 Felly, rhesstiaeth ddybl i gwelliannodd y gaelol, gyda Slesiau Cyfnodau, a'r Sioedden y Llywodraith yw yn 2024. Mae ddylai am ddif僲. Roeddwn i gaelol i gaelol y gaelol? Felly roi'r gaelol i gaelol i gaelol, iddynt i chi'n gaelol yma? is to increase the value of payments for free personal care and nursing care by 6.68 per cent. The policy note states that payment rates are being increased in line with inflation using the GDP deflator, with rates increasing from £233.10 to £248.70 for personal care, and increasing from £104.90 to £111.90 for nursing care. The Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee considered this instrument at its meeting on 23 January 2024 and made no recommendations in relation to the instrument. We will have an evidence session on the instrument with the Minister for Social Care, Mental Well-being and Sport and Sporting Officials. Once we have had all our questions answered, we will proceed to a formal debate on the motion and I welcome to the committee Marie Todd Minister for Social Care, Mental Well-being and Sport, Marianne Barker, unit head, adult social care charging and support from home, and Claire Thomas, policy manager, adult social care charging and support from home, all from Scottish Government. I invite the minister to make a brief opening statement. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee today regarding a proposed amendment to the community care, personal care and nursing care Scotland regulations 2002. The draft regulations before the committee today make routine annual increases to the rates for free personal and nursing care. Those payments help to cover the cost of those services for self-funding, adults and residential care. This year I am happy to propose an uplift based on the GDP deflator, which will result in an increase of 6.68 per cent to the current rates. The GDP deflator has been used historically as the inflationary measure to increase those rates. That will mean that the weekly payment rates for personal care for self-funders will rise from £233.10 to £248.70 and the nursing care component will rise from £104.90 to £111.90. It is estimated that that will cost around £11.5 million in the next financial year. That will be fully funded by the Scottish Government with additional investment in the local government settlement, as outlined in the recent £24.25 Scottish budget. The most recent official statistics show that over 10,000 self-funders receive free personal and nursing care payments. They should all benefit from those changes. I am happy to take any questions from the committee. Thank you very much Minister and we will move to questions and Paul Sweeney. I would like to query that increasing the rate above inflation for the last three years, the Scottish Government has effectively admitted that in line with inflation uplifts are simply not enough to meet the rising costs of providing care, yet this statutory instrument puts the rate in line with inflation in the coming financial year. Who does the minister intend to see meeting the gap that is rising between rising costs and the actual incapacity to pay for them? What is covered in the local government settlement? Is it for already councils that are under significant financial pressures in the forthcoming budget settlement to find that extra financial capacity rather than the Government centrally? Given the challenging financial context that we are facing, I am happy that we have been able to increase the rates by 6.68 per cent. That is increasing investing an additional £11.5 million through the local government settlement to do this. It is for local authorities to make decisions on how they spend their funding at a local level. Does the minister not accept though that more than 80 per cent of local government finance is determined by central government grants and therefore constrains their capacity to meet the other side of the equation? Traditionally, the payment has increased in line with inflation since 2010. In the first few years of its existence, up to 2007, when the SNP Government came into power, it was not increased at all—not in line with inflation and not at all. From 2007 to 2010, the payment rate was negotiated between us and local authorities. From 2010 to 2020, it was increased using the GDP deflator. As you said, in the past three years, there has been an above-inflation rise to it. Unfortunately, the financial context this year means that that cannot occur again. However, in the financial context that we are experiencing, I am pleased to be able to increase it in line with the GDP deflator, as stated. In terms of the GDP deflator that you are setting it to, what assessment has the Government made of any impact of this rate upon the delivery of personal care? Can the minister guarantee that people will still be able to access the care that they need and that it will remain free at the point of use? We have not done an impact on assessment, because it is not a new policy. It is continuing an existing policy, so we have not done a full impact assessment. However, we expect this to support everyone who is self-funding within the system that we think is about 10,000 people in Scotland. In the previous years, you were concerned that the rate was increasing more. Do you have concerns this year again that that will be the case and that local authorities and local government would need to meet the costs that will not be in the settlement agreed to? In the past three years, our ambition has been to give above inflation settlements. Unfortunately, the financial context that we find ourselves in this year is not enabling us to do that. Local authorities will make their own decisions on their local priorities, as they are democratically elected to do. In your modelling, I suppose, you are anticipating that local government will need to make some contribution to costs. In the previous three years, you think that there will be an increase in costs. I am going to ask my official player to come in here and respond to that line of question. Those free personnel and nursing care rates are set out in the legislation, so there are set rates. There should not need to be a contribution from local authorities. Those contracts and the rates that self-unders pay are private arrangements between individuals and the provider. Thank you Minister. Just to pick up again on what Paul and Carol were asking, the £11.5 million that will be the cost, is that £11.5 million that the central government has put into a budget that would allow local authorities to make their own choice? Is that an extra £11.5 million that the central government has put in, or is it that that £11.5 million cost is something that local governments have to just find? That additional £11.5 million is additional funding that is put in to fully fund this uplift. I have not done any indication that any other members wish to ask questions, so we will move to agenda item 3, which is the formal debate on the instrument on which we have just taken evidence. Minister, can I ask you to speak to and move motion S6M-11853? I am happy to move motion S6M-11853, that the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee recommends that the Community Care, Personal Care and Nursing Care Scotland amendment regulations 2024 be approved. Thank you Minister. Members should not put questions to the Minister during the formal debate, and officials may not speak in the debate, and I invite any members who wish to contribute to the debate. Mr Sweeney. Thank you, convener. I have concerns about this strategy that has been recommended to Parliament because the Scottish Government has previously set the rate of inflation for the last three financial years to help to redress the cost of providing personal and nursing care, which has increased significantly and payments have not kept pace with us by their own admission, then this rate increase in line with inflation is insufficient to meet the rising real costs of delivering personal care. The Scottish Government expects members to trust in their vision, which we have not yet seen for a national care service, which delivers, in their own words, consistent and high standards, yet this statutory instrument demonstrates an inability to adequately resource a basic tenet of social care, whereas it won't be voting actively against the statutory instrument, who do have concerns about recommending this rate? To Parliament, which falls short of what local government needs to provide personal care? Thank you. I have had no indication that any other member wishes to speak. Minister, could you sum up and respond to the debate, please? As stated during questioning, this operating is fully funded by the Scottish Government, and local authorities have ring-fen additional income into their budget in order to ensure that it is paid. I am happy to put this trouble with the committee. The question is that motion S6M-11853 be approved. Are we all agreed? Thank you. The committee is agreed. That concludes consideration of the instrument, and I will now briefly suspend the meeting to allow a changeover of witnesses for our next item. The next item on our agenda is the first of our two oral evidence sessions as part of our post-legislative scrutiny of the Alcohol Minimum Price in Scotland Act 2012. I welcome to the meeting Alison Douglas, chief executive alcohol focus Scotland, Dr Alastair McGillchrist, chair of Scottish Health Action on Alcohol Problems, Tracy McFall, chief executive of Scottish Recovery Consortium and Justina Murray, CEO of Scottish Families, affected by alcohol and drugs, and we will move straight to questions in Santish Gohani. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Thank you for coming in. Alison, may I start with you, please? How accurate has the Sheffield model been in each of its iterations prior to its update? The Sheffield modelling predicted that there would be a 3.5% decrease in consumption, which is pretty much what we have seen in practice. In terms of the effect on consumption, it has been pretty accurate. In terms of the effect on health outcomes, it was a very conservative estimate and the effect that we have seen in the real world has been significantly higher. I think that they were probably quite deliberate in being cautious about the expected health benefits, but in practice we have seen that, as you know, it was predicted to save 60 lives in the first year of operation. In practice it has saved 156 lives, so that was significantly greater than was predicted. The key thing is that the theory of change that was behind this Parliament's support for minimum unit price has, through the evaluation, been fairly well borne out. The real world evidence that we have been able to add through this comprehensive evaluation to the evidence that came from other countries, but also from the Sheffield modelling, is all painting a picture that minimum price is operating in the way that we expected it to. It is affecting high strength, low cost drinks the most. It is thereby reducing consumption, particularly among those who are drinking above low-risk guidelines. It is reducing alcohol harm. The way that we can measure that is through alcohol-specific deaths, so they are deaths that are caused directly as a consequence of alcohol and through no other cause. That is the 156 that I alluded to. In addition, we have a whole range of conditions such as cancers, heart cardiovascular disease and minimum unit price is also having an effect on those. There is an estimate of an additional 112 lives saved each year due to minimum unit price. That is the reason that over 30 organisations the direction of public health have given, have endorsed the evidence that we have given to the committee and that of SHAP because there is a widespread understanding through the medical community, through public health professionals, through children's charities that minimum unit price is working but that it needs to be upgraded. A number of things that you said in your opening answer to me. You said 156 lives like a fact, but that is an estimate based upon modelling which is under intense scrutiny. You talked about comprehensive evidence and only one out of the 30 papers that were evaluated is what you were speaking about. The other thing that I really do want to get into here, and I wonder if I might be able to bring Justina in prior to coming back to you, Alison, is about dependent drinkers. How has MUP affected dependent drinkers? I think I'm going to pre-empt this with a slightly different comment, which is I'm here today representing Scottish families so on behalf of families affected by alcohol and drugs. I think families are just getting a little bit frustrated that this is still being debated so many years down the line. You know that we've lost over 11,000 people specifically to alcohol over the past decade, many times more than that if we look at alcohol-related conditions and other things linked like violence and accidents and so on. Families really understand why this is still being debated. They want to see action on other issues as well, marketing, availability and treatment. We are part of the public health community, not just Scotland, but part of the international public health community. That community is united in believing the evidence and understanding the evidence that MUP saves lives. It is designed as a whole population approach. We can see that it has reduced consumption, it has reduced hospital