Minimum pricing failed in Wales too

Wales introduced minimum pricing for alcohol in March 2020 but you don’t hear much about it. There has been an evaluation but it has tended to use surveys rather than empirical data. The evaluation team have done their best to paint minimum pricing in the best light, but you don’t need to read between the lines too much to see that the policy has hugely underperformed.

The proportion of people in Wales classified as increasing or higher risk drinkers rose from 33% in 2018 to 40% in 2020 to 45% in 2022.  

People in Wales are drinking more frequently and fewer people are abstaining.

 

 

More people are binge-drinking, and twice as many people are binge-drinking every day than they did before minimum pricing.

 

 

Obviously there is the confounding factor of the pandemic and lockdowns which polarised drinking patterns and led to more heavy drinking across the UK. We don't have comparable figures for England, which does not have minimum pricing, but we do know that alcohol-specific mortality trends have been very similar in both countries since Wales introduced minimum pricing. 

 

As the graph below shows, alcohol-specific deaths rose by 3.2 per 100,000 in Wales after 2019 (27%) and by 3.0 per 100,000 in England (27%). (In Scotland, they rose by 3.8 per 100,000, or 20%.)

 Great success! 'Public health' just can't stop winning.