Andrew Lester
speaker
15 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2012
last heard Nov 2012
Andrew Lester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
More or Less · More or Less: Opinion polling, Kevin Pietersen, and stacking Lego · 30 Nov 2012
podcast
The Home Office has said that what it wants to do is reduce the availability of alcohol sold at very low or heavily discounted prices, which implies it would only hit a very small part of the market.
But from our estimates, it looks like that almost 60% of alcohol units sold off-licence, so sold in supermarkets and off-licences, would be affected by a minimum price of 45p a unit.
So it's a pretty big policy.
Yes, these are fairly big numbers.
Cider and peri tends to be the cheapest sort of alcohol.
We think on average it sells for just over 31 pence per unit, so 45p would be quite a bit higher than that.
But even for things like wine, it's just under half the market.
46% of wine units, for example, would be affected by the minimum price.
If we look by income, then we find that there's a slightly bigger impact on average for poorer households.
It's
It equates to about 1.1% of the grocery spending of households with incomes below £10,000 a year, about 0.5% of the spending of households with incomes above £60,000 a year.
There's an awful lot of research and an awful lot of evidence which demonstrates that when the price of alcohol goes up, people consume less of it.
So I think we can be fairly confident that this policy is going to reduce drinking overall.
What we don't necessarily know so clearly is whether it's the problem drinkers, perhaps the people who are addicted, or the people who are out binging, who will be reducing their consumption particularly as a result of this.
But I think it's a fairly safe bet that drinking will go down as a result of a minimum price.
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