admissions and it has reduced deaths. Sorry, can I ask you for the evidence that has reduced hospital admissions, please? The evidence has all been presented to you. Was it statistically significant? The papers we've shared show that hospital admissions have reduced by 13.4 per cent. Was it statistically significant? I'm here as a charity CEO. I'm not going to start arguing with you over statistical significance. I think that you should be focusing on the fact that MUP has saved lives. I think that you're possibly the only person in the room I'm not sure who doesn't believe the evidence, but I think that I'm standing firm with the public health community across the world saying that price is the most effective mechanism for reducing harm and reducing deaths. I do believe the evidence. I want to make that abundantly clear, and this is why I'm asking the questions. I asked you specifically at the very beginning what does MUP do to dependent drinkers, which you haven't answered yet? You're correct to haven't answered it. Many of the families that we support are families whose loved ones are drinking at hazardous, harmful and dependent levels. Price is one of many factors that they talk about in changing their loved ones' behaviour. The evidence on dependent drinkers was never supposed to be what we pinned the success of MUP to. It is a whole population measure, and it has worked as a whole population measure. We know where people are dependent drinkers. Their needs are very complex. They're very specific. One tool in the toolkit is never going to work for all dependent drinkers. Some drinkers have said that they have changed their behaviour based on MUP, but we also need to look at these other tools in the toolkit. Instead, we just focus all of the time on MUP and talk about MUP all of the time, but it's got to sit alongside availability and marketing and treatment. We certainly will be coming on to those questions. You haven't answered my question about dependent drinkers. I said that their needs are very complex and specific, so price alone is not going to be the only thing that's going to impact their drinking. I think that that is an answer. The evidence shows that dependent drinkers are spending more on their alcohol consumption. If I may come back to you, what has happened to help dependent drinkers who are spending more money to try to help them come away from alcohol—for example, alcohol brief interventions or people seeking treatment? How has that worked for dependent drinkers? To come back to the point about how minimum unit price worked for dependent drinkers, let's be absolutely clear that it was not the purpose of minimum unit price to change the drinking of dependent drinkers. The purpose was to reduce consumption among people who are drinking above the low-risk guidelines. Just to give you a sense of scale in relation to that, roughly about 1% of the Scottish population is alcohol dependent. That's about 50,000 people or so. 23% of us are drinking above the low-risk guidelines. That's well over a million of us. That's what we mean when we talk about a population-based measure. The effect has been greater on those who are drinking at higher levels. When it comes to dependent drinkers, as Justina has indicated, if people are waking up in the morning and they are psychologically and physiologically dependent on alcohol, the first thing that comes to their mind is not how much am I paying for my alcohol. It is that I need alcohol now to get me through this morning. It is really clear that people who are in that extreme position need more intensive support in order to overcome their alcohol problem. I can tell you, and I am sure that Tracey can add to that, that people who are dependent on alcohol or who are in recovery from serious alcohol problems are very clear when I have been speaking to them that minimum unit price would not have changed their dependence on alcohol, but they wholeheartedly support minimum unit price as a preventative measure to ensure that people do not come along behind them and experience dependence on the severe problems that they and their families have had to contend with. The message from people in recovery is to get on with renewing an up-rating minimum unit price because it is such an essential component of the wide range of things that we need to be doing to tackle the alcohol problem in Scotland. I am sorry, but I want to move on. You have had 12 minutes of questions and answers and we have got lots to get through. I am going to move to Tess White. Thank you, Camila. May I ask my question to Dr McGillchrist, please, initially, and then if another member of the panel would like to answer this question? In terms of looking at the facts and the data, alcohol deaths are the highest now since 2008 and the number of male deaths has remained unchanged, yet the data from 2022 shows that the number of female deaths has risen by 31 to 440. How does minimum unit pricing help reduce the number of female deaths? The question about female deaths is quite a specific area and we will get into some quite close detail here, but when you look at the modelling for a minimum unit price, when we set it at 50 pence, the unanimous agreement, a 50 pence was first suggested in 2012. By 2018, 50 pence was already on the borderline of how effective it would be because of the effective inflation over that time. The modelling suggested that, at that 50 pence level, MEP is less effective on preventing female deaths than preventing male deaths. It is interesting that a 50 pence has been effective over the last five years, but it has probably not been consistently effective over those five years. It is becoming less effective as time passes because of the effective inflation. 50 pence now isn't what it was in 2018, perhaps what it was in 2012. It is, I think, reasonable to speculate that that very disappointing and interesting small increase in female deaths between 2021 and 2022 might reflect that MEP is becoming less effective, particularly in women. We do not really understand why that is. Maybe because women drink a different pattern of products compared to men, less likely to drink the cheapest end of the range in terms of cider, et cetera, compared to drinking wine. Wine is relatively ineffective, not affected by MEP at that 50 pence level. If you do not mind, I really cannot let a couple of the comments that have gone previously go unchallenged in terms of an answer. If you do not mind giving me just two minutes to come back on a couple of points, I realise that very briefly. Dr Oghahani stated that only one in 30 of the studies showed this. That is a very misleading statement, I am afraid. There was only one study that looked at population-level deaths on hard data, i.e. national statistics on deaths and admissions, and that study showed a clear difference between Scotland, where there is MEP and England, where there is not. That was not modelling, but looking at real-world data. To suggest that 156 is based on modelling is incorrect. That is real-world data. It is an estimate because we are talking about percentage differences, but it is not a model. You asked about the significance of the hospital admissions. Again, that gets very detailed, but when medical studies talk about statistical significance or clinical significance, they talk about a 95 per cent certainty that it could not have happened by chance. The data on hospital admissions showed 94 per cent certainty, p equals 0.06. Yes, it did not cross the 95 per cent certainty, but you can draw your own conclusions about 94 per cent versus 95 per cent in terms of whether there is an effect or not. Just one final point before we go on to other matters, the question about dependent drinkers. It is important that everybody understands what we are talking about here. Harmful drinkers, people who are drinking in excess of 35 units for men, 50 units for women, constitute probably around 5 per cent of the population. Dependent drinkers, 1 per cent. These dependent drinkers are people who are already addicted to alcohol. Of course, MEP is not the solution for them. The whole point about MEP is to prevent people from getting to that point. It is a preventative measure. Thank you, convener. Can I go back to my question? Sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry. It is like gone off piece. Apologies. If we can go back on piece, which is female deaths. Yeah, yeah, I understand that. And it is statistically significant. 31 to 440 is a huge increase. So we are looking at no change in male deaths since 2008, but the female deaths are, it is dramatic. And you talk about modelling and speculative, but if you actually look at the data from the National Records Scotland, the data does not support what you are saying. And what you have confirmed is that female deaths you just do not know if MEP affects. So I'd just like to say there's no answer. So can I invite Alison Douglas, please? I need to perhaps finish my answer then if I didn't clarify to you. What I'm saying is that MEP at 50 pence is less effective on women than it is on men, and the data is bearing that out. So if you want to solve the problem of why it's less effective on women, the clear answer is to operate MEP. I dispute that. Can I ask Alison Douglas, please, thank you. Thank you. So I think in relation to deaths as a whole, what we saw was. Sorry, the questions about women. I'm going to get there. So deaths as a whole doubled between the 70s and the 2000s. And women are still much less likely than men to die. However, because of a number of different changes in society, women are drinking at higher levels than they have previously. What we've seen in terms of what people are consumed in Scotland is increases across the UK is an increase in wine in particular, and wine is often favoured by female drinkers. So we've seen the increasing social acceptability of women drinking and the increased availability of wine and the increased acceptability of wine drinking. And I think these things over time have contributed to an increase in female deaths. So we talked earlier about alcohol specific deaths, which are three quarters of those would be alcoholic liver disease. And Dr McGillchrist can speak to what clinicians are seeing in terms of having very young women presenting where they hadn't seen that previously. But also many of those conditions, the alcohol related conditions, can take 10, 20 years to manifest themselves. So for example, alcohol related cancers, breast cancer, those can take 10, 20 years to manifest themselves. So I think part of what we're seeing is probably because of the increased drinking amongst women that that is flowing through into increased deaths. Thank you. I'm not just disputing those facts, but just disputing the question of MUP on female deaths, alcohol related deaths. Thank you. Just a question for Dr McGillchrist. I'm interested in the medical community that works in this area. I'm sure you've discussed MUP as part of that whole package. In terms of the medics that work in this area, are they generally quite convinced that this has helped them and that we should upgrade to it? Yes. There's no doubt that MUP has maybe not unanimous but near unanimous support for the medical community and the health community in general. Without indulging you too much, the background to this is that my clinical career is spent as a liver doctor. As you've heard, not only are most alcohol specific deaths due to liver disease, it works out the way around to most liver deaths or due to alcohol. So I've got lots of folk in my ward who are dying of liver disease. I was in the infirmary last week speaking to my colleagues and it was just a usual week. 18 out of the 19 patients in the ward had 19 out of the 19 patients with liver disease due to alcohol, so that's a scale of the problem. The last death they had at the weekend was a 40-year-old who had two young kids. So frustrating that it comes to you when it's at an irreversible stage. Serozus is silent until you have advanced disease. To have a mechanism that's preventative, that's why I got interested in the stuff in the first place. If you can prevent them getting it in the first place. I've come to this public health stuff a bit later and I'm reading the evidence. It's actually clear that we've known what to do for a long time. We've known what's effective, affecting price, availability, attractiveness and marketing we've been speaking about a bit. So to have this targeted progressive policy that reduces health inequalities, the medical community is delighted. We're not seeing it on the ward yet to be honest. Some of the deaths which Ms White has referred to, it's important to realise that we're still seeing the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, which has had a major effect on everything, but including alcohol deaths and liver deaths. So it's more important than ever that we use effective measures such as MUP at a proper level. We have got a lot to get through this morning. So can I ask both committee members and witnesses if they can keep their answers concise, please? And I'll move to Emma Harper. Thank you, convener. Good morning everybody. So over the weekend I was reading about minimum unit pricing policy that's been implemented in other European countries and I do declare an interest as a registered nurse, former liver transplant nurse. So I'm interested in like what do we, other countries that are adopting MUP in some