Government's four-pints-a-day 'binge-drinker' definition attacked

A new government strategy aimed at stamping out binge-drinking has been criticised by the trade.

The government's national alcohol harm reduction strategy, which was published last week, defined any person who has drunk four pints in a day as a binge-drinker.

Mark Hastings, spokesman for the British Beer & Pub Association (BBPA), said: "This means that a fifth of pensioners are binge-drinkers, as is 40 per cent of the population. It is ludicrous and undermines the strategy as a whole. The real focus of this strategy needs to be on what motivates a small minority of people to go out and behave in a disorderly way."

Francis Patton, customer services director for Punch Taverns, believes the government has blown things out of proportion.

He said: "Four pints won't get many people drunk and to blame the industry for the problems highlighted by the strategy is a bit simplistic."

Bill Sharp, spokesman for the Guild of Master Victuallers, agreed: "There are problems concerned with alcohol and I believe education is the best way to deal with it. But the fact is that the average pub serves sensible people who don't behave like teenage tearaways when they drink four pints."

The strategy reported that binge-drinking in Britain is responsible for up to 22,000 premature deaths each year and costs the taxpayer £20bn a year.

The cost to the NHS of alcohol-related injuries and illnesses is £1.7bn a year while expenses for policing and clean-up operations resulting from drunken crime and disorder top £7.3bn a year.

Rob Hayward, chief executive of the BBPA, said while he welcomed the strategy's target of tackling alcohol misuse, the strategy unit had "overplayed the numbers" and had used out-of-date information.

"The strategy unit used an outdated measure to define the scale of heavy drinking," he said. "Weekly units were replaced by the Department of Health in 1995 by the daily unit benchmarks of two to three units for women and three to four units for men.

"Consequently, many people drinking within those guidelines have been defined as heavy drinkers in this analysis."

Home Office minister Hazel Blears said: "Heavy drinking is bringing with it health risks and a range of other social problems. Not least of these problems is the nuisance and disorder that are all too often a feature of our town and city centres."

Meanwhile a poll on thePublican.com has shown that 49 per cent of licensees believe that the best way of dealing with binge-drinking is to ban huge price discounting.

A quarter of respondents said the government should spend more on educating people about alcohol abuse.

Perhaps surprisingly, 18 per cent of respondents said that the best solution to the problem of heavy drinking would be to increase the legal drinking age to 21.