Alcohol Harm

Alex Norris Excerpts

Thursday 25th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and to follow such powerful contributions by colleagues. I commend in particular the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) on securing the debate and on the way in which he led it. He said he wanted to start a new conversation. That was an elegant way to put it and is a good challenge to us all; we should all work in that spirit, and his efforts in the commission and in Parliament more generally reflect that.

I was particularly grateful to hear the hon. Gentleman mention foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. That is a hidden harm in society; we are scratching the surface of our understanding of the profound challenges it poses for individuals and society at large. I hope the Minister will give a commitment in her speech to a national prevalence study on it, as the sector is calling for; that would be an incredible thing for a public health Minister to pick up. That fits in neatly with what the hon. Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) said about investing in services that are proven to work. That is important, particularly in relation to work with our local authorities, which I will refer to shortly. Gathering evidence on conditions such as FASD would help us build services that could be very impactful.

The contribution from my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) was exceptionally moving, and his candour and the vulnerability with which he spoke will have touched those watching the debate and given people permission to speak out themselves. I congratulate him on the work he has done, and the work my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth), the shadow Secretary of State, has done in this area is also genuinely transformative, changing societal perceptions and giving people permission to speak. I felt very lucky to have been sat here to hear the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill.

My right hon. Friend spoke movingly as well for my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Dan Carden). We have missed him today, for entirely understandable reasons today. He and I have been friends for a very long time—from long before we were elected here a few years ago—and he and his family are in the thoughts and prayers of me and my family, and I am sure they are also in the hearts of all hon. and right hon. Members. His courage, too, in speaking out as he has done has given others permission to do the same.

Every day in our country 70 people die from alcohol-related causes. Alcohol is a powerful drug that has a wide range of effects on the human body, and the impact goes far beyond just individual health: it meaningful both for the health and wellbeing of the person concerned and for their family and the community they live in. Alcohol is linked to 200 different diseases and injuries, including heart disease, liver disease and stroke, and costs the NHS £3.5 billion every year. Alcohol is now the leading risk factor for ill health, early mortality and disability for those in my age bracket of 15 to 49. There are over 1 million hospital admissions related to alcohol each year and, as with many public health issues, they are disproportionately reflected in the poorest communities; a third of all alcohol-specific deaths are in the most deprived 20% of communities.

In my city of Nottingham our hospital admissions entering the pandemic in 2017-18 were 25,000, an all-time high, and the pandemic will only have turbocharged that. We know that in 2020 a record high of nearly 7,000 people died from diseases that are a direct consequence of alcohol, up 20% on the year before. That is a staggering change. In 2020-21, 126 million extra litres of alcohol were sold, and the heaviest drinkers increased their buying by 14%. That is a really significant change in behaviour from what was already a very challenging baseline.

As I say, alcohol harm does not just affect the individual; it harms families, too. Alcohol harm is associated with violence and domestic abuse. While alcohol use is never the sole reason for domestic abuse, the World Health Organisation estimates that roughly 55% of perpetrators were drinking alcohol prior to an assault. As we have heard today, alcohol is also a major factor in child maltreatment, with Department for Education statistics showing that parental alcohol use was a factor in 16% of child-in-need cases.

We feel the harm more widely, too, with crime and antisocial behaviour, traffic collisions and unemployment. As colleagues will know, I have been campaigning for a number of years on violence and abuse against retail workers; again, alcohol is an anchor factor in that type of abuse. Drink-driving causes almost 9,000 casualties and 260 deaths a year. That is an awful lot of empty places at the table this Christmas, and a lot of hearts broken.

Good treatment services are our way, as a society and as a Parliament, to respond to the harm in our society, but even prior to the pandemic, only one in five dependent drinkers were believed to be in treatment. We must do much better than that. I think we can be much more ambitious. The hon. Member for St Ives mentioned the significant proportion of dependent drinkers in his constituency who are not in treatment—and, as he said, his constituency actually outperforms the national average.

That takes us, as we are often taken in Thursday debates about public health, back to the public health grant and our cuts to it over the last decade, which have been a cost efficiency but, as a value proposition, poor public policy. Between 2016 and 2018, more than two thirds of local authorities in England cut their alcohol treatment budgets, with 17 imposing cuts of more than half. Those cuts are part of the reason why dependent drinkers are often unable to get support. St Mungo’s estimates that funding cuts meant that 12,000 fewer rough sleepers accessed support in 2018-19 than if funding had remained at 2010 levels. Of course, as I say, covid will have exaggerated that even further.

Due to these resource cuts, alcohol treatment providers have reduced their offer to try to make sure that they can see as many people as possible. Currently, there are just six NHS in-patient detox units operating in the entirety of the UK, with fewer than 100 beds in total. A lack of outreach services means that those with complex needs are missing out, and a reduction in capacity means that those at lower levels of drinking, where treatment could be really impactful as an early intervention, are missing out too. We are not investing properly in those services, but we need to.

I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. I hope that she will address the point about the public health grant and what more can be done to restore what we have lost. As I say, there may have been a short-term cost saving on a financial line in the Budget, but in reality the cost—in human terms, of course, but also in cash terms to the rest of the health service—far dwarfs whatever has been saved. I hope that we can look at that and restore it as a matter of urgency.

Before closing, I want to revisit the point about labelling on alcohol products that I and my right hon. and hon. Friends pressed during proceedings on the Health and Care Bill. I will not reiterate the arguments, which I had the chance to make at length, but it is safe to say that we on the Opposition Benches are impatient for consistent, high-quality information to be available. It is about informed choice; we know that that is what consumers want, too. The settled will of the House, as established during proceedings on the Bill, is to let industry continue its efforts through self-organisation, and it is doubtless true that significant progress has been made in this area in recent years, so we will watch that with great interest. I hope that those in industry who are least willing to make this important change do not see Monday’s vote as a defeat of the concept of labelling itself but, rather, see that they are being given time and space to sort it themselves. If they do not, we will return to the issue.

In conclusion—I want to give the Minister plenty of time to address the comments that colleagues have made—the point about a strategy is well made. Now is the time to pull the efforts together under one roof so that they can be measured, understood and action-planned together—I think that is a good call. The funding that sits beneath them must be restored to its 2010 level. This is a significant harm for the individual and for our communities. I have no doubt that there is a cross-party commitment to attack this issue, and those are ways to do that.