All that time – and not a jot of action on drinking

Just drift. Let your thoughts swim, flop around, and come to a gentle, sliding rest.

And now, with no background noise, with no static interference, and with nothing clouding your mind at all, start to consider a very simple question: ‘Can it really, actually be true that in the five years since the Island’s top medical expert warned that Jersey’s population had a major drinking problem and consumed almost 50 per cent more alcohol than people in the UK, that we have done nothing about it?’. Pretty stark, isn’t it?

In fact, it’s not clear which is more shocking – the fact that we are drinking so much or the fact that we have done so little about it.

It’s worth recapping the basic facts. In her 2007 report, the then Medical Officer of Health, Dr Rosemary Geller ,warned that Islanders spent around £111 million on alcohol per year, or around £123 per person. It also said that they drank the equivalent of 14.8 litres of pure alcohol every year, compared to 11.8 litres in Scotland and 9.9 litres in the UK.

Three years later the warnings were repeated, with the JEP reporting that Islanders were downing an average of half a bottle of wine each per day, that one in 20 of us was dying a drink-related death, and that there were 1,000 hospital admissions directly due to alcohol problems per year.

Today, the situation is very slightly improved. Our drinking is down to 14 litres of pure alcohol per year (it’s 13 in France, 11 in the UK and eight in Canada), we are 50 per cent more likely to die of chronic liver disease than people in the south-west of the UK, and there are around 2,000 drink-related hospital admissions per year.

That amounts to a serious public health issue, one that the current Medical Officer of Health, Dr Susan Turnbull, puts on a par with smoking, which has seen huge changes in public policy in recent years.

But the States’ response to all this is that, basically, nothing much has happened.

OK, that’s not quite right. The States adopted the policy of putting up alcohol duty by more than the rate of inflation every year. In fairness, in the Bold and Decisive Public Policy Decision Hall of Fame, this is hardly likely to figure.

And it’s not as though there weren’t options. Back in 2009, Dr Geller proposed a range of ideas, like raising the minimum age to buy alcohol from an off-licence to 21, ending price promotions on alcoholic drinks, and having a minimum price per alcohol unit, as well as increasing duty.

Meanwhile, you can now buy booze in what seems like just about every shop in Jersey – not to mention the pubs, restaurants, bars, clubs and hotels. In fact, it’s pretty hard to walk down more than a couple of streets in St Helier without finding a shop of some description selling booze.

And since the 2007 report that found that we drink 50 per cent more than people in the UK and 25 per cent more than the Scots, the devolved Scottish government has headed off down the road of minimum pricing (getting far enough to be bogged down in a legal battle with the Scottish whisky industry) and the UK announced this week that they aren’t too far behind.

Here, the subject appears to have been bogged down by the fact that it’s an area which falls between the Economic Development department (responsible for licensing), the Health and Social Services department (responsible for public health) and the Home Affairs department (responsible for policing).

To add further confusion, they all want different, and not necessarily compatible, things: Economic Development want a decent evening economy and the jobs that flow from it, Health want fewer people drinking, and the police want less crime.

Bogged down, in fairness, isn’t the phrase for it. It seems as though the subject of alcohol and licensing has been ‘under review’ fairly constantly since the days when Deputy Gerald Voisin was running the old Economic Development Committee.

The problem isn’t just that the objectives of the departments aren’t compatible; the problem is that they collide head-on – to the point where Chief Minister Ian Gorst has had to step in to sort things out.

Proposals are expected early next year, and minimum pricing may or may not be a part of the recommendations (it’s worth noting that they have been a part of a presentation on the effects of alcohol on public health that has been doing the rounds).

There will be, no doubt, a huge amount of talk about public health during next week’s Budget debate over duty rises on alcohol (ministers want 10 per cent of spirits and wine, eight per cent on strong beer and five per cent on weak beer), whereas St Helier Constable Simon Crowcroft wants to reduce the increases to below-inflation levels.

‘If the Council of Ministers want to address alcohol abuse, they need to do it in a way that addresses the price and availability of alcohol in off-licences as well as licensed premises,’ is what he said to the JEP, announcing his amendment.

Perhaps he didn’t notice that he hadn’t come up with much in the way of proposals for addressing the price and availability himself – but he did make the point that there is a clear difference between the on-licensed trade of pubs and bars where price promotions are barred, and the off-licence trade where you can sometimes buy discounted beer cheaper than water.

He is right to say that. For ministers or anyone else to imagine that raising duty (while conveniently producing a few extra pennies) constitutes a measured response to the public health problems posed by alcohol abuse is someway beneath silly, when simple maths shows that we’ve drunk, on average, more than 900 bottles of wine each since the 2007 report that blew this subject wide open.

Part of the problem is that for most of us, alcohol isn’t really a problem at all. It’s hard to see things outside the range of your own personal experience, but the yawning gulf between most of our experience of drinking alcohol and the health risks it poses to some who abuse it distorts thinking on the subject.

This isn’t about you having a pint in the pub. It isn’t about a glass of wine over a meal. It isn’t even about you having a skinful at your Christmas do, making an idiot of yourself and feeling abysmal for a few days.

It’s about one in 20 of us dying a drink-related death. It’s about 2,000 people drinking their way into hospital every year. It’s about people in Jersey consuming more alcohol than almost anywhere else in the world. We’ve got a problem. We need to address it.

It’s the little things that matter in life …

THERE was an excellent Rachel Sylvester column in The Times the other day (it’s not surprising – there really is no other kind of Rachel Sylvester column) in which she hit on a strange truth.

Her point was this: It’s not the big, huge issues of state that affect peoples’ lives. The New Labour moves that will have had the most serious impact on people are the soft issues, not spending on schools, not the NHS, not Iraq. It’s the smoking ban, changes to maternity leave, civil partnerships, free entry to museums, Scottish devolution.

The logic holds true, I think, to the Jersey perspective. For example, I don’t think that the vote on Plémont will change anyone’s life one way or the other, but I’m fairly sure that people will remember it. It’s the same with the Millennium Town Park vote (on which note, how odd to see Deputy Geoff Southern’s position on public spending change so quickly).

Things like the Medium-Term Financial Plan, the Health reforms, even duty rises – they’ll all just fade away.