Dr. John Holmes:

Another example is that we have regularly updated our estimates of the impact of minimum pricing over time both in Scotland and England. Each time, because of inflation, an increasingly smaller proportion of the market is affected if we keep to the same minimum unit price. The industry has represented this as us correcting rather than updating our estimates. There is a sense that we are being undermined in a slightly underhand way. The reason it undermines it is it does not have any evidence to support its case that pricing policies are ineffective.

All the international evidence agrees that increasing the price of alcohol reduces consumption and reduces harm. They have tried to undermine this because they do not have evidence to suggest anything different. When the committee hears evidence from the industry, I urge the members to press industry for the details of its evidence because that is where it begins to become clear that the industry's evidence is not quite what it appears.