Number of adult drinkers increases
The number of adult drinkers in Britain increased by about 300,000 every year between 2004 to 2009, according to the Wilson Drinks Report Annual Review of 2010.
However, total volumes of alcohol consumed over the same period decreased for all the major categories except cider - proving that the increase in the numbers of people drinking alcohol in Britain is not keeping pace with population growth.
According to the report the number of additional drinkers falls each year as the population increases. For example, in 2006/2007, there were 325,000 additional adult drinkers out of an adult population of 46,551,000. In 2008/2009, the figure fell to 315,000 adult drinkers out of a population of 47,320,000.
Tim Wilson, managing director of the WDR, said : "In our view, most industry pundits and lobbyists fail to take into account this increase in the total population of adult drinkers when analysing the amount of alcohol consumed in Britain. If the number of drinkers is increasing by nearly 1% every year, you might expect the total volume of alcohol consumed to also increase by the same