Mr. Colin Angus:

This was a point picked up in a recent House of Lords committee report in the United Kingdom, entitled A New EU Alcohol Strategy? There is a short paragraph in the report about the industry approaches which states that the researchers, whom that committee had in at the beginning, stated the industry is always sniping at their research. The short summary states the House of Lords committee, after it had spoken to the industry, sympathised with the academics because the industry was quick to pick holes in the research and try to knock it but was reluctant or unable to provide evidence to support its own perspective. it would merely knock the evidence of others without being able to support its own position with evidence.

There are a few other points. It might be helpful to give a few descriptive statistics about the population. According to the definitions Dr. Holmes described, 78% of the population drink at moderate levels. That is the vast majority. The 22% of the population who drink at increasing or high-risk levels are drinking 66% of all of the alcohol and spending 61% of the total spent on alcohol. The consumption or spending is concentrated predominately in this small group, and these consumers account for almost all alcohol related deaths and 87%, by our estimates, of alcohol related hospital admissions. Therefore, the problem is quite concentrated in a relatively small group who also happen to be those who buy the cheapest alcohol, which is why minimum pricing is a well-targeted measure.

On the distinction between those in poverty and those not in poverty, to return to the beginning of the questions, those in poverty are more likely to be abstainers. Some 30% of those living in poverty do not drink at all compared with 20% of the rest of the population. Those who drink alcohol at increasing risk levels drink less than their counterparts living above the poverty line. That switches around when one looks at the high-risk drinkers. High-risk drinkers in poverty drink more, and are buying a lot more of the very cheapest alcohol right at the bottom of Dr. Holmes' distribution. The proportion of the population which is drinking at these high-risk levels is similar among those in poverty and those not in poverty, at just over 5%. In terms of absolute numbers, they number 36,000 of those in poverty and 150,000 of those not in poverty. It is inaccurate to state that all the high-risk drinkers are in the lowest income groups. There are many people on higher incomes who are drinking at harmful levels. As Dr. Holmes stated, those living in poverty are buying the cheapest alcohol and suffering the highest rates of harm. The rates of deaths and hospital admissions is approximately 40% higher among them than among those not living in poverty. These are the people one would want to target if one's aim is reducing harm.

On price distributions, I have some beautiful graphs in the report that I was proud of having produced which disaggregate prices into different types of drink. In doing that, I can no longer tell the committee exactly the median for all types of drink.