form or other, other European countries have got some form of taxation on alcohol anyway. So for me there's one report that's called No Place for Cheap Alcohol, the potential value of minimum pricing for protecting lives. So I'd be interested to hear from you about what we can learn from other countries and then perhaps the impact of the pandemic would be a second question. Shall I take that? I'll leave the other countries to you. The international community is the eyes are on Scotland because it was the first country in the world to introduce MUP having known for a long time that pricing is effective but pricing regulation is generally by taxation. The attraction of MUP is this idea that you target the cheaper drinks which the heavier drinkers take. So prior to Scotland there was a few provinces in, well quite a number of provinces in Canada who have something similar. There's now one province in Australia, Northern Territories, one, two other areas within the British Isles, Ireland and Jersey I think in the Channel Isles. The ones in Europe in general are slightly different. We often target one particular drink in Russia, in Lithuania, sorry, in Ukraine. It's interesting that Ukraine has a variety, it's specifically its spirits. We're lucky in Scotland that we have very good evaluation, good data. Few other areas have such good data so that's why they're interested in watching what's happening in Scotland. That's one of the reasons that the industry is so worried if you like because if it seems to be effective then other countries will adopt it. But you're still only talking about a handful of countries and you can ask yourself why that is maybe with the power of the industry. Most people just rely on taxation which is a much blunter tool. Okay thanks and in the pandemic justina. Yeah if I could come in on that. So in December 2020 when we thought actually the pandemic was tailing off Scottish families produced a report called lockdown and beyond and in that we talked about that impact of the pandemic on families and we really saw like we don't get involved as a charity where there's alcohol use in a family or drug use in a family is where there's harm and I think during the pandemic we really saw for a lot of families that use becoming harm and we talk about both new families and existing families so there was already families pre-pandemic where they knew there was an issue with alcohol for example but actually during the pandemic alcohol use increased and it was more likely to be happening in the home because of the closure of hospitality and the stay-at-home rules and also that other members of the house were also more likely to be at home and then there was also new families where they weren't actually aware there was an issue before but you know it was hard to hide that during the pandemic when again everybody was at home and all the things that families do normally to keep themselves well you know maybe to go to work to go to school to go to college to meet their friends to go for a swim in the gym whatever none of that was available so everybody was kind of stuck in the house with this alcohol use increasing so it really was what we call the kind of pressure cooker situation and of course alongside that there was the closure of a huge number of treatment services and support services that could no longer be accessed so people who were concerned about their drinking were phoning the Scottish families helpline because they were trying to contact services and nobody was answering the phone or there was a voicemail and nobody was getting back to them so you know it was just like a perfect storm and obviously once that box has been opened you can't just say oh well the pandemic's over now we'll just pretend that never happened you know that harm is ongoing and we're not really seeing the pickup and treatment services and support services for example that we need so it's a pandemic affected our ability to capture further evidence or it's all obviously informed the way that some evidence has has been gathered because we saw higher levels of drinking as you've described justina so so does that mean that minimum unit pricing we just need to continue and and then go and continue to get some you know further robust evidence as he Allison said got our hand up thank you yes as as justina said you know the the scale of the problems increased and i think like so many other areas of our health and we have this covid hangover or unfortunate legacy on our health whether it's cancer or it's mental health or it's alcohol there are ongoing effects from covid that people who started to drink more during the pandemic unfortunately don't appear to have reverted to their previous patterns of drinking since the pandemic and that means that we have an even greater kind of public health emergency on alcohol than than we would otherwise have had and i really fear you know we could be heading back to record levels of deaths if we don't do something part of that response needs to be minimum unit price and upgrading it but there's a whole range of other things which we also need to be doing and but i think the to your point about the evidence base the study which public health scotland did around the deaths and the hospital admissions not only did it use the kind of gold standard data but they were they used the methodology which would be largely accepted as that you know the best possible methodology for the statistical analysis and they did a whole range of controls and that included stopping the data before the pandemic and looking at whether there was a material change and what they found was by using england as the comparator there was the same sort of changes in in deaths were were evident and there was the same direction of travel that deaths went up significantly but while in scotland they went up by 22 percent they went up by 30 percent in england and they concluded that the only plausible explanation for that was the introduction of minimum unit price okay thank you thanks to the panel i would just like to ask if any of the panelists have concerns that there may have been unforeseen negative impacts on health rate outcomes which have not been picked up by the public health scotland evaluation and if there are any other aspects that you would have liked to have seen measured or have found it difficult or impractical to evaluate so one example that i have concerns about is potential substitution with benzodazepins so-called street valium should i take that i'll start anyway another other's contributing one of the points about the public health scotland led evaluation was how comprehensive it was you know for the past few years you went into international meetings they've never seen a measure that's had undergone such scrutiny which includes what we're doing in this room so the evidence that they're they've wondered about substitution both in terms of other products such as benzos or or illegal illicit alcohol not really a problem in the UK to be honest or cross border trade so they did look at these three things and found no significant evidence there was a little bit of press just about a year or two into MUP about a couple of examples of people who had taken benzos but what you found when you looked at the evidence was that they found no evidence that anybody who wasn't using street drugs or or not non-prescription drugs started to do it some who were using both perhaps changed the emphasis of what they were doing so i'm not too concerned about the illicit thing it hasn't proved to be a big problem thanks just to comment from a really practical community-based level in the communities that we work across in my engagement over a number of years with communities who use both alcohol alcohol and drugs that has not been the case so there is that evidence space but in real life communities there was a concern that that would happen we haven't seen that in the communities that we work with i think we need to keep our eye on that really really closely but we haven't seen that and that's from real life communities that we engage with in a day-to-day basis we haven't seen that thank you thank you David Torrance thank you convener good morning witnesses and i know everyone you have touched on it slightly but to make sure that it's on record for a committee what would you say to those who have concluded from available evidence that minimum unit pricing is not working in targeting problem drinkers i'm happy to start to make a really broad point this is not only about minimum unit pricing this is about the other things that we need to wrap around that so that's about early intervention prevention and education it's about access to treatment it's about minimum unit pricing it's about opportunities about employment it's about what happens after treatment so there's a real there's something more broadly that we really need to look at this in the recovery communities that we've spoke with and my experience in the sector this is one tool and it needs to be in the suite of a number of different tools and just a very another very broad point we're talking about alcohol consumption here how is it committee just before christmas cross-party committee where we're talking about drug deaths there is connections across alcohol drugs mental health justice homelessness domestic violence from a policy perspective we need to be joined in the dots and we need to be joining those dots locally as well so from a from a broad point of view that's the two things that i'd like to get across this is not just about minimum unit pricing because if it is it won't work we need access to treatment we need access to recovery we need access to opportunities and all of this is underpinned by poverty and inequality that we really need to focus on too thank you i think just to a risk of slight repetition i talk about problem drinkers all the time too it's common parlance but we have to be careful what we're talking about here um a the harmful drinkers and as i said the dependent drinkers are small proportion of those the people who i think um m up has had least effect on are the dependent drinkers but i think that people person people who has had most effect on are those who are drinking at a harmful level or a certainly hazardous or harmful level and quote you two bits of that um one is that um when they looked at the sales data and of course remember that sales data is more robust than survey data um a survey you're asking people questions about how much they drink and maybe the reclause not very good um maybe they're not always entirely honest and maybe you don't reach the people who you need to with surveys so sales data showed that not only had sales fallen from off sales but a from data collected on till receipts the the households who bought the most alcohol were the ones who had seen the biggest change that's encouraging and the second thing is again coming back to my liver disease hat when you look at that difference between scotland and england um those deaths that were happening in england that that haven't happened in scotland you might have expected to happen it's all liver deaths now i can tell you all my liver patients are very heavy drinkers um and so there's no way that those deaths would have been we've seen that difference scotland england unless heavy drinkers were not being influenced by mv convener for my other questions have been answered okay thank you Ruth Maguire thank you convener good morning panel thanks for being with us um i suppose hearing um justine i talk about the 11 000 um people lost alcohol think about the families and children around them so i'd like to ask about um children and families um i hear a bit of the frustration about us just talking about minimum pricing however that's the that's the legislation that we're scrutinising but do feel free to to add extra in amongst that um i think my questions would tend to be for um the justine and forgive me it's terrible my seat i can't see names Tracy apologies Tracy um as i think you'll have um rich evidence from us from from families the public health scotland evaluation report says researchers felt unable to determine of minimum minimum unit alcohol pricing had a positive or negative impact on the lives of children and young people affected by parental drinking and said there was no evidence in a change of parenting outcomes i think we would probably all intuitively understand the harm that drinking causes i wonder if you just want to say a bit about the impact on on children and families i think one of the issues for children and young people and adult family members actually is so much of this is hidden so you know there was a question earlier about you know needing more research or more evaluation and i think you know we know that um there's so much stigma and shame and secrecy around alcohol used within the family that i think we can be quite confident that most of that harm is hidden and particularly um where you know so many people outwardly you know they might have a nice house a nice car you know great job and actually there's a lot of drinking going on behind the scenes and there's really very little support for families there's there's i would say there's the best support for children is where there's opioid use in the in the family and particularly where there's a single parent or both parents using that i think there's a whole lot of families where there's alcohol use and actually it's not