The health lobby’s move towards having a greater say in alcohol licensing decisions has big implications for supermarkets and off-licences.

The contention that significant sections of the population are drinking themselves into an early grave has prompted calls for England and Wales to follow Scotland and bring in plans for minimum pricing for alcohol.

Those calls were partly based on statistics purporting to show over a million alcohol-related hospital admissions in 2009/2010 and that such admissions had doubled in the past 10 years.

But the Department of Health now concedes that the way figures were collected was based on a method that requires revision. All medical conditions suffered by someone admitted to hospital are recorded. If they have high blood pressure, their admission will automatically be recorded as alcohol-related, whether that’s why they’re in hospital or not - and whether they drink or not.

A new method of recording alcohol-related admissions, to be adopted next April, is predicted to show figures in the region of 200,000 admissions per year. If repeat admissions are taken into account, the true figure may be in the region of 100,000 or less.

Since much of the recent debate about alcohol has been coloured by the one million admissions figure, can we expect a change of heart if that turns out to be the case? The answer would appear to be ‘no’. Minimum pricing remains very much on the agenda. David Cameron has asked officials to look into adopting a scheme similar to that going through the Scottish Parliament.

Price fixing has its own problems, not least its apparent incompatibility with EU competition law. Opinions differ as to whether minimum pricing would be legal and it seems that the courts may end up deciding this.

Despite this and the debate over the health stats, it is clear alcohol is in the firing line. Retailers need to start contingency planning now: a minimum price of 50p per unit of alcohol would have a major effect on supermarket deals, for example.

I believe it is also inevitable that ‘health’ will become a fifth licensing objective (as in Scotland), allowing PCTs to object to the grant of licences or to ask for conditions when a licence is granted. Not so good for the health of the licensing trade.

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