Mrs.
Robinson: I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention and
I absolutely support his views. An awful lot of good work is carried
out by the voluntary sector, which is, sadly, crying out for more
adequate funding. I certainly support his call, which the Minister has
heard. Across the UK,
between 780,000 and 1.3 million children are affected by parental
alcohol problems. There are between 5,000 and 20,000 street drinkers,
more than 4,000 acute alcohol-related deaths and between 11,300 and
17,900 deaths due to chronic illness. The Prime Minister’s
strategy unit’s alcohol harm reduction project estimated that,
in 2000, there were between 15,000 and 22,000 alcohol-related deaths in
England and Wales. Alcohol can cost the workplace up to £6.4
billion, the health service up to £1.7 billion and up to
£7.3 billion in crime and public disorder. Some 11 million to 17
million working days are lost through alcohol-related illness, and
another 15 million to 20 million are lost due to reduced
unemployment. Up to
150,000 hospital admissions are associated with alcohol abuse each
year. Alcohol accounts for9.2 per cent. of life years lost and
years lived with disability. It is the third-highest cause of disease
in developed countries after tobacco and blood pressure. Nearly 5,000
cancer deaths a year are attributable to alcohol. It is linked to
between one in three and one in seven accidental deaths and up to 1,000
suicides a year. One third of all accident and emergency attendances
may be due to alcohol, at a cost of more than£500
million a year.
Earlier this
year, the Department produced a document entitled “New Strategic
Direction for Alcohol and Drugs (2006-2011)”. Many of the
recommendations in the document are laudable, but this area of health
care must be appropriately resourced. Clearly, it must be prioritised.
We must never forget that these statistics relate to people and
families, and we must do all that we can to encourage people to
consider their lifestyles. Will the Government reflect on their
decision to extend drinking hours? I ask them to target young women in
particular and warn them against binge drinking, and to educate people
more proactively that drinking excessive amounts of alcohol is not cool
and is a sure way to a shorter life expectancy.
Clearly, this area of health
care must be prioritised. The statistics are overwhelming and speak for
themselves. The devastating effect of alcohol extends far beyond the
individual concerned, as their families—often including young
children—and friends suffer. Frequently, it is the
patient’s nearest and dearest who will bear the greatest
torment. All classes and creeds can be affected. There are
repercussions not only in the field of health: it is fairly common for
employment, policing and criminal justice to be affected. Those in
authority have a duty to act on behalf of society. I look forward to
the Minister’s
response. 4.14
pm
The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Maria
Eagle): I congratulate the hon. Member for Strangford on
securing this debate and on the way in which she presented her remarks.
She absolved me of the responsibility of reading out any statistics by
doing me the favour of putting them all on the record. I now do not
have to spend time setting out statistics that illustrate some of her
points. This is not the first occasion on which she has raised such
issues in Committee or in the House. Clearly, she has a keen interest
in them and has displayed it on many occasions.
She is correct to stress that
alcohol misuse is an issue for public health. In saying that, I do not
just mean the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety,
but the health of society more generally. As she said, the consequences
of alcohol misuse and its increasing incidence have repercussions
across many other Government Departments. Alcohol is, of course,
socially acceptable and legal, but there is no doubt that it is a drug.
When it is consumed, marketed or sold irresponsibly, it has the
potential to play havoc not only with the individual who partakes, but
with families and society more generally. We recognise the impact that
the misuse of alcohol can have on people’s lives at the
individual, family and community levels.
The hon. Lady was right to set
out some statistics. It has been estimated that the cost of alcohol
misuse alone to the health service in Northern Ireland is more than
£25 million. Such figures are disturbing, and we take them
extremely seriously. However, there is a cost to individuals and
families beyond that, and it can be lifelong. The scars on children who
grow up in families affected adversely by alcohol can last all their
lives and have intergenerational consequences that are difficult to
tackle and can, I suspect, play some part in the intergenerational
poverty that we discussed earlier. There is no doubt that the issue is
important.
There is also no doubt that the
proportion of the Northern Ireland population who choose to drink is
increasing. The latest figures show that 76 per cent. of the adult
population are drinkers and that a significant proportion of men and
women binge drink. The hon. Lady made a specific point, which I
endorse, about binge drinking. She may have noticed that our public
information campaigns of the past few years have tried to focus on that
problem. It is not clear whether everyone who partakes of alcohol is
clear about the definition of binge drinking. The threshold is lower
than many might think: binge drinking is defined as only five drinks
for a man and four for a woman at any one time. If stopped in the
street and asked what a binge-drinking session was, many people would
not set the level that low. The Government have tried to disseminate
that important information through our public information campaigns. It
is key, because only with knowledge and understanding can people change
their behaviour. If someone does not perceive that they are binge
drinking, although in reality they are, they will hardly apply to
themselves information from the public domain about dealing with it.
The hon. Lady highlighted that fact in her remarks, and we take it
seriously. Phase 2 of
our public information campaign on alcohol abuse focuses on encouraging
better awareness of what constitutes binge drinking, what is a unit of
alcohol, and the health consequences of partaking in what many might
think a moderate intake of alcohol. An evaluation of the campaign
indicates that we are making some impact in getting that message
across. However, given the statistics that the hon. Lady set out, with
which I concur, we have not yet dealt with the issue.
There is particular concern
about the level of under-age drinking and young people binge drinking.
It is often difficult to deliver a health message to young people. At a
certain age, they think that they are immortal and that health issues,
getting old and being ill do not apply to them. That makes it a
challenge for us to put information in the public domain to educate
young people. Teaching children and young people to look after
themselves and their health and to get across a general health
promotion message is increasingly important.
