Alcoholic Drinks: Excise Duties
(asked on 5th July 2018) - View Source
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate he has made of the total cost to the public purse of alcohol duty freezes and reductions since 2013.
Based on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) published policy costings, we estimate the cumulative loss to the Exchequer from the successive alcohol duty freezes and cuts from financial year 2013-14 to the current financial year 2018-19 to be around £4.0bn. This is equal to the yearly cost of employing over 100,000 teachers.
The annual impacts on the Exchequer are reported in the table below.
(£m) | 2013-14 | 2014-15 | 2015-16 | 2016-17 | 2017-18 | 2018-19 |
Exchequer Impact | -170 | -505 | -685 | -770 | -820 | -1,025 |
These past decisions will also incur future losses to the Exchequer in years beyond 2018-19. The OBR’s costings of previously announced policies currently extend to 2022-23, and the future impact of these announced freezes and cuts in the alcohol duties to that year is estimated to be around £4.4bn.
The future annual impacts are set out in the table below.
(£m) | 2019-20 | 2020-21 | 2021-22 | 2022-23 |
Exchequer Impact | -1,050 | -1,075 | -1,105 | -1,140 |
The OBR’s policy costings are available at the following link:
http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/download/policy-measures-database/