on anybody's radar because children are attending school and you know young people attending college and so on so i do you think we need to talk more openly about you know what's going on and i think we've got this really contradictory approach to alcohol in scotland where we we use it to you know mark every single occasion you know hatches matches and dispatches and yet if anybody develops a problem then we don't really want to know about it so i think that's my main issue for families is that just so much of this harm is hidden and the support's not not there for them thank you yeah i agree with justina and there's a huge amount of stigma attached to alcohol use so whilst it is hidden it's it's very difficult for families and family members and therefore the impact on children to come forward into treatment services and i think there's a reality here that there's actually less treatment services to support alcohol than there ever has been in scotland so if families identify there is an issue where do they go and that's why justina says that recalls to the the helpline because families are really struggling when they identify there's an issue on where they get that help and there's a massive stigma attached to that so i suppose there's parallels in relation to somewhere learning around the drugs work and the national mission we could learn from that in relation to some of the work we've done around stigma we don't need to stab from a blank piece of paper and again that's why we really need to be looking at this across portfolio approach so i agree with justina sorry and we still need access to treatment if families identify that and we do need to do more research but you need to be using organisations like the scotland families and scotland recovery to get access to those families because more than likely they'll probably go before in scotland families first before accessing treatment services okay thank you can you know if i may just come back in as this is a post legislative that's my least favourite word to say i find it really difficult scrutiny often when legislations moving through parliament will talk about the other things that are needed so i'm sure at the time this was a little bit before my time because it was 2012 the need for treatment and additional interventions would have been spoken about has there been progress on those types of things thank you yes i think that's maybe the frustration you're you're hearing today is you know in scotland's alcohol framework and in rights respect and recovery there's multiple commitments around price availability marketing and treatment and support and actually so much focus so much you know funding for research has gone on to that the MUP quite rightly it was well evaluated and so on but actually what about everything else and i think that's the point that families are just really reaching breaking point with all of the other stuff that needs to be looked at as well and we're obviously talking about costs a lot this morning but when we started to talk to families about costs of living issues and when that was first kind of hitting the press and so on you know that wasn't even in the top 10 things that families are worried about and is keeping them awake at night which is not to say that families don't have cost of living worries but we've actually talked about the cost of loving that is the cost that they face it's really relentless every day yes there's financial as practical as health costs life is chaotic and so within that yes price is a factor but also all of these other things need to be addressed thank you thank you very much and good morning panel hugely important subject and i think there's probably many of us that have had family members or friends that have succumbed to alcohol harm and passed away earlier than they should have done i wanted to focus a wee bit on the the economics of this and so i'm going to be a bit geeky to kick off with i'll start you've got a chart and your submission the sharp submission and i'm just trying to get my head around what the labels are on the axis i'm assuming the if you got it to hand there yeah yeah i'm assuming the left hand side is units of alcohol per person per year the right hand side the relative numbers there what are those 100 200 what um yes i'm not sure i know but i can tell you what this is a slide from a very old piece of data in the 70s and 80s actually um a which first drew attention to the fact that there's an absolutely clear relationship between a how much we uh i think let me just see yeah this is about consumption not harm how much we drink in relation to how affordable it is um so price relative to income which is the right hand graph there is its affordability you know alton's alluded to the fact there's been a huge increase in alcohol deaths in many countries but particularly scotland and the uk since i you know i graduated in 1979 um and you know at that point you know uh deaths were at a bad level but much more manageable and it increased hugely over the last 30 years the primary reason for that is because alcohol is much more affordable you know alcohol goes up a little bit in price but our income and our disposable income goes up much more so when this crisis really hit the public eye was in about 2007 and there was a famous headline in the sunday mail you know alcohol's cheaper than water and it was at that point it's not quite as bad as that now but um that's what that graph is trying to tell you it's trying to tell you there's an absolutely clear relationship that if you make alcohol cheaper more people will drink the country will drink more and more people will die make alcohol more expensive less will be drunk and more people will live yeah and i understand what it's trying to tell us and thanks for for it but it's an old graph it would just be nice to know what the numbers mean yeah so if you could dig that out and also it'd be really nice to know if there's any data sensing i think that only goes up to 2000 and what he said seven or so um if there's anything beyond that for the last 15 years or so would be really healthy to see this is i could show you many graphs that are i'm happy to try that data to you okay but the point is that at any time point in any country um anytime it's been looked at that relationship holds up good that's fine that's fine so moving on i've got in terms of the effect on the industry i've got a couple of data points here and i just want to again clarify those because we're going to talk to those with another panel later on there's an IFS study that says 383 million pounds per year um it's called windfall gains to the sector and i'm not sure if that's increased revenue or increased profit or net profit or what that number is and then there's also a sheffield model of 140 million um that is a revenue number so clearly that won't translate through to profit so i don't know if any of you are on top any of those numbers if not it's not a problem i'll snoose well i wouldn't go so far as to say i'm on top of them but i think um all of the estimates are are using different um different approaches to try and estimate the the revenue increase to the supply chain um and you know Fraser Valander Institute did a calculation for us um which came out at 30 million per year and as you alluded to the IFS is an order of magnitude greater than that per year um so but you're you're right that revenue does not equate to profit an IFS number is that a Scotland number or a UK number it's a Scotland number i think it's Scotland yeah 10 okay that's fine so there's also a number we've gotten here of just short of a million pound a year saved on nhs costs which i can understand the way that's been calculated and that it's good to see that um are you aware or do you have any data on the cost of alcohol harm to the overall economy i'll stuff like that because we got um we commissioned the social market foundation to do some work uh to update some work they've done for the UK wide some years to go specifically for scotland and um it depends on what parameters you use these are always estimates you know because you can take account of the healthcare costs spoken about social costs the policing costs disorder etc but if you start getting into calculations on years of life lost one of the things about alcohol kills people in their middle years unlike most other conditions which we discuss kill people you know once they're beyond working life so if you want to be brutally honest you're you're you're losing productive people and the estimate is somewhere between five and ten billion now that's that's that's that's a big estimate you know that that's a big is that a UK level or a Scottish level that's in scotland five to ten billion pounds of economic activity that's the cost that's right including years of life lost yeah that's helpful and put some of the other numbers we're talking about today into some kind of context thanks very much last thing i want to focus on was just in terms of the up rating um your perspective on that what should the mechanism be should it be automatic should it be based on inflation or affordability or i'm going back to the graph you just shown us there um so yeah but can you get anyone's perspectives on how we should take this forward well i take that briefly and maybe didn't pass on um we we touched on affordability in ideal world you'd have an instantly available measure of affordability and you know affordability might change year on year depending on whether you're in a recession or a boom economy and so the in an ideal world you would operate it in relation to affordability and it might go up and down year on year in reality the date on affordability always lags behind by several years you know for example we don't actually have affordability data since 2021 and we've had the cross living crisis since then so inflation is the next best measure you've got um and one of the striking things about the inflation in the past few years has been how um alcohol inflation has been much less than food inflation or general inflation so actually alcohol prices haven't gone up so alcohol has become relatively cheaper compared to the other products um so um if i had my way there would be a regular up rating automatic would be best um because it takes the heat out of the situation um but if you don't have some sort of regular up rating mechanism you're consigning any p2p progressively less effective year on year and that's one reason why we're having this discussion you know we're almost six years into it and we're talking about that uh reducing effect so um automatic if possible if not that regular affordability would be the gold standard but i think inflation is is a good second best thank you anyone else Alison if i may from the sheffield's modelling um it's clear that uh if we if we leave the price at 50 pence um then we will see harm go up uh if we were to raise it to 65 pence per unit then over five years 800 lives would be saved um 10 000 hospital admissions would be averted and 12 million pounds would be saved in hospital costs so that's that gives you a comparator for the the two price levels over the next five years okay okay i'm happy to add in there that we are very much in favour of up rating and then automatically um continuing that on it makes no sense whatsoever to have you know put all of our eggs in the basket of this policy which actually is as i was saying the the price was fixed in 2012 i think and then to wonder why it's maybe having less and less impact over over time so i think if we are to become once again we're leading in terms of alcohol policy we have to you know look at a reasonable price point for m up yeah and it's interesting the very you know you all have seen because it was public the first session i had this morning on upgrading social care payments it's just a percentage increase in there's a very relatively painless process um so okay thank you very much thank you jillian mckay thanks convener and good morning to the panel if m m up was to continue would witnesses support the introduction of a levy to recoup the additional revenue from retailers as outlined in the scottish budget and justina's nodding so i'll go to justina first thank you yeah i mean it's something that families really really support you know that that sort of polluter pays idea that you know if you're making money through alcohol that should definitely be put put back into treatment so yeah very much in support of that there's a wide range of organisations who support uplifting um m up and the introduction of a levy i mean the likelihood is that if you if you raise the price of m up there will be additional profits um it's been very difficult it's not been possible to quantify what what that translates into in terms of profit but it's pretty clear that the producers think that the retailers are making more money um and you know in a common sense analysis you you know we are we are buying less alcohol but we are paying more for it so um the likelihood is that shops are making more money there was a public health supplement in scotland between 2012 and 2015 that applied to large supermarkets who sold both alcohol and tobacco and there has been some discussion about whether that may potentially be reintroduced and we would strongly support that we think it's both unfair that shops supermarkets should profit from minimum unit price um but we also think that it's unhelpful that it should