Examination of Witnesses (Question Numbers
560-579)
MR DEREK
LEWIS AND
MR DAVID
POLEY
2 JULY 2009
Q560 Dr Taylor: So far?
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q561 Dr Taylor: But you are so good
that they will remove it?
Mr Lewis: The Portman Trust has
made no suggestion that it will reduce its commitment. We always
hope that it may increase it. An important point to dwell upon
for a moment is that the trust is an independent organisation
with a very specific remit which is to provide information and
education. It is evidence-based so that the consumers of alcohol
and other interested parties can make informed judgments about
how they use it. The question sometimes raised is whether that
is possible when the funding comes from the alcohol industry and
we have on our board people who are employed by it, but the trust
does defend its independence with great rigour. We view the presence
of people on its board from the alcohol industry as helpful because
it brings a considerable amount of expertise, but they are in
a minority. When they are on the board they are there to represent
the interests of the trust, not their parent organisations.
Q562 Dr Taylor: How do you respond
to suggestions that you were established to provide an acceptable
face for the alcohol industry?
Mr Lewis: I do not think that
is true at all. My judgment is that those from the industry who
were instrumental in establishing the trust had a genuine and
serious concern to make a contribution to dealing with the problem
of alcohol. They have been very positive and helpful in supporting
the work of the trust. I sense no hidden agenda on their part
in trying to influence the activities of the trust to mitigate
its effect and help their own interests as companies.
Q563 Dr Taylor: Your stated aim is
to promote responsible drinking. How do you get that across to
younger age groups?
Mr Lewis: We have established
two principal target audiences for our work: one is underage drinkers,
the under-18s; the other is the mature adult drinkers. We chose
those because they were not being extensively addressed by other
agencies. In the case of the underage drinker it is a difficult
audience for the alcohol industry to address directly anyway.
A lot of the conventional media approaches are simply not appropriate
and any communications programme that appears to be adults telling
children what to do is almost bound to fail. For that reason we
have been relatively slow in developing our own strategy. We have
undertaken quite a lot of research about what will and will not
work in that area. We also have a portfolio of activities now
being launched. A lot of that is around education, supporting
teachers and others in their work with children; a lot of it is
around developing peer-to-peer programmes so that children learn
from their own peers in a way that is not threatening to them.
We do that both through our own programmes and some of the grants
we give, such as a substantial one we gave recently for a programme
that incorporates an alcohol education element in a sports-related
programme for children in the London area.
Q564 Dr Taylor: If you really were
successful and got drinkers to keep to recommended guidelines
what would be the effect on sales?
Mr Lewis: I have not calculated
that. Undoubtedly it would be a significant effect, but everyone
on the board of the Drinkaware Trust would regard that as a major
accomplishment and a real market success. We are a long way off
that; this is a long-term programme.
Q565 Dr Taylor: So, you really value
your independence from the industry?
Mr Lewis: Absolutely; we zealously
guard it.
Q566 Dr Taylor: Even though your
results could go against the interests of the industry?
Mr Lewis: Yes. We have very strong
representation from the health community. In the room today you
have an adviser who is one of our trustees, and one of the witnesses
from the health community who is to follow is also a trustee.
I think that that together with the presence of three entirely
independent trustees is the safeguard of the independence of the
organisation.
Q567 Dr Naysmith: This area is bedevilled
by the fact that evidence on the effects of advertising is sometimes
quite difficult to obtain so people tend to argue from both sides
of the same piece of research and say it supports both arguments.
There are, however, nowadays some good reports. The World Health
Organization report Alcohol: No Ordinary Commodity presented
evidence and argued that public education was one of the least
effective policy responses to the problems of alcohol because
it promoted measures that tended not to interfere with companies'
business operations rather than more effective measures which
some of us suggest would adversely affect profitability. You are
both engaged in the area of trying to educate the public. Mr Lewis
has suggested some novel ways of doing it that probably have not
been tried before. What do you think of that report? It is probably
the least effective thing you can do to try to control the amount
of alcohol that is abused by the population.
Mr Lewis: I am not sure I can
tell you which of the various activities will be effective. It
seems to me there is a requirement for a portfolio of activities
to deal with the very serious problem of excessive alcohol consumption
and harm, but I believe that education and information has a vital
part to play in that because there is evidence that it can be
successful. We have some early indications of that in our own
work. You may have seen the campaign How Much is Too Much?
that we ran in major metropolitan areas last autumn The research
from that showed an encouraging level of awareness of the advertisements
and a very high number of people, about 75%, said that it had
caused them to stop and think about their alcohol consumption
and might lead them to change their behaviour. We have also seen
a massive increase in traffic on our website. We now have about
130,000 unique visitors a month to our website. That is a very
significant audience of people who voluntarily seek information
about alcohol and its effects. One must believe that over time—it
will take time and commitment—that will start to have an
influence on behaviour, but it is only one component. In any event,
it seems to me there is an obligation on society to make available
the right information about the effects of alcohol. For example,
a car manufacturer would not dream of producing a car without
a handbook that had all the safety advice in it. Equally, when
marketing a product like alcohol it is an imperative that that
same safety advice is made widely available and accessible to
those who use the product.
