Projects & Research Partnerships

Introduction

Each year harms from alcohol cost the NHS £3.5 billion and wider society £21 billion. The UK Alcohol Strategy 2012 included a plan to introduce a policy called 'minimum unit pricing' (MUP).

Under MUP, the price at which alcohol can be sold is linked to the amount of pure alcohol (e.g. under a MUP of 50p per alcohol unit, a bottle of wine containing 10 units could not be sold for less than £5).

Although research shows this policy would probably reduce the amount of alcohol drunk and the number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by alcohol, by 2014 the government decided not to introduce MUP.

Local authorities (LAs) are responsible for responding to alcohol harms in their communities. The North West (NW) region of England has a higher than average level of alcohol harms. As MUP was not introduced for England as a whole, there is a high level interest in the North West in introducing MUP locally.

Expert legal advice says that one possible way to introduce MUP is for local authorities to use a law called the Sustainable Communities Act to ask the UK government to allow them to set a local MUP. To do this, local authorities need to:

1. Demonstrate local support for MUP
2. Provide local evidence that MUP would be beneficial for the health of people in the North West

Aims

This project aimed to address the second point above by providing evidence about what would happen if MUP was introduced by local authorities in the North West. Specifically, what would happen to the price of different types of alcohol, what effect these price changes would have on how much alcohol people drink and on the number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by alcohol, as well as changes to quality of life and NHS costs.

Method

To test what would happen to the amount of alcohol drunk if MUP were introduced locally, we took several steps:

• We combined survey and market research data (bought through this research grant) to work out how much alcohol of different types is currently bought and at what price.
• We used national survey data to estimate how much people currently drink in each local authority area.
• Using evidence from previous research on how people respond to price changes, we worked out how the amount of alcohol bought and consumed would change if there was a MUP. We worked this out for nine different levels of MUP (30p, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60, 65, 70p).

After working out what change there would be in the amount of alcohol drunk, we were able to estimate what difference this would make to harms. We:

• Used hospital information about the number of patients with conditions caused by alcohol to work out how many fewer cases there would be.
• Used death records on the number of people dying of alcohol-related causes to work out how many fewer deaths there would be.
• Converted these estimates to quality-adjusted life-years (QALY) which is a measure of quality and quantity of life gained from introducing a particular health policy.
• Estimated what changes would occur under MUP for 20 years for different population groups (e.g. more or less wealthy, and for light, moderate and heavy drinkers) for each local authority in the North West. We also undertook comparison with eight other regions.

Impact

Our work provided evidence about the likely scale of impact of MUP in the North West region. The local authorities, with whom we engaged in developing the bid, planned to use this to make a submission under the Sustainable Communities Act.