Mr. Colin Angus:

I will add a comment on tax. If members imagine tax as an alternative to minimum pricing, there are issues of targeting in the sense that they would affect all of the alcohol products everyone is buying, not just the very cheap alcohol favoured by the drinkers who suffer the most harm. We recently published some research which looked at the way retailers responded to changes in tax. It shows that they did not just flatly increase the price of all products in line with what we all expected following the tax increase. In the case of very cheap products they increased the price by less than we would have expected and over-shifted onto expensive products. Retailers are doing what members do not want them to do. They are increasing the price of the alcohol they want to affect the most by the least amount and increasing greatly the price of the alcohol in which they are less interested because it is very expensive and not drunk by the drinkers suffering most of the harm.