Mr. Colin Angus:

I would like to pick up on some issues around the edges such as numbers for the impact on household budgets for people on low incomes. For the low risk drinkers we estimate a reduction of €4.50 per year, almost no impact on their spending. For increasing risk drinkers it is €41 and for high risk it is a reduction of €60. They are small savings impacts. We do not estimate that the policy would lead to a reduction in the budget for other things for people in low income households because although the alcohol they buy is more expensive, they buy less of it and that cancels it out.

There was a question about people substituting down, in other words, if the market reshuffles itself do people start buying cheaper alcohol. In a sense that is incorporated in the price elasticities that we use to estimate all of this. That is incorporated into our estimates of impact on consumption. What it does not consider is if one believes that cheaper alcohol is fundamentally worse in some way than the same volume bought at a higher price. The evidence does not necessarily suggest that. The harmful component is the alcohol. The evidence even suggests that illicit alcohol is harmful only in the sense that it is strong and has lots of alcohol not because it has some other nasty chemicals that are also bad for one.

Younger people tend to drink more on average and it is true that they drink more in the pubs. The gradient across age is not that great. By our estimates, approximately 38% of their consumption is in the off trade whereas it is 46% or 47% for 35 to 54 year olds. There is not a huge difference. One might expect, although we do not have the figures here, that the impact of the policies on their consumption overall is quite similar. It is important to note that young people do not tend to suffer as much alcohol-related harm because they are young and not as ill. Young people do not tend to die as much as older people. That is a fact of life. If one is interested in the harm outcomes one will see that the policy has a much smaller impact on young people. That is because their baseline rate of harm is very low to start with.