Q568 Dr Naysmith: We know that in
society and in medical terms the harm caused by alcohol is increasing,
in some areas quite rapidly. We know that price can have an effect
on alcohol consumption. Maybe the effect is not quite as direct
as with tobacco but it is similar. Would it not be much more sensible
to introduce policies to try to limit the amount of alcohol consumed
particularly by young people which we know work much better than
education which all the evidence suggests may or may not have
an effect?
Mr Lewis: I do not think it is
an "either or" but an "and and" question.
There must be a role for information; people have the right to
have access to evidence-based intelligible information. Equally,
there is a place for other measures as well. It is not the role
of the Drinkaware Trust to advise governments or other bodies
on their activities other than acknowledge that it simply fills
one particular need in a spectrum of activities.
Q569 Dr Naysmith: Mr Poley, in the
past I have had numerous discussions with representatives of the
Portman Group. They argue that the drinks industry engage in advertising
in order to encourage the consumption of one brand rather than
another but then they deny that it encourages an increase in alcohol
consumption overall. I just think it is very unlikely that that
is true, but what do you think of it in the context of what we
have just been talking about?
Mr Poley: Perhaps I may first
address the question of education. We hear the argument that education
does not work. To my mind, this is a completely wrong argument.
One needs to look only at the example of drink driving for evidence
of how it can work. Over the past 25 years deaths from drink driving
have been slashed by about 70% in the UK. That is due in part
to strong law enforcement but in large measure it is also due
to the sustained educational campaigning that has gone alongside
it; it has transformed attitudes and subsequently behaviour. The
Department for Transport conducts tracking research to measure
attitudes and so on. If you go back to 1980, 60% of people agreed
with the statement that it was hard to avoid drink driving if
you were to have a social life. By the end of the century that
figure had been slashed to just 25%. That has been achieved through
education and I believe we can do the same in terms of attitudes
to public drunkenness provided the campaign is sufficiently long
and it is accompanied by strong law enforcement. To turn to the
question of the advertising effect, there is a wealth of evidence
to demonstrate that the predominant effect of advertising is to
cause brand switching. Even the report from the University of
Sheffield commissioned by the Department of Health last year found
that the evidence for the effect of alcohol advertising upon consumption
was relatively weak. At best it will have a slight effect.
Dr Naysmith: I am not sure the evidence
on that is quite as good as you suggest.
Q570 Mr Scott: Do you accept the
problems associated with alcohol are best tackled at a population
level through policies such as perhaps minimum pricing and controls
on the level of alcohol advertising rather than through information
campaigns?
Mr Poley: We believe that the
best way to tackle alcohol misuse is to focus on the misusers
rather than try to get everyone in the whole population to drink
less. In the UK at the moment it is estimated that 7% drink 33%
of all the alcohol. It is this minority, and the minority who
occasionally drink to excess on particular occasions and cause
harm, on whom we should focus. If you reduce alcohol misuse it
is true that it is likely that per capita consumption will go
down as a result, but you should be doing it that way round. You
should focus on the misusers rather than try to get everyone to
drink less and, within that, capture the minority who happen to
be misusing alcohol.
Q571 Mr Scott: Do you accept that
the evidence put forward to us clearly shows that advertising
increases both the uptake of drinking and consumption among young
people?
Mr Poley: I think it will be a
weak effect at best. The Sheffield report looked at what might
be the effect of a complete advertising ban and concluded that
it might have a positive effect on consumption and harm but conceivably
it could make things worse and result in people drinking more.
There is no strong evidence to suggest that advertising is one
of the significant influences on consumption and harm.
Q572 Mr Scott: But evidence has come
from the European Court of Justice, the European Union Science
Group, three peer reviews and systematic literature reviews and
that has now been endorsed by The Lancet. Do you say they
are all wrong?
Mr Poley: There is a variety of
research out there and, depending on the researchers and the methodology
they use, they arrive at different results. That is why when Sheffield
tries to estimate the effect of an advertising ban it has some
research, all of which has been peer-reviewed, that says it is
a good thing and also some research saying it is a bad thing.
One can always pick and choose research that backs up one's particular
view. The fact is that when it comes to advertising the study
carried out by Sheffield suggests that there is a confused picture
out there. There is likely to be some impact on overall consumption
but we should not overestimate it.
Q573 Mr Scott: So, you believe that
all of those are incorrect?
Mr Poley: There will be other
studies that can be set against them and I suggest we should come
to a different view.
