Alcohol Change UK consultant Mike Ward works on our Blue Light Project, supporting some of the UK’s most vulnerable drinkers; here he considers what a minimum price for alcohol could do for this group.
Minimum unit pricing (MUP) sets a baseline price for a unit of alcohol, below which it can’t be sold. That means that it increases the price of very cheap, strong alcohol, and this reduces the harm alcohol causes. A minimum unit price of 50p is already in place in Scotland, and on 2 March will be introduced in Wales.
I have recently seen bottles of white cider on sale in England for as little as 16½p per unit, compared with the minimum of 50p per unit mandated by law in Scotland.
What the three-litre bottle size has done for some heavy-end drinkers is create a situation in which their consumption is going up in increments of 22½ units. If beer was sold in pubs 22½ units at a time, you’d have buy nine pints every time you went to the bar!
