Hansard

I think that the figure varies by income, which I think is the point that the member is making. I am sure that people will look forward to drinking more with Margo MacDonald in future.

Drinking is not just a problem of the poor. I heard a telling comment from an Edinburgh wine merchant who told a middle-class audience that they should all support minimum unit pricing because it would not affect them—“We drink wine, not cider,” he said. However, the greatest growth in the number of people abusing alcohol involves middle-aged, middle-income women. Indeed, the rise in consumption in Scotland since 1994 is wholly explained by wine, while the consumption of beer and spirits has declined in that period.

We have concerns about three main areas: the legality of the measure; its efficacy; and, related to that, the windfall of £125 million, which will go, in the main, to supermarkets. On the issue of legality, I note that the cabinet secretary is offering to notify the price-setting order to the EU, and that is welcome. However, the bill itself should be notified, and not simply as an accompanying document. The cabinet secretary knows that there is a difference. The bill forms an important context. It describes how minimum pricing will be applied and it contains the mechanism for calculating the price of products on the market. I believe that the Tories thought that the cabinet secretary had promised them that she would notify the whole bill, but she is not delivering that in full.

On the issue of efficacy, there is little impact on young people or on binge drinking and there is no impact on caffeinated alcohol products such as Buckfast, which we know causes wired, wide-awake drunks who engage in a disproportionate level of violence on our streets. As I said, of all alcoholic drinks, the consumption of wine is increasing at a considerable pace, yet the minimum unit price will have only a marginal impact.

I acknowledge that, for some people, the minimum unit price will have an impact. Further, at least people are talking about the issue and awareness has been raised in a way that it has not been before. Indeed, the level of consumption has helpfully, although slowly, been on a steady decline since the passing of the Licensing (Scotland) Act 2005, under the previous Administration.

The purpose of our reasoned amendment is to recoup the windfall of £125 million. The University of Sheffield model predicts that a minimum unit price of 50p will generate approximately £125 million each year as revenue for alcohol retailers. We know that supermarkets would be the biggest beneficiaries of that. The Confederation of British Industry believes that the figure will be in excess of £150 million. However, whatever the figure is, at a time when money is tight and the Scottish National Party is cutting the alcohol treatment budget by 7 per cent—more than £3 million—handing that money to supermarkets is, frankly, astonishing.

I am disappointed that the cabinet secretary has set her face against using—at least for the foreseeable future—the social responsibility levy, a measure that we supported. She could, of course, use the public health levy. Contrary to the SNP’s assertions, Labour supported the public health levy at the Local Government and Regeneration Committee when the order was debated. However, the public health levy takes back only £35 million in one year and applies only to retailers who sell tobacco and alcohol, yet a minimum unit price will generate £125 million each year, which is four times more than the cabinet secretary will claw back.

I know that the cabinet secretary believes that the supermarkets will reduce the price of bananas, which is, frankly, naive. Already I hear proposals to decrease the price of premium drink as a marketing ploy and to stock supermarket own-brand products in preference to others, but not one peep do I hear from the supermarkets about reducing the price of bananas.

This will be a massive leap of faith. Labour believes that there will be significant unintended consequences if the windfall remains with supermarkets, and that they could undermine the very purpose of the bill. That view is supported by the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Our preference would have been to build on the alcohol duty escalator that was introduced by Alistair Darling and has been continued by the coalition, which brought about rises of 2 per cent above inflation, which this year meant a rise of 7 per cent. We supported a proposal from the alcohol commission that would create a duty floor, added to which would be the price of invoicing—the French have been using such a measure to good effect. We even suggested on a cross-party basis in the chamber that the restructuring of duty to link it to alcohol strength would be preferable; that was later suggested by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

All those things would have raised the price of alcohol considerably, and would have returned the money to the public purse to be used for public services. Under the SNP’s proposal, not one penny will be spent on education, enforcement or treatment. Instead, the SNP wants to give supermarkets, which make billions of pounds of profit anyway, even more money. The SNP is stuffing the supermarkets’ pockets with gold when budgets across the public sector are being cut and it is cutting the alcohol treatment budget. People in Scotland just do not understand that: it does not make sense.

In closing, I observe that the cabinet secretary’s closing speech at stage 1 was very big on rhetoric but quite short on detail, which is surprising. I expect more of the same as the debate carries on, but I gently suggest that she change her tone—[Interruption.] I think that she should, because in her last speech she said that I was putting a blanket over my head on the issue, in an apparently witty reference to the lack of blankets in our hospitals, although she denied that at the time. That spectacularly backfired, so a bit of caution is required.

Tackling our relationship with alcohol is a serious issue. We have come forward with a serious suggestion to improve the bill and empower public services in tackling alcohol abuse in Scotland. There is time for the cabinet secretary to have a unified chamber, but she is in danger of losing it when she decides to fill the pockets—