Minimum pricing failed in Wales too

What if - just hear me out - this policy simply doesn't work?

Wales introduced minimum pricing for alcohol in March 2020 but you don’t hear much about it. There has been an evaluation but it has tended to use surveys rather than empirical data. The evaluation team have done their best to paint minimum pricing in the best light, but you don’t need to read between the lines too much to see that the policy has hugely underperformed.

The majority of drinkers in this study continued drinking at the same frequency and quantity as they had before MPA had been implemented.

Among the few who reported changes in their consumption of alcohol, increases and decreases were reported and sometimes both were reported at different points in time.

And there were some predictable unintended consequences:

… some drinkers reported circumventing the legislation by travelling across the border to England to purchase alcohol at cheaper prices.

For the majority of drinkers, MPA had little or no effect on their personal lives.

When changes in relationships were reported, these were usually for the worse rather than for the better.

As predicted, some dependent drinkers reported increases in acquisitive crime to pay for their continued use of alcohol. Most commonly this involved shoplifting or paying someone less than the minimum price to shoplift on their behalf. 

There was also an increase in theft among street drinkers who were victimised when intoxicated. Being intoxicated was reported as being more likely among those who had switched from cider to spirits.

Finally, there was some limited evidence of dependent drinkers shifting their household budgets away from food to free up money to pay for alcohol and one case of fatal alcohol withdrawal that was perceived to have been caused by MPA.  

Top stuff! I can’t think why other countries have resisted the temptation to introduce this world-leading public health policy.

Further evidence of failure emerged from new statistics released this month.

The proportion of people in Wales classified as ‘increasing or higher risk drinkers’ rose from 33% in 2018 to 40% in 2020 to 45% in 2022.  

People in Wales are drinking more frequently and fewer people are abstaining.

More people are binge-drinking, and twice as many people are binge-drinking every day (or almost every day) than they did before minimum pricing.

Obviously there is the confounding factor of the pandemic and lockdowns which polarised drinking patterns and led to more heavy drinking across the UK. We don’t have comparable figures for England, which does not have minimum pricing, but we do know that alcohol-specific mortality trends have been very similar in both countries since Wales introduced minimum pricing. 

As the graph below shows, alcohol-specific deaths rose by 3.2 per 100,000 in Wales after 2019 (+27%) and by 3.0 per 100,000 in England (+27%). (In Scotland, they rose by 3.8 per 100,000, or +20%.)

Great success! ‘Public health’ just can’t stop winning.