Health and Care Bill — House of Lords, 2022-02-04
Topic: Health
Ilora Gillian Finlay (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, these amendments also relate to alcohol. Amendment 259 is about alcohol labelling to prevent harm and Amendment 296 concerns dealing with the harm when someone has become addicted to alcohol. I shall cut what I was going to say dramatically because of the time spent on other amendments earlier today Labelling is the way we inform the public of what they are getting. About 70 people die every day from alcohol-related causes in the UK. Alcohol is responsible for 12,000 cancers every year. Covid has compounded this harm, with deaths from alcohol now at the highest rate since records began. There is more information on a carton of orange juice than a bottle of beer. Awareness of the health risks of alcohol is very low. Just one in five people can identify the low-risk drinking guidelines and less than one-quarter know that alcohol can cause breast cancer. Alcohol is linked to the worst pregnancy outcomes and serious lifelong impacts for a baby, yet one in three people are unaware that it is not safe to drink in pregnancy. It has been estimated that 41% of pregnant women consume alcohol Alcoholic drinks are also extremely calorific, as we have heard. We have already spoken about the number of calories those who drink take in and I will not go there again, but calories need to be included on the labelling. People have a right to know what they are consuming, but they cannot make informed choices about their drinking. Voluntary inclusion of information on labels has not worked and has been very low: 70% of labels do not include the CMO’s low-risk drinking guidelines, over 70% do not list ingredients and only 7% display nutritional information, including calories. The public want the information. In July 2020, the Government agreed to consult on requiring calories and drinking guidelines to be on alcohol labels, yet here we are all this time later and we are still waiting for the consultation to even be launched Amendment 296 refers to treatment services. Alcohol addiction is a complex problem, with many factors driving and perpetuating harmful drinking. People who are trapped by alcohol dependence need help to move towards recovery. The benefits for the health service are reductions in emergency service call-outs and unnecessary hospital admissions, and the benefit for everyone is a reduction in avoidable deaths. These are the outcomes by which the effectiveness of any measure can be assessed Many people who require alcohol dependency treatment also have problems with other substance abuse, mental health, domestic abuse and homelessness. It is alarming that, during the pandemic, only 20% of people who need help for problem drinking have been able to access it and there has been a significant and sustained increase in the rate of unplanned admissions for alcohol liver disease. Since 2012, there have been real-term funding cuts in alcohol treatment services, yet every £1 invested in alcohol treatment yields £3 in return; that rises to a return of £26 after 10 years. Only 9% of people with alcohol dependence account for 59% of in-patient alcohol-related admissions. So, a cohort of more than 54,000 people accounts for 365,000 admissions and more than 1.4 million bed days, at an estimated cost of £858 million a year. There are also significant pressures on the treatment workforce because there is a shortage of psychiatry trainees I hope that these amendments are self-explanatory, and that the Government will look favourably on doing something about the problem of alcohol harm. I beg to move.