Speaking with a forked tongue

The Home Secretary’s views on who to blame for binge drinking, disorderly behaviour and hospital admissions have resulted in a swathe of new and impending legislation, most of it targeted against the sector on the basis that the licensed trade needs extra controls and regulations to combat exactly the issues he is highlighting.

Apparently, he commented: “If there’s a problem, there’s a blame game — ban something, restrict it, tell people what to do, wag the finger. That approach should not be our first resort, it should always be our last resort.”

Well, he clearly has not read Rebalancing the Licensing Act recently, or if he has, he has forgotten the basic points it made.

The trade, apparently, was getting away with murder, binge drinking was rife, disorder on the streets was a nightly occurrence and the only remedy was a tightening up of town-hall restrictions and the imposition of late-night curfews, charging periods and a further crackdown on new licences.

I am fully aware that ministers come to trade events and tell the audience what they want to hear — about co-operation, working in partnership and the sterling efforts being made for self-regulation. But they then go away and vote consistently for a completely different approach. It is no wonder that trust takes a bit of a hammering when one contrasts the words with the actions.

A good example of this was the reaction of Government and the anti-alcohol lobby to the research documentation on pricing from Sheffield University, which was claimed to link minimum pricing with a lessening of violent disorder and/or hospital admissions.

In fact, no direct links of this kind were made in the research, which was ringed around with caveats and cautions, as these papers often are. But it has been trotted out regularly as a reason for imposing a price limit — now apparently shelved as a policy, but still going strong north of the border.
If you think about it, there is a clear impossibility of drawing a direct correlation between the actual price of alcohol and the question of hospital admissions, given the very different approaches to alcohol taken by different sections of the population and in different countries of the world. Yet this short-cut approach retained its credibility in Parliament for a very long time. One only has to read Hansard to see both MPs and peers trotting out almost identical phrases on the subject.

In fact, the debates during the Police Reform & Social Responsibility Bill were littered with generalised references to problem drinking and the availability of alcohol, rather than any proper scrutiny of the effect of the proposed measures on the vast majority of the licensed trade.

The problem for the industry is to try and divorce the more emotional elements from the day-to-day practical requirements of running a business. Politically, the coalition still sees trade-bashing as a front runner for appeal to the electorate, and that will not go away overnight.

Of course, it is far more difficult to push the pendulum in the opposite direction with ‘good news’ stories about pubs and alcohol, because that does not really catch the headlines or provide the good pictures.

But MPs need to experience something of the trade’s own issues and the recent campaign to get them into pubs is one to be warmly welcomed. Whether it will be sufficient to get them to defy the whips is, of course, an entirely different matter.