Alcoholic Drinks: Excise Duties
(asked on 11th February 2020) - View Source
Question to the HM Treasury:
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the cost to the public purse was of the (a) freezes and (b) reductions in alcohol duty in each year since 2012.
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 £5.2bn.
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 | 2019-20 |
Exchequer Impact | -170 | -505 | -685 | -770 | -820 | -1,059 | -1,217 |
These past decisions will also incur future losses to the Exchequer in years beyond 2019-20. The OBR’s costings of previously announced policies currently extend to 2023-23, and the future impact of these announced freezes and cuts in the alcohol duties to that year is estimated to be around £5.2bn.
The future annual impacts are set out in the table below.
(£m) | 2019-20 | 2020-21 | 2021-22 | 2022-23 |
Exchequer Impact | -1,246 | -1,282 | -1,320 | -1,361 |
The OBR’s policy costings are available at the following link:
http://budgetresponsibility.org.uk/download/policy-measures-database/