be more profitable to spend to sell alcohol um because that could encourage other shops which currently don't sell alcohol to to move into selling alcohol that's great um would the witnesses prefer this to be a levy as to take the form of a public health supplement or a social responsibility levy and what do witnesses believe that that revenue should be put back into everybody on this panel supports the alcohol harms prevention levy which is a form of the public health supplement that would apply to retailers who sell alcohol and that would be levied on non-domestic rates as the public health supplement was um a 13 pence rate would bring in 57 million pounds per year um we believe that that would could be used at local level um for improving treatment we've heard that you know treatment services are inadequate we've seen a 40 reduction in treatment services over the last 10 years um also people in recovery are saying that you know their recovery groups are struggling financially so investing at local level in those recovery groups and support would be extremely helpful and also for preventative activity there are projects going on at the moment around scotland that are involving communities children parents in trying to get more sustainable change in alcohol consumption at local level investment in those and similar activities would be very welcome just add to that you know obviously um in terms of drugs we've got the national drugs mission that huge investment of 250 million pounds over five years as part of that um although alcohol actually causes more harm and causes more deaths as well so it seems to me a very obvious mechanism to use to be able to identify funds that we could then put back out to communities treatment support and recovery services is really really important that's great and what do the what do the panel believe that the the total benefit of minimum unit pricing for to bring that social responsibility levied public health supplement back in in terms of the public health benefit of minimum unit pricing in itself and the and the difference we've seen that make but also that additional revenue going back into services in terms of both treatment and preventative services what is that whole bundle looking like yes i think it's a win win or a win win win if you like but perhaps one of the lessons that we've learned compared to when mgp was first introduced is that you know we've heard about the concern about a effect on dependent drinkers you know that that one percent of the population and and how they need to support them so i think that at the same time as we're introducing a or continuing m up and hopefully upgrading it to to an appropriate level it's really the ideal time to focus on improving services for treatment and that takes money that takes resources so it's a win win to use some of that windfall increased revenue to play it into the public purse to be put into alcohol services that's great thanks commander and carol mulkin thank you and possibly just a short follow-up to justine if you don't mind i'm interested often the alcohol industry advises that they already you know put some money into funding services do you think that that model or the levy model might allow us to put money better into public services and be able to use it across scotland to to support the harms that you've spoken about how would you see that working out well i think it's preferable for a number of reasons first of all it's focusing on large-scale retailers so there's a direct link between how much money is raised and the amount of money that's coming through you know alcohol sales but also there's that local decision making you know it would be a levy where the money goes back to local areas there's you know it's community oriented in terms of how that funding is used and i think we do want to see in every local area that people have got a choice you know some people will need hospital treatment but other people may want you know community-based counselling or you know a recovery community and we need family support in every area so i think that then lets local communities determine how the funds are are spent and it's not so direct the link to the alcohol industry and maybe trying to get some PR out of sponsoring a community project and having their branding for example on show okay that that's helpful thank you and pulse weenie thank you conveyor i just want to get a greater clarity on each panel's view on the benefits of a public health supplement vis-a-vis a social responsibility level i know certainly miss Douglas you mentioned that a public health supplement might be your preference is there any other particular views on that distinction i mean i'm not a legislator now i'm not related to that i can give you a very sort of a educated guess but as an outsider you know we know the public health supplement is readily implementable and we know that it worked i think the social responsibility levy is a bit more uncertain in terms of how easy it is to implement what it actually has so in terms of practicalities i'd probably prefer supplement any other strong views or particular views yeah i agree with allister and this is about making sure whatever form it takes let's look at the easiest option let's get money where it needs to be local communities to reduce harm in relation to problematic drinking so yeah the easiest way possible for those communities to make decisions in my experience is local communities understand the problems and they have their own solutions and they can drive those solutions and so that's where the money needs to go in the most easiest way possible and that would be through the public health approach i agree okay that's great just i also wanted to clarify you mentioned about local communities having a degree of democratic oversight of the proceeds of that supplement would that be money that would flow to a health and social care partnership or does it reside would it reside with a different organisation i'll turn to Alison for the mechanics but my understanding is there to be local control over the spend okay so i think um we we've seen with the drugs mission that there was a political commitment to an extra 50 million pounds per year um i think that's probably what we would like to see in relation to the public health supplement that there is that commitment and that that can then be scrutinised by the parliament but the money would go back to local authorities who of course are key partners in local alcohol and drug partnerships and those partnerships are used to looking at the money available and how best to deploy it so that's where these decisions should be made okay have you any modelling evidence of what scale a public health supplement could sit at relative to m up in the overall price split or price share um so i think they're in the Fraser Valander Institute research that was published yesterday um that used a poundage rate equivalent to the previous public health supplement of 13 pence in the pound and that would raise total revenue of 57 million pounds across scotland um it modelled where where the money would come from from local areas i don't think it modelled how it would be then returned to to local areas but that would be using pre-existing formula for local allocations that's great very helpful thank you and Emma Harper thanks convener it's just a question about your thoughts on advertising or alcohol advertising for instance um i was reading a Lancent article that basically said that a third of the people on the planet die based on four sectors so it's a fossil fuels alcohol ultra high process food and tobacco so what are your thoughts on what needs to happen as far as advertising in order to reduce the harm from alcohol brief as we have one and a half minutes to go i think it's really abundantly clear from the international evidence but alcohol marketing drives consumption of alcohol it's there's a causal link between exposure of young people and children to alcohol marketing and initiation of drinking um increasing drinking in those who are already drinking and the likelihood in the longer term of them going on to develop an alcohol problem people in recovery also tell us how alcohol marketing affects their daily lives in in terms of being a risk to them maintaining that recovery and all of us frankly are affected by marketing we may think that it's other people that are affected by marketing but we see it in all sorts of decisions that we make and and alcohol marketing is is part of that because we are we're encouraged and in thinking that alcohol is glamorous it's the way that we connect with friends and family that it is an integral part of our lives and it's something that we should be using on a a weekly of not a daily basis whereas we know as we've heard today that the immense harm which alcohol causes so tackling marketing has to be part of the wider mix of measures that we take in Scotland apologies to clear mentors of praxing and hsgp thank you can i thank the witnesses for their attendance today and i'll suspend the meeting we now continue our post legislative scrutiny of the alcohol minimum pricing scotland act 2012 with a second panel of witnesses and a welcome to the committee Dr Pete Chima OBE chief executive of the scottish grocers federation bob price director and policy advisor national association of cider makers who joins us online David Richardson who also joins us online regulatory and commercial affairs director of the wine and spirit trade association and paul waterson honorary president and former ceo of the scottish licensed trade association and we move straight to questions and i'm going to just kick off here so on the previous panel where we heard evidence from alcohol health charities and i'm paraphrasing slightly here because i don't have the official record in front of me but one of the panel members spoke about a minimum unit pricing being one of the most scrutinised public health measures that there's been now we know that there was previously robust challenges to the introduction or from sections of the alcohol industry so i wonder to what extent do witnesses contest public health scotland's conclusion that the evaluation of MUP showed strong evidence that the policy had reduced chronic alcohol deaths and hospital admissions i'd like to start there to kick off thank you i think the the Covid-19 pandemic and the fluctuations in behaviour in particular the increase in costs in hospitality and online consumption mitigates really significant excuse on on on any data collected since march 2020 so sorry i didn't quite catch that there so the Covid-19 pandemic yeah and the subsequent fluctuations in behaviour in particular the increase costs in hospitality and online on licensed um consumption i think mitigates any significant uh excuse on any data collected since march 2020 um so it's our view that is essential that MUP retains remains at 50 pence but there's been i don't think there's been a real opportunity to assess um the impact on the policy um on the impacts on on the on the policy because of the pandemic so the so you're challenging what public health scotland had said well i think um the the data is skewed and and i think we have to assess it you know for for a longer period of time to make sure that the data is correct and and how in what way are you challenging the data because that's quite a challenge to public health scotland well what evidence do you have because it was such a um if you if you understand what happened under Covid-19 a lot of the stores were closed people weren't allowed to go out people had to stay in so there be here there was behavioural changes um which were really quite different to um what we were experiencing now and what we would normally experience in day-to-day running so i think we need to see the data for a longer period of time um than just um that period that it was assessed at and and you're doing that on what basis what scientific basis what evidence basis well i think um the scientific basis is you know very very clear in front of you because there was such a behavioural change during that period that the data has to be skewed okay so so essentially the Scottish grossest federation doesn't accept public health scotland's evaluation of minimum unit pricing on the basis of anecdote that's right okay thank you sandish gohani thank you convener and just to clear my interests as a practicing NHS GP at the start um so can i just come back to you um please so you know we looked at public health scotland's modelling and it was modelling um because real world deaths have gone up and they've modelled it against england um whilst if they modelled it against wales we would have seen no difference um and if which is what wales have found and if we modelled it against northern island we'd have actually seen that m up exacerbated deaths um and so that that to me is a bit of a concern when it comes to the way the data was collected just want to put your thoughts were about that it's it's very very difficult to assess when we've had such unprecedented times so i i think in reality we need a longer period of time to collect data to make sure that everything's correct and and if i could turn um to to those who are online if i may um i'd sort of like to to look at the studies that have been produced by public health scotland where eight studies looked at health outcomes one study showed some changes but it was clear that dependent