In the next few years, two big
public health issues will be increasing levels of obesity and substance
abuse, whether of alcohol or other substances. In a few years we will
be able to judge whether our messages have got through when we consider
the impact of our efforts on young people’s health, their
alcohol intake and their fitness. It is a tough challenge, because many
people see the binge drinking of alcohol as fun and nothing is harder
than trying to persuade people to change their behaviour and stop
having fun. It is a
difficult problem for us to tackle and I shall take a little time to
explain what we are trying to do about it. The pattern of alcohol
misuse is changing. There is more misuse among women than there used to
be; there is also a definite increase in the number of young women who
are choosing to drink, and a significant proportion appear to be binge
drinking. Often, one hears anecdotally of young women trying to keep up
with young men in their alcohol intake, but they cannot take as much
alcohol as young men. The
definition of binge drinking for young women involves a lower intake of
alcohol than for young men. We need to reduce the proportion of women
and men who binge drink, and prevention and education are the only ways
of doing so. We must
reduce the harm suffered by children in those families where there is a
dependency issue or an alcohol problem. I was glad that the hon. Member
for Strangford referred to our new strategy and the policy initiatives
that it contains—I think that she said that it was
“laudable”, and I will check that in Hansard
tomorrow. She said that the initiatives need to be funded—a
point which was made repeatedly in the debate—and I accept the
sense of what the hon. Lady
says. In the new
strategy there must be an understanding of the challenge that we face.
We need to check our progress against specific outcomes as we implement
our proposals. We have developed specific outcomes in respect of the
priorities and activities in the strategy, especially at local level,
and we have already started to deliver on some of them. There are key
indicators for alcohol against which we will measure our success in
reducing alcohol-related harm in Northern Ireland, and we will report
on them annually. We have announced annual targets today, even if they
are not for climate change.
The targets will enable hon.
Members and those in the wider society to see how we are doing on
specific problems. Alcohol misuse is not an issue for political
bun-fighting; it is of equal concern to all parties in the House. We
need information on how we are doing to see whether we need to change
how we try to achieve our objectives, which are widely shared in the
Committee and in the House. The pillars of our strategy include
treatment and support, prevention and early intervention, education,
law and criminal justice, harm reduction, monitoring, evaluation and
support. Those structures should enable us to get a pretty good picture
annually of how we are doing. I hope we will then be in a position to
adjust our policies better to achieve the outcomes that we
want. We have big
challenge in front of us; our task will not be easy. It is easy to put
out information on what constitutes binge drinking, but there are
people who binge drink who do not perceive themselves to be doing so
and people who perceive themselves to be binge drinking who think it is
a good thing that gives them kudos in their social circle. There are
still people who do not care about the consequences for their own
health and that of their families and communities of undertaking what,
in effect, becomes an addiction. We must tackle all those issues in a
rounded way by providing information, and support and treatment when
needed. I think the
hon. Lady accepts that we are trying to do that and that we are having
some success. She referred specifically to some examples that she has
seen in her work of how motivated individuals, backed up with resources
and support, can make a big difference in an area. We are looking
closely at the examples to which she referred for lessons that could be
extended to other parts of Northern Ireland. There is no point in
trying to reinvent the wheel in dealing with these issues. We must find
good practice and spread it if we are to have a chance of meeting the
difficult challenges.
I hope that the hon. Lady will
continue—I am sure that she will—to give close attention
to these issues. Resources are available online that she and
constituents of all hon. Members can look at to check whether they
really are binge drinkers and to see what support is available. Part of
our information campaign is the website, www.knowyourlimits.info, which
sets out basic health messages and explains drinking patterns and what
a unit of alcohol is, how much a young man or woman can safely drink,
what it does and the process, and the effect that it can have on
health. Information is readily available out there and is back up by
further information
campaigns.
Mrs.
Robinson: Does the Minister accept that low-income
families with alcohol-related problems may not always have access to
the
internet?
Maria
Eagle: Yes, that is why we have issued leaflets. The hon.
Lady knows that we are not only high-tech;
we are also low-tech. We have information leaflets with the same support
material. The difficulty is that those who do not wish to find out the
information may be the very ones whom we want to have the information.
That is where human efforts come in, such as the example of the nurse
whom the hon. Lady mentioned who has been commended for his
work. There is no one
simple answer. A website or leaflet is not enough. One individual doing
a fantastic job is not enough. We need all those threads and we need to
back up the efforts that individuals make and the effort that we can
put in the public domain with work across the House and across the
Committee to ensure that we tackle the problem effectively. I am not
saying for a minute that it will be easy. Addiction is difficult to
deal with. Socially acceptable addiction is even more difficult to deal
with. It is incumbent on all of us to put our shoulders to the wheel
and to take forward the measures in our
strategy. Question
put and agreed
to. Committee
adjourned at twenty-eight minutes past Four
o’clock.
Questions Not Answered
OrallyEqual
Lives
Report12.
Mrs.
Iris Robinson (Strangford) (DUP): What
progress has been made in implementing the recommendations of the Equal
Lives report of the Bamford review of mental health and learning
disability.
[105407] The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Maria
Eagle): A policy framework supported by an action plan is
being developed to take forward the implementation of the
recommendations. An interdepartmental taskforce chaired by the new
Northern Ireland director for mental health and
learning disability will agree, oversee and implement them, including
the cross-departmental issues.
Job Creation
Strategy13.
David
Simpson (Upper Bann) (DUP): What his
strategy is for creating jobs in Northern Ireland over the next 10
years.
[105408] The
Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Maria
Eagle): The “Economic Vision for Northern
Ireland”, published in 2005, is of a globally competitive
economy creating wealth and offering employment opportunities for all.
We will secure this by investing in innovation, enterprise, skills and
infrastructure. The “Economic Vision” will be underpinned
by the forthcoming regional economic
strategy.
| 