Q574 Jim Dowd: I should like to do
what Members of Parliament are most eager to do and quote myself.
I put the following question to a couple of academics who appeared
at our first session of evidence in April. Referring to campaigns
to promote responsible drinking by the drinks company I asked
whether they regarded "them as (a) ineffective, (b) counter-productive
or (c) total hypocrisy." Dr Anderson, a consultant in public
health and adviser to the World Health Organization and European
Commission, replied: "We would say that it is likely to be
ineffective in terms of reducing harm. It is counter-productive
in the sense that it leads to a more positive view about the alcohol
industry serving the drinks which tends then to make people feel
a bit easier about drinking. In a way it is hypocritical because
if you were an industry wanting to be serious about reducing harm
then you would have to be serious about agreeing to certain things
that would reduce harm." He referred to something like minimum
pricing or seriously reducing the investment in advertising. How
do you respond to that?
Mr Lewis: There are probably issues
about drinks companies conducting responsible drinking campaigns
under their own brand names, but the distinguishing feature of
the Drinkaware Trust is that none of its campaigns makes any reference
at all to the drinks companies that provide the funding. They
are issued under the Drinkaware Trust brand and we go to great
lengths to try to ensure that the general public recognises the
Drinkaware Trust as an independent organisation with the precautions
I talked about earlier. It also now has an independent medical
panel that vets all of the publications it issues to get to the
point where the reality and perception among the public is that
the trust is an independent source of information they can trust.
The evidence is that we are progressively moving towards that
point.
Mr Poley: As Derek says, the campaigns
of the trust do not promote any particular brands. It is fine
if companies choose to do either brand-based or corporate-based
responsibility campaigns on top of that as long as they are done
in a genuine way and are properly researched and not cynical.
I would not automatically assume that they would be cynical. Our
member companies along with others in the industry at the moment
will use their brand advertising, for example, to promote the
Drinkaware Trust website address. That is responsible no doubt
for driving an awful lot of traffic to that address. I believe
it now has 130,000 unique visitors a month. No doubt a significant
proportion of those visitors will have been driven there through
the use of the site in brand advertising. I do not think that
is cynicism on the part of the industry; it is a genuine attempt
to help educate the public.
Q575 Jim Dowd: Presumably, you would
equally resist the charge of hypocrisy?
Mr Poley: Yes.
Q576 Jim Dowd: What is the attitude
of the witnesses to health warnings on alcohol products?
Mr Poley: All of our member companies
are committed to putting certain information on their drinks packaging;
that is to say, they have information that they put on voluntarily
about the number of alcohol units they contain. They also put
on the Drinkaware Trust website address and they will also have
a responsible drinking message such as "Please drink responsibly".
I do not believe it is necessarily appropriate to have a health
warning on a drink of alcohol. Alcohol is not like cigarettes;
it is capable of being misused but when drunk in moderation it
is perfectly compatible with a healthy lifestyle. For certain
groups when drunk in moderation it has health advantages. To put
on a soundbyte in the form of a health warning label seems to
me to be an unbalanced way to convey the complex information about
the health effects of drinking.
Q577 Jim Dowd: Are you not being
totally disingenuous? This inquiry and the nation generally are
not concerned with the vast majority of people who drink responsibly.
We are talking of a particular product with particular characters
and a capacity for social disruption and the message is that drinking
the product excessively can cause harm to yourself and others.
I accept that you could, if you like, put that on a bottle of
bleach, but we are talking here about alcohol. For the people
who do not drink excessively it will have no impact whatsoever;
for those who do drink excessively it may have no impact whatsoever,
but it must be worth doing.
Mr Poley: You say there is no
evidence that it will have a positive effect.
Q578 Jim Dowd: I did not say that.
Mr Poley: Where health warning
labels are in effect elsewhere the evidence seems to indicate
that it does not have a significant impact on people's knowledge
and behaviour; indeed, it just becomes wallpaper and people dismiss
it after a certain period of time. Having the information we have
on the product at the moment in terms of directing people towards
the Drinkaware Trust website where they can get comprehensive
information is a more appropriate way to use packaging.
Q579 Chairman: I do not know whether
the Portman Group has any publications about the Sheffield report,
but I would appreciate its detailed views on the content of that
report on advertising and maybe other things as well. It might
help the inquiry.
Mr Poley: It is an interesting
and thorough piece of work that is a very useful contribution
to our knowledge in these areas.
Q580 Chairman: In view of what you
said about advertising—you referred to brand switching which
is an expression I have heard in relation to other matters—I
should like to have on paper your views on it.
Mr Lewis: The independent audit
of the Drinkaware Trust review will be available in a couple of
days' time and we shall be very happy to make that available to
the Committee, if that is helpful.
Chairman: That would be appreciated.
Thank you very much for coming along to help us today.
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