“We’re not anti-alcohol. We’re just anti-alcohol harm”

Alcohol Change UK is the UK’s leading alcohol charity. It works across the whole range of serious alcohol harms, from mental and physical health to the societal and economic.

“We want to see a world without serious alcohol harm. We’re not anti-alcohol. We’re just anti-alcohol harm,” says Ailar Hashemzadeh, director of research and public affairs at Alcohol Change UK. “We know that alcohol impacts everyone, whether that’s through your own drinking, a loved one’s drinking, or the impact on our communities. But we also have a really strong belief that that harm isn’t inevitable.”

Reducing alcohol harms, she says, “doesn’t just sit within one department. It goes right across government, and there’s no one thing that can be done to reduce overall alcohol harms, so you need a cross departmental strategy that is embedded across the whole government. Alcohol deaths are at a record high here in the UK, so this really should be a pressing issue for the next government.”

Alcohol Change UK has three key asks. “One is around creating an environment that prevents alcohol harm from happening in the first place,” says Hashemzadeh. “There is this idea that if someone’s drinking too much they should just know that because the health risks are set out in the UK Chief Medical Officers’ low-risk drinking guidelines. But we absolutely don’t believe that. That isn’t the whole picture.

“The environment in which people drink alcohol absolutely influences their choices and the amount of harm that we see as a society, and alcohol labels just aren’t clear, so people are very confused about how much they should – or shouldn’t – drink. We run Dry January® and other behaviour change programmes and we offer a free app, Try Dry®, where people can track their drinking, because it can be really, really confusing.

“We want to see a strategy that focuses on things like tougher laws on marketing, advertising and promotion of alcohol. We’ve done a lot of work on improving the labelling of alcoholic products which have an exception that no other food product does. Alcohol is the only item that we consume that doesn’t legally have to display nutritional and health information.  We don’t think that’s right. We need clear labels on our alcoholic drinks, including ingredients, units and health warnings. And this should be regulated independently, and certainly shouldn’t be self-regulated by the alcohol industry.

“We are calling for alcohol duty to rise in line with inflation every year. We’re also asking for 2% on top of that because of the amount of freezes that the alcohol industry have had on alcohol duty over the past decade, to help cover the costs of the some of the harm that is caused by alcohol.”

“We know that minimum unit pricing works. This prevents strong alcohol being sold very cheaply, helping to reduce illness and hospitalisations caused by alcohol. The evidence from Scotland is really, really strong, the evaluation for a trial in Wales will be coming out next year. The Republic of Ireland has also brought it in, and Northern Ireland will be consulting on it, so England’s very much the country that’s behind.”

Minimum unit pricing was first implemented in the UK in Scotland in 2018, when legislation set the minimum price per unit of alcohol at 50p and banned multi-buy discounts. As Hashemzadeh notes, this has had a considerable impact on health and wellbeing – alcohol-related liver disease and deaths reduced by 10%, and the figure was even higher among the most deprived groups. Although there was an increase in deaths by 33% in 2020 from the previous year, this Covid-19 spike was reflected across the rest of the UK, and compared to England, Scotland saw 13.4% fewer deaths, including 11.7% fewer alcohol-related liver disease deaths, and 4.1% fewer hospitalisations, including 9.8% fewer alcohol-related liver disease hospitalisations.

Hashemzadeh also emphasises the importance of “ending the stigma and recognising the complexity of alcohol harm. We can’t tackle a problem if people feel worried or uncomfortable talking about it, or if people are too embarrassed to seek support if they need it, and as part of this piece of work, we are constantly looking at the language that we use and how we talk about alcohol.

“But the big campaign that we’ve got going on is around the Equality Act, which has a specific exception for people with alcohol dependence from its protections, and we don’t think that’s right. We think that that there are people who need that help and support, especially in the workplace. If someone’s going through recovery, they may need flexible working hours to go and get therapy or medication as part of their recovery programme, which means that they perhaps can’t work in the early morning. Those reasonable adjustments absolutely should be there for people who may have had alcohol dependence in the past.”

The final ask focuses on “ensuring that everyone can access support and treatment – having proper long-term funding for treatment services to be accessible, but also inclusive to our communities.

“Something like 80% of people who need alcohol treatment are not receiving it, and some people face multiple barriers. It’s not just stigma being alcohol-dependent and needing help. Sometimes they’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Sometimes they’re from an ethnic minority where people don’t talk about alcohol. There could be religious or economic factors, too, and we need to ensure that not only are the people who need that help supported, but that their family members and friends are also supported by services on how to help them and how to deal with their own experiences.”

Tackling alcohol harms in the UK will not be easy, but Hashemzadeh is optimistic. “We do need a complex mix of policies to achieve change, but we absolutely believe that change is possible.”

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We are calling on the government to commit to developing – and properly funding – a national alcohol strategy that will focus on education and support, and that acknowledges the increased vulnerability of marginalised people. Please join us in our efforts by signing our petition, writing to your MP and sharing our #DyingForADrink campaign on social media.