drinkers were doing very badly women drinkers also did rather badly um and wondered what your thoughts were about that but also how we could help those groups i wonder if i could come in here please thank you for the opportunity to give evidence to the committee it's always a challenge to challenge data that's been painstakingly collected by a number of different groups over a period of time um i think my my main point here is that i'd refer the committee to the evaluation report produced by the university of sheffield um which said there was no significant change in the proportion of drinkers consuming at harmful or moderate levels after the introduction of MUP um which i think reflects the point that you've just made um and our view of how do you get to the groups that don't do very well under MUP um is that you don't have a population measure um you don't have a measure um that um we say um penalizes the the moderate responsible drinker um but you have targeted measures um now there's various ways of targeting measures but the the one that we would promote um is one called community alcohol partnerships which has got a very long track record of tackling and reducing underage drinking um and does so in uh in collaboration with retailers with regulators with local authorities in the area it works um it doesn't come with um alcohol sponsorship badging it comes with community alcohol partnership badging um and it's a very clear program um that has a track record of success in targeting a particular group uh underage drinkers um and we would very much recommend that sort of targeted response as opposed to a population measure thank you thank you um we heard in the the previous panel um that there has been money generated now we we're not sure how much it could be between 90 million over three years to 200 million we we're not sure but my question to you is it's clear that money has been generated from MUP but who's got that money what where is it physically going whose pocket has that ended up yeah that that's an extremely good question and it's it's something that i'm very very concerned about because um um what i'm hearing um from um other witnesses from various committees that i've sat on is that people conflate turnover revenue um with profit how much money people have um and if prices go up but consumption go down it doesn't automatically follow that turnover goes up if turnover goes up in a retailer it doesn't automatically follow that their profit goes up because they have other costs as well responding to covid national minimum wage energy crisis um i'm sure we could list others um all of which affect profit and we don't know uh what conversations that have gone on between retailers wholesalers and producers of alcoholic products uh about the price at which retailers get the products in their hands and there's then an issue that even if some of that increased turnover goes to wholesalers and producers it again doesn't necessarily translate into profit now i absolutely can't say to you that nobody has made a profit out of this because i'm sure we could comb through accounts and find somebody who has um but i think you would need a lot more evidence about what's happened to people turnover as a result of m up and then what has happened to profit as a result of that before you could draw any sustainable conclusions about how much money there has been and exactly where it's gone thank you i mean my the a big concern i have is m up shouldn't be generating profit you know i i don't feel that that should be what what it does it should be helping people um and so the it would be very helpful to know where the money is so that we could try to use that money to help people that that need it especially those who are most dependent upon alcohol my my last question um is about what else we could be doing uh from a retailers point of view to try to help people who are drinking to harmful levels and dependency so i know we've spoke about community alcohol partnerships but what else could we do because we heard in the previous committee tracy saying that we need a suite of tools but there doesn't seem to be others and we've also heard um justina say that uh we that what about everything else when it comes to measures to help so so just does industry have an uh some ideas of what else we could be doing uh are you talking specifically about advertising here i'm talking about anything um there there are a lot of measures in terms of um industry voluntary codes um around marketing so the portman group code is well known um for challenging and taking products off the shelf that have a particular appeal to children or that um promote products on the on the basis that they they will make you a more appealing human being um so that so there are those measures that again are effective and known to work but i think what you're looking at is a series of voluntary codes and education um around responsibility um because uh i think it's it's always tempting for government to legislate um whereas we would suggest um that you can get at least a large part of the result you want um through co-operation and discussion thank you thank you and before we move on i'll declare my interest thank you for reminding me there uh Dr Gilhane in that i have registered nurse with a bank contract with NHS cricket Glasgow and Clyde and i'll move to Ivan McKee thanks very much and good morning to the panel i just want to dig in a bit deeper into the question that Dr Gilhane asked about revenue and where it's going um i suppose i'm maybe concerns too strong a word but perplexed that's why we don't have better data on this and if you look at the wide range of estimates or models um on what the additional revenue flow in the system has been as Dr Gilhane said that ranges from 30 odd million to 300 odd million per year and i've thought the sector would have had a better handle on those numbers now i absolutely take take the point that's been made that um the whole point of this is to reduce consumption so if you double the price and you only sell half as much your revenue hasn't gone up at all so it's quite clear to say that it's possible there hasn't been any extra revenue but it could have been quite a significant number depending on those those numbers and then as you rightly said the profit calculation on that is even more complicated because of the various layers within the supply chain and what they're all charging each other and again it's common sense if you're selling less your unit price of course to producing and distribute is going to and to sell is going to increase as well so just throwing this out there is anybody on the panel get any reliable data that we can talk to and put on the record um what regards to what money may have additionally been coming through retailers and where they think it may have ended up getting money from getting data from supermarkets must be one of the one of the hardest things to get i mean we had the public health supplement a number of years ago which added 13 pence depending on rateable values which was meant to be used i think for this purpose and it was stopped after a couple of years i don't know why it was stopped it kicked in at 300 000 it was targeted at supermarkets and they paid that money in and i think over the two years there was about 95 or three years there was about 95 million pounds in its lifespan so the money's money's there i think um perhaps that 300 000 pound ceiling could be brought down um to about 100 000 that would protect smaller shops i think it's really the supermarkets that should be targeted to this so it's been in it's been in place before and there's figures relating to that yeah with respect that's very different to what we're talking about here because that was a tax which raised an amount of revenue which you're right there's no point in that but in terms of the additional revenue that has flown through retailers and up the supply chain directly as a consequence of m up and there was any data well that's specific way yeah i get that but it's the model that you've used before and you know what the figures are um is that more profit well we'll never know will we it's as simple as that you'll never get the data because they used alcohol as a loss leader for years so they're using something else as a loss leader now well four industry experts in the room so i would hope that one of you may have at least something data on it so does anyone else want to comment i think it is genuinely very hard to get that data because let's take a product that was previously sold below m up and is now subject to m up and you can see what happens to the volumes of that product you don't necessarily know if those customers of that product trade up to a different product or keep buying the same one um so it becomes quite hard to associate the activity um with the with the measurements in place i think in a more general sense this is the the challenge that m up faces um of causation versus association um and in terms of industry data um you can get quite easily the published accounts of supermarkets um through companies house to start drilling down to their management accounts um and seeing how particular lines have performed and how particular lines have then competed against or worked with each other um you're not going to get that data out of supermarkets or brand owners i'm afraid and they're they're not going to tell us that as a as a trade association okay i mean i'll leave it there but i just find it strange having been in business that people whose day job it is to know these numbers don't don't have a perspective on it but i'm moving on um to talk about um the upgrading um and i think there was um the grossest federation submission um made a comment about um you because you didn't think there was any reason to increase um the 50 rate because um wage inflation hadn't kept pace with price inflation i'm not sure how true that isn't it with with recent wage inflation data but um does that mean that you're comfortable with an increase that reflected um wage inflation rather than price inflation and it's just the inflation calculation you're disputing rather than the concept of upgrading look i think what's important is that um you know that our industry has suffered quite a lot you know we've got the cost of living crisis we've we've um not had the same um rates relief as our English and Welsh counterparts have had um despite um the Scottish Government having the um by the course consequentials given to them of 568 million that has never been naturally passed on on to the retail convenience or hospitality sector so we're a considerable disadvantage there and you know we all know about the rate of inflation the rate of interest um and we're also uh aware of um the increased costs that we're having to incur um so i want to just go back to what you had said about you know where all that whereas all this profit going no business actually takes into account one sector is it's the overall basket spend in the store so that's where the profits you know is determined from but you've got to also remember that convenience stores um are now for the very first time able to um play a level playing field with uh supermarkets where who were traditionally able to reduce the price of alcohol in order to encourage footfall so you know putting that to one side we honestly believe that the MUP should stay at the current level it shouldn't be increased because one we don't have the proper data number two um there are um in my view or in the federation's view that there is no pacific data to see why it should be increased because there's no correlation at this moment to say that an increased MUP will have um will actually reduce the number of deaths in alcohol having said that you know if if you are to increase the MUP then we should be given at least a minimum of 12 months in order to react to that in order to adjust the prices throughout the supply chain the stock that we hold replace the shelf edge and install labelling reprogramming the till's payment systems and new formulas etc so that that's that's where the federation stands I'll do a final question on this and again I'm quite perplexed while we're on this effectively what this is is an opportunity for retailers convenience stores grocers to increase prices without increasing costs right um and I'm not clear why you see this as such an economic challenge to the sector unless you can unpick the earlier question about who's charging who more for this and what the data is telling you about reduced revenue um and reduced profit if that is the case as a consequence of this look I think I've answered that question quite adequately um uh just a few moments ago but what I don't understand about um you know this line of questioning is is profit such a rude word for business are we not here to make are we not here to make a profit are we all here to make a loss so that there is no business why why do you want to destroy a business that is so highly regarded in the world you know like scotch whiskey for example and so forth you know why do you want to destroy something like that where where if it's doing well we we should be committed to to say our industry in scotland is doing well we we should be actually encouraging that sector not absolutely saying no we want to absolutely destroy it if it's making too much profit then we should be reducing that is that the way is that the way the