Game over for minimum pricing

The SNP's experiment is finished in the eyes of any true Scotsman

It’s been a bad few days for minimum unit pricing (MUP). At the weekend, the Sunday Times revealed that Scottish civil servants had put pressure on Public Health Scotland to sex up their evaluation of the policy back in June. Today, we heard that the Scottish government has re-written its June press release, watering down strong claims about the success of minimum pricing and deleting a whole paragraph. Today also saw the publication of figures showing that the number of alcohol-specific deaths has hit a 14 year high in Scotland.

The political meddling with Public Health Scotland is disappointing but not surprising. The Sunday Times quoted ‘a source close to the process’ saying…

“It’s a shame the Scottish government’s control-freakery around messaging has extended to the presentation of the final [Public Health Scotland] report.

“It doesn’t undermine the findings, but anything that brings questions into people’s minds is a pity after all the work that has gone into ensuring the evaluation has been as independent and objective as possible.”

This is true. I was pleasantly surprised by how impartial the evaluation was. Public Health Scotland could have covered up inconvenient facts and given the evidence a pro-MUP slant but, on the whole, they didn’t. It was only when they published their final conclusion in the summer that they started cherry-picking, but we now know that was largely because of political interference.

Officials scoured a report sent to them on the impact of minimum alcohol pricing, submitting at least 88 comments and questions about one draft alone. They suggested that evidence that alcohol consumption had fallen after the minimum unit pricing (MUP) was introduced in 2018 be described as “strong”.

The final version of the report, published in June by Public Health Scotland, included the word, saying that there was “strong and consistent” quantitative evidence of a reduction in public alcohol consumption.

But the evidence was never strong and it was anything but consistent. In an evaluation comprising 40 studies, there was really only one cherry to pick. The research looking at A & E attendances, alcohol-related crime, heavy drinking, ambulance call outs, underage drinking, road traffic accidents and various other health-related issues all found either no evidence of a positive impact or found contradictory and inconclusive evidence (see pages 79-81). The only outlier was a study which compared trends in alcohol-specific deaths to a counterfactual of what might have happened if Scotland hadn’t introduced minimum pricing. That study estimated that the number of deaths could have been 13 per cent higher in the absence of the policy, but it clearly depended on a lot of assumptions, most of which were debatable.

That study became the flagship for the whole evaluation in the Scottish government’s propaganda to such an extent that you could be forgiven for thinking no other ships had set sail. Not only did the government focus on that study to the exclusion of all others, it treated its fundamentally speculative findings as if they were proven facts. The following misleading paragraph from the Scottish government’s June press release has now been deleted:

Wide-ranging evidence drawing on 40 independent research publications showed that MUP has been effective in its main goal of reducing alcohol harm with the reduction in deaths and hospital admissions specific to the timing of MUP implementation.

I have written about this for the Spectator today.

The June press release was so shamelessly one-sided that the Conservative MSP Dr Sandesh Gulhane wrote to the UK Statistics Authority about it. It takes a lot to make the Scottish government admit it was wrong so getting them to amend the press release is quite an achievement — even though the damage has already been done.

But the SNP still won’t admit that the policy has failed and nor will their cheerleaders in ‘public health’. Scotland’s state-funded temperance pressure groups are calling for the price to be increased. Dr Alastair MacGilchrist, chairman of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, said today: ‘It is vital that policies such as MUP remain in place to continue to reduce alcohol-related harms.’

Continue?!

Do have a read of it.

Minimum pricing has a sunset clause. If, after six years, the government cannot show it has worked, it is supposed to be repealed. The SNP have a job of work to do turning this pig’s ear into a silk purse, but they will keep minimum pricing in place because this is about politics, not evidence. Despite it all, no one seriously thinks that the sunset clause will be invoked - and that is a damning indictment of public health policy-making in Scotland. Nevertheless, anyone who has been following this issue can see that it has been a failure and the recent publicity means that more people are paying attention than ever before. The SNP and their cheerleaders in the temperance lobby can keep insisting that a 10 per cent increase in deaths is actually a 13 per cent decline, but nobody really believes them.