Meeting of the Parliament 19 June 2019
I am pleased to close for the Government this evening. I commend Kenneth Gibson for lodging the motion and highlighting the importance of protecting our young people from alcohol advertising. I also add my thanks to the cross-party group for its important work.
I will set out the distinct challenges that we face in Scotland. Since the 1980s, we have seen substantially increased alcohol consumption and, consequently, high levels of alcohol-related harm. On average, every adult in Scotland drinks around one third more than the lower-risk guidelines of 14 units per week.
That has a range of serious consequences. There are, on average, 22 alcohol-specific deaths every week in Scotland and 683 hospital admissions. Behind every one of those statistics is a person, a family and a community.
That was the motivation behind our 2009 alcohol framework, which has been successful in taking steps towards a healthier relationship with alcohol. We have banned irresponsible promotions of alcohol, lowered the drink-drive limit and implemented our national alcohol brief intervention programme.
We have taken significant steps over the past decade. Our refreshed alcohol framework, which was published last year, builds on a decade of progress and sets out 20 further actions to prevent harm. Our approach is rooted in the best international evidence. At the heart of our new framework are the World Health Organization recommendations to tackle the affordability, availability and attractiveness of alcohol.
We have taken bold action on affordability—I am proud to serve in the Government that implemented our world-leading minimum unit pricing policy last May.
As members may know, the annual monitoring and evaluating Scotland’s alcohol strategy monitoring report was published today. That includes alcohol sales data for 2018, with eight months of post-minimum unit pricing sales. The volume of pure alcohol sold per adult in Scotland fell by about 3 per cent from 2017 to 2018 to its lowest level for 25 years. Those are very promising signs.