Clause 3
Finance (No. 2) Bill
5:15 pm
Philip Dunne (Ludlow, Conservative)
I should like to raise a brief point, to which I hope the Financial Secretary will respond; it is the obverse of the point that I raised about tobacco duty. There has been an inflation-only increase on duty on beer, but there has been a freeze on spirits for, I think, the eighth Budget in succession; I may have got that wrong. In real terms, the duty on spirits has declined by 18.4 per cent. since 1997.
Put that in the context of the public health aspects of excise duty, which were part of the justification for the increase in tobacco duty. Today we have learned that the primary justification for the increases in excise duty on alcohol is to do with revenue, yet the incidence of alcohol as a cause of admission to hospitals is increasing steadily.
According to my calculations, there was a rise of4.6 per cent. between 1997 and March 2003, the last period for which statistics are available in the 2004 statistical bulletin. That is an increase of 8,000 to 176,100 admissions in which alcohol is cited as the primary reason, or is referred to, in the relevant note. There is at least a case—I should be interested to hear whether the Financial Secretary considered it during his preparation for the Budget—for using excise duties as a means of improving public health in relation to alcohol-induced illness.