Dr. John Holmes:

We have not done so. There has been some movement to do so in the UK by the UK alcohol industry as part of the public health responsibility deal with which the committee may be familiar. The industry promised to take 1 billion units out of the market by reducing the strength of some existing beverages. That has involved beers like Stella and Heineken being reduced from 5% alcohol by volume to 4.8%. It also involved introducing and promoting new low-strength beverages.

On the surface, that is probably a good thing. It is a good thing if we provide more options to consumers. It is a good thing if we provide people with the opportunity to drink lower strength drinks, if they want to.

There is very little evidence that these policies are effective in reducing consumption because we do not know who is drinking those lower strength drinks. It might be that the moderate drinkers are now drinking the same amount they were before but are adding some lower strength drinks on days they would not otherwise have drunk. Similarly, abstainers may now be drinking some low-strength drinks. We do not know what is going on. The industry has made some claims that it has succeeded in this billion unit pledge. We dispute that and the committee will hear more about that in the coming weeks.

A nice example of substitution versus complements for illicit drugs is that young people’s alcohol consumption is falling off a cliff in the UK. There are far more abstainers and far more young people drinking at lower levels than ever in recent years. This seems to be a very consistent and robust trend. The interesting point is that it is not being replaced by young people doing other things. They are not taking up smoking, or smoking more cannabis or taking more ecstasy. The data does not cover legal highs so we do not know what is happening there. The suggestion seems to be that when alcohol consumption is falling among young people, consumption of other substances is falling as well.

I forgot to make one point about the industry. Our research has been published in a wide variety of scientific journals, the world's leading medical journals, British Medical Journaland The Lancet. The World Health Organization, WHO, has also picked it up and recommended it, as have the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, NICE, in the UK and a whole range of royal medical colleges in the UK and abroad, and their equivalents. By contrast there has not been a single publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal which has criticised our work in any substantial way. There have been a couple of suggestions for how we might build on it but nothing has said this work is simply wrong. That is quite important. The publications the industry cites are soft publications, think tank reports, things they have submitted to committees such as this one. There is no credible scientific attack on our research that has not been funded by the alcohol industry.