Lobbying by the alcohol industry was taking place ‘right up to the wire’ before the publication of the government’s ten-year health plan for England in July this year, according to a report by the Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA), Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) and the Obesity Health Alliance, and funded by Cancer Research UK.
The ten-year plan had been rumoured to include a commitment to minimum unit pricing (MUP) alongside other measures to tackle growing rates of alcohol-related harm, says Killer tactics 2: business as usual, but as publication neared ‘it became clear that this had been dropped’. Media stories in the days before the plan’s launch – reportedly based on a leaked draft, the document says – also claimed that it would include new restrictions on alcohol advertising, but these had been removed by the time of publication, despite the Department of Health and Social Care previously confirming they were under consideration.
The proposed restrictions had been ‘strongly opposed’ by industry bodies, and ‘in the end, the plan contained very little on alcohol beyond a commitment to introduce new standards for alcohol labelling’, the report says.
The document is a follow-up to a previous Killer tactics report published last year, which set out a range of methods used by the alcohol, tobacco and unhealthy food and drink industries. These included denying and playing down evidence of the harms linked to their products, positioning themselves as ‘part of the solution’, using legal threats to delay implementation of policies, and providing gifts and hospitality to MPs in an attempt to win their favour. ‘All too often, policies designed to improve the public’s health are delayed, diluted or entirely derailed by underhand tactics from industries focused on maximising profits at the direct expense of the public’s health and wellbeing,’ the report states.
In the run up to last year’s General Election the alcohol industry ‘went into overdrive’ to remind politicians of its contributions to the UK economy, it continues, with these arguments then ‘recycled in the media’ ahead of that year’s Autumn budget. Since then the industry has ‘been busy undermining other potentially game changing policies on alcohol’ such as plans to lower the drink drive limit in England and Wales, it says, while the tobacco industry has also been ‘attempting to undermine’ the tobacco and vapes bill.
The document calls for new guidelines to limit alcohol industry engagement in policy making, as well as a requirement for transparency on conflicts of interest at ‘all levels of government’ – including advisors. ‘Each year, millions of lives in the UK are impacted or cut short from diseases linked to just three products – tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food and drink,’ it states. ‘Although the products are very different, the operations of the multi-billion-pound industries that produce and promote them are strikingly similar with a tried and tested ‘playbook’ of tactics.’
Killer tactics 2: business as usual available at https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/killer-tactics-2-business-as-usual