economic world in your eyes I think you're asking the wrong person that question I was 30 years in business before I committed to politics and I've run a lot of very profitable businesses the question I'm asking you is about the question I'm asking is about basic economics and trying to understand if somebody said to me when I was running a business you've got the opportunity to increase prices without increasing costs I would have seen that as a positive not a negative and I'm just trying to understand the basis on which you see it as an economic challenge to the sector rather than an economic opportunity because our stores are embedded in the communities you know we can we can see if people are drinking too much we will our stores generally will take we know that we know each and every one of our customers we will try and discourage those people not from drinking that's that's the essence of MUP we know the issues we know the problems and we you know our stores are the first port of call and you've got to remember during the Scottish sorry the Covid-19 pandemic our stores were considered to be the fourth emergency service okay thank you thank you David Tolts thank you convener just a quick supplementary I'll find that everybody's represented here nobody could tell me where his profit is as went to everybody who sells alcohol needs an operating plan I spent the last few weeks going through five councils licensing papers and new applications every one of them a majority of them were for extensions of sales of alcohol especially in small grocers so you tell me if they are not making a profit would not be extending the area to sell alcohol so it has to come from bigger retailers and small grocers are definitely getting that profit you can go through all licensing papers and I bet if you check that with every local authority the number of people who are putting in for extensions to sell alcohol shows that they are making a greater profit for convenience retailers offer a wide range of services and in order to remain viable they have to share the additional costs of being a smaller business across and their products and services the reduction in the viability of one product area means that there will have to be increases elsewhere and across the range and ultimately adding to inflation and the cost of living crisis for customers you know we we don't want it to be such that mrs smith can't enjoy her saturday night tipple is it not that you spend an area to sell our goods if you're making great profit of it I can't really comment on on one area you know in five that may have applied for additional licensing you know in times that's over several different licensing boards the number of applications to extend areas that sell alcohol which shows that these are these shops are making greater profit from it because you would not change an area could they could they're not could they're not be the fact that convenience stores are finding it very very difficult to sell you know dry goods for example foods foods because of the increase in supermarkets and the increase of discounters so they're trying to decrease the area for those products and could it not be that they see that that is the only viable opportunity for them to make a profit I would argue against that because a small paper shop I go to every day doesn't sell alcohol at all it's been there 20 years very successful look there are different types of stores you know there's always been traditionally newspaper stores that sell nothing but newspapers magazines and sweets and then there are those that have always been sending alcohol so I think that they're just different types of stores and that's always going to be the case in business you know there's always going to be different different types of businesses so I think David Richardson wants to come in forward by both price thank you convener I just wanted to go back to Mr McKee's point about the opportunity to increase prices without increasing cost isn't that a good thing for retailers I'd argue not necessarily because first of all increasing prices might not attract customers and secondly it's not just the cost to the retailer that matters it's the cost up the rest of the supply chain if there is consumer resistance to a particular product then producers might want to look at how to repackage it or reformulate it to change the ABV and we saw in the implementation of MUP certainly in the first year there very much was an increased cost to industry in generally across the supply chain in terms of what people had to achieve in order to deliver MUP now in fairness that became business as usual and MUP became more or less embedded but it's not a cost-free exercise thank you yeah just very briefly on that convener for me thanks very much no you're absolutely right and I of course understand all of that it's been fact as the point I'm trying to make is that we've already established to the earlier question that you don't have the data to understand where the revenue and the profit is and where it's flowing up and down the supply chain and what the impact has been what the impact has been on volume and what the impact has been on revenue and so on and so forth so without that data I'm struggling to understand how such a strong case is is being made that this is a bad thing for retailers without without the data to back that up when it may well be as we've said a good thing depending on exactly what those numbers are that nobody seems to know and I come in at this point please yes please thank you very much I'm Bob Price I represent the National Association of Cider Makers Cider is not a mainstream product in Scotland in fact at the very moment only 10% of the cider made in the UK makes its way to Scotland England being by far the largest market since MUP was introduced the data that we have has has pointedly shown that cider sales in Scotland have fallen by 60% and strong cider sales which was principally the target of MUP in the very first place has dropped by 82% and at the end of the day there's very little strong cider and when I say strong anything above 5.5% ABV mainstream cider sales that's 4.5% ABV to 5.5% have also fallen and that fall is 33% so from the cider makers point of view no money at all is being made in Scotland um there's a residual market which is being fed by companies um but it's it's a market that's in serious decline and almost being put out of existence in Scotland so there's no profit or money or revenue being made by our industry in Scotland thank you thanks very much I'll help to get data points just clarify is that by value or by volume volume right okay so the value number won't be obviously dramatic reduction is that because the price will be more than doubled in many cases but thanks very much for that data Paul Sweeney thank you convener um clearly the picture of retail revenue impacts is difficult to ascertain given the lack of data has been described by panel members but um I've just heard from the association of cider makers representative I'm keen to understand more about the secondary impacts on manufacturing is there any evidence from brewers and distillers um that the fear consequences for the industry following the introduction of MEP has happened for example lower manufacturing revenue um or discontinuation of certain products or specific instances firms or products that any panellys can point to okay that's fine um is there any indication that minimum unit pricing is contributed to a leveling of the playing field between the on trade and off trade and has this perhaps been a benefit in particular to the on trade the whole point of MEP was to see the government getting involved in pricing which was revolutionary really um the relationship between low prices and increased consumption and the potential misuse is as obvious as it is dangerous to us um if we just go back for a while um after the 1976 act there was an explosion in the amount of licences all over on and off trade but in the on trade towards the end of the 80s and through the 90s we saw um a lot of irresponsible promotions and so on um happy hours drinking games and so on which made people drink more than they would normally and faster than they would normally so the SLTA was very clear when we moved towards the 2006 act that we had to do something about it the extra competition was forcing prices down that was leading to the abuse of alcohol and we had to try and stop these drinks promotions and we managed to get those drinks promotions stopped and we don't see them really now at all in the on trade but little did we know that um another group would be standing around to exploit that and that was supermarkets now um if you if you're chasing profit um it shouldn't be achieved at any cost we're licensed for a very good reason trends will come and go supermarkets will come and go but one thing always remains constant and that's alcohol is potentially dangerous and it must be respected now when you're giving alcohol away basically you're making no profit out of it and you're using it as a loss leader to get people into stores to make profit off of other things that's fine but not when it comes to a licensed product because it creates abuse so eventually um the Scottish Government of the time decided that they should stop some of the promotions on alcohol and supermarkets and in other shops but it couldn't be prescriptive enough because supermarkets kept getting around it and that's why we needed MUP to bring the standards up again to those that didn't take the responsibilities and we've heard about that already this morning seriously it was profit and nothing no responsibility no adherence to licensing laws if they didn't like the licensing laws in supermarkets they would challenge them they would challenge their local boards and usually win um so how did we do it we did it through minimum unit pricing and i think that was the right way to go we all we've supported that for for many many years um i think it must be one of the most scrutinised acts that we've ever had in this country i might be wrong but certainly 40 odd studies looking at every aspect of it taking into account Covid to tremendous detail there and showing it's been very positive so the SLT is very clear very very clear that we support minimum unit pricing we always have done um and um if you look at the the level of it at the moment i think that what we should be doing is put some sort of mechanism in for putting it up or indeed putting it down um if it's not proportionate to the problem which it that was that was why it was brought in to be proportionate to the problem so certainly we would we would support that level going up but to what level um i think it's to be left to us John your view on you mentioned earlier the public health supplement which was recently introduced and then discontinued are you supportive of reintroduction yeah absolutely my problem with um personally personally my problem with um that money is how do you hide that money off for what it's for how do we make sure that money's ring fenced i think ring fencing of money is very very difficult when it's if it's given back out to councils or how are they going to use it we all know that councils are a start for cash but certainly we would we would see it but protecting the smaller shops through rateable value um i think it should be our our way of looking at it would be to a ceiling of about 100 000 on it anything above 100 000 should pay should pay that okay thanks David Torrance factually just on that point the witnesses before us and all the charities dealing with alcohol related um diseases um problems i've all called for an alcohol levy um as was up until 2015 and i'm going to go to every one of yous to ask if you're in favour of alcohol levy and for it the money raised to be put back into these different organisations that help support people with alcohol addiction and families and things like that now would we support it if we could guarantee it was used for that purpose um and it should be used through the off trade as i said for for rateable values over 100 000 pound yeah we would certainly see it we made what was at 95 million pound over two years on it yep um supermarkets um it wouldn't be that big a dent in their profit i'm sure i'm sure between them could you ask other witnesses if you're in favour of it i'm very much in favour of targeted measures to help people who need help i'm i'm not convinced that a levy and extra business taxation is necessarily the right way to go about it when there's probably more that that can be done through voluntary and cooperative measures thanks thank you um it's it's a very very difficult question but um i think our view would be much the same as as paul's um but as long as it protects the convenience sector and i think that's very very important because i think you know we've been fairly disadvantaged um to date and um if that money was actually ring fence for that fact our factor and and we're protected then i have no problem with that at all mr price thank you if if you impose the levy on the cider industry you'd be applying it to manufacturers manufacturers are getting no benefit whatsoever from m up so you're just taking more money away from manufacturers that they have already lost through m up pricing is retailer uh not a manufacturer uh basis we're not allowed to set selling prices only retailers are so you're just taking extra money that we've not