message over to teenagers that you don't have to get blind drunk to have a great evening. As for this new initiative, anything is better than nothing. But giving parents advice on how to encourage low-risk drinking by their offspring - and promising classes and even punishment if they fail - should only be step one. If as a result having a drink is more sociable and jolly as opposed to nauseous and nauseating, I'll drink to that." - Sunday People​

For most of the last five years, the battle between private equity and traditional institutional investors has focused on the argument that companies were being taken private far too cheaply, re-engineered financially and sold back at a huge premium to those same unfortunate fund managers. Somehow, and quite unbelievably, the private equity firms allowed themselves to be painted as the villains of the piece. Bradford & Bingley, and to a lesser extent Mitchells & Butlers - who recently gave places on its board to two of Robert Tchenguiz's people - will provide the testing ground for a world where these two very different breeds of shareholder are forced to coexist side by side. There will be blood. - Sunday Telegraph​

Bosses at one of Britain's biggest pub groups have warned that sales of beer in the on-trade are likely to fall by more than 40 per cent in the next decade. In a presentation to stockbroker Blue Oar Securities, management at Mitchells & Butlers, owner of the Harvester chain, said beer sales were likely to fall from 17m barrels this year to 10m by 2018. They were as high as 37m in 1979. They said the main reason for the decline was the wide availability of cheap beer from supermarkets. Such a fall in on-trade beer sales will be catastrophic for UK pubs. Data suggest four are closing each day. - Sunday Times​