been able to get from the marketplace so i can't see that that achieves any benefit other than driving the industry out of scotland good to kick him back there um just to give an example diagel which is situated in my constituency and um genegal roofs made 4.6 billion pound profit alone last year from its alcohol sales and i know both of you have agreed that if the levy was there it was targeted it could go there but mr price and mr richerson do you think the taxpayer should pay for the damage alcohol does and pay for all the nhs all the different treatments all these different charities and not contribute something which could be targeted back to help oh you know the answer to that is that all businesses pay taxes they pay exorbitant rates in the on trade in scotland exorbitant rates um i think you know we can be talking about two different things we would like to see that the same model as a public health supplement which was very much off trade very much supermarkets protect the smaller operators um it wasn't for producers i don't see the i don't see the relationship there and producers this was really um i think identifying at the time where the problems were stemming from the vast vast majority of alcohol in this country you might have heard figures previously are sold by about seven or eight operators so it appears to me if you've got a problem with alcohol you know who the seven or eight operators that are most responsible for selling it and trying always to keep the price down to sell more so you know who that is so it's quite simple to say that's who should be targeted and that's supermarkets it's supermarkets that that caused a lot of the through ridiculously low prices um not adhering to the licensing acts not having the moral obligations that license holders should have if they were licensed who caused a lot of the alcohol problems in this country so knowing that and knowing where it's coming from it should be those people not the small smaller operators or or pubs who are bounded by licensing um severely bounded by who they can sell to when they can sell it the age and so on and all the other licensing restrictions that we have and rightly so it shouldn't be that the smaller operators or the the pubs or the bars or the hotels or the restaurants that should be paying that should be the the main people who are responsible for the problem in the first place and um keeping it to a certain extent going we know who it is it's to that's selling most thank you for that is sandesh gohani thank you convener um i was speaking to uh a small business a retailer who said that when she sells alcohol um she listens to conversations that are going on because she knows that and will name a brand dragon soup is very popular with children because of how sweet it is and um parents are buying it for their kids and when she hears a parent texting or calling their kids to say which one is it you wanted she refuses to sell it to them um diminishing her profits but she feels that's the right thing to do so convenience stores do a lot of good when it comes to to looking at this so the question that i have when we look at a way of producing money in a in a levy or using the money generated in the mu p i i i i you know we've agreed we don't know where that is so maybe we do need to find out where that money is but would it not be very useful to put that money back into education back into alcohol brief interventions and back into actual targeted help for people uh to to try to reduce the harms i think i mentioned in my remarks that um you know convenience stores are embedded in in society and we know our customers and you know when we see there is an outright abuse of alcohol we try to stop it and i think you've made that remark quite adequately so you know in in terms of responsible retailing you know we're there we it was the sgf that introduced challenge 25 almost 30 years ago which has now been implemented right across the uk so in terms of responsible retailing we're there um and we we have supported the scottish government with the mu p um and we were glad it actually leveled out the playing field because large supermarkets as paul's mentioned quite quite neatly that they were the cause of the the cause of the issues they were the ones that were sending alcohol uh sometimes um you know at the cross the price of water you know um and it did cause problems so the introduction of mu p of 50 pounds has been very much warranted it's been it's been welcomed by our sector in terms of um um you know we sgf has always implemented education uh over everything i think it's it's absolute key now if you look at you know where that money is going to come from then um i i think um you know because of the the amount of cost rises that are occurring in our industry in our sector we would find it very very difficult um to contribute any further but i think that's for one for the uh for the scottish government to to to take on so very very briefly to do paul and pete do you feel that we should have um supermarkets in front of us to ask similar questions to yeah i hope you get an answer out because it's very very difficult i know mr mckay was saying um about getting data i mean it's not i don't think it's any of our jobs to get that data and i know that in the past when the scottish government have tried to get data from supermarkets they've not got it yeah i mean supermarkets should be here to answer for the for themselves on what on what they've done over the last number of years remembering of course that um they were open when other businesses like ours were closed for for covid and um and the profits were were through the roof for wanting a better phrase um but i think if we could ring fence that money which is difficult very very difficult to do that and it could maybe help with the groups that haven't been helped as much through m up um you know alcoholism and which is a scourge of course in a basically a health problem if it could be if it could help those groups yeah i mean very much so but as i said before it's difficult to get that money ring fenced um the government would have to come up with a way that we could make sure that that was spent on alcohol problems and all for the groups that haven't really been helped with m up which i think that one of the studies showed thank you Emma Harper thanks convener and good morning she is just to pick up on on what doctor peat it said about education being the way that we need to go forward i've been looking at the work of henry dimbleby and chris van tulican around ultra high processed foods and and how some some of that isn't just about education because we need to tackle stigma we need to help support people in weight loss and and education isn't the only answer so i wonder about you know in relation to alcohol dependence what opportunities are there for i suppose for supermarkets like the the big ones that are here at the table today and what opportunities are there to maybe them change their model of selling and like like goes on in ireland for instance with the shop inside the shop kind of off license is is that an opportunity that could help look at how we support people as well well the shop inside the shop at the time when it was um if you remember back years ago that was how it used to be sold and they said alcohol at the time i think it was afs might be wrong said that as soon as it was moved into the main store alcohol sales increased by 40 so to go back to the shop within a shop i think we've always advocated that we see it in other countries we see it in america for instance for the cancels in many states the cancel spirits and in supermarkets only beer and wine and so on so i think that would be certainly a way forward and would allow control and also perhaps get the data because the data always went through a different till so maybe you might get some some more data on the amount of alcohol that's actually been sold and the education issue is it's not just about education otherwise you know we had to introduce laws around seat belts for instance you know in order to get people to wear seat belts so isn't regulation part of the process of how we help tackle alcohol harm in scotland well the sgf runs two very successful programmes on behalf of the Scottish Government the healthy living programme which we've been running since 2004 and also the go local programme which is now in its year four stroke five and they've been very very successful education is definitely the way forward i mean we're part of the Scottish alcohol industry partnership we've been involved in the community alcohol partnerships but it's interesting that the supermarkets don't seem to get involved you know and if you look at having you know if you're trying to hive off shops alcohol into a different sector into a convenience store that's additional costs which some of them wouldn't be able to to swallow and it would put them out of business so i'm sure that's not what the Scottish Government would want to want to see but if that is implemented in the larger supermarkets and let's let's face it you know that they have huge sections and if that was hived off for the larger supermarkets then then it may well help but for the small convenience stores it would just simply put them out of business we've focused quite a lot so far on on the big retailers and unratable value in things in terms of a public health levy but given that in some communities small shops may be the only one that's there and they will sell alcohol to the community that are round about and as you correctly identified Paul the amount that people drink is the thing that does the harm what's your view on a public health levy actually being linked to volume of sales rather than rateable value and therefore the harm that those that those shops are actually doing to the community around them well i think it's just a matter of being pragmatic it's getting that data and finding out who actually is selling the most it's quite it's a difficult thing to to find out so the easiest way would probably be through rateable values and as i said before to protect the smaller shops who i don't think caused the problems here that rateable value if it was set at 100 000 it would take the smaller shops out of that and they wouldn't have to pay it i just think it's a matter yeah i mean it could be done but it's very difficult to to get as we know to get those figures on volume and who's selling the most i think when you people know this better than me i think as you go down into smaller villages and so on with our ant supermarkets the convenience store knows everyone and gets really involved in the in the sale of alcohol and will take their responsibilities seriously and just wouldn't sell if they thought it was a big problem there but people know it's not better than me i mean alcohol accounts were just under 16 percent of total sales in a convenience store on average and and i think that's that's very very important but we also got to remember that communities you know convenience stores are really a hub of the community you know that's 16 an average on average yeah of the total baskets so it's it's not the most it's not the biggest sector what's important to remember is that convenience stores sell a whole range of services on top you know post offices which don't make money lottery which doesn't make money payment services which don't make money atms which don't make money in fact most of these services are sold at a loss and most of these services are not available in supermarkets you know they're just just not available you know if they are available you know there's a cost implementation you know for example our post offices and we've all seen the huge problems that our sectors faced in running post offices so you can probably imagine that you know that the largest counterparts are really only focusing on those products that are making them making them a profit and as Paul said you know if you if you look at them the only way to do it is through race will value okay thanks convener now just just check that so 16 percent on average in convenience stores just under is alcohol and that takes into account every other service or every other item that's sold not services just just the products and so you be getting things like cigarettes yes tobacco newspaper yeah grocery chill products fruit and veg very briefly mr thorns because we need to finish does that include convenience stores which don't sell alcohol that's covering every convenience store in scottland that's several there is several that's covering convenience stores that sell alcohol okay yeah thank you thank you can can very briefly mr mickey that data point on 16 percent just very briefly is that 16 percent is that number gone up or gone down since introduction of m up it's a very good question and i don't know the answer thank you the committee then to clarify that sure thank you what what i can supply you is with a survey that we catch actually conducted and i can leave the reports here if you email with it with a get into email correspondence with clark's that's easiest way to do that and i thank the committee witnesses for joining us today our meeting on the 20th of febru we'll be hearing from participants in the committee's recent informal engagement as part of its post legislative scrutiny of the social care self-directed support act 20 scotland act 2013 and that concludes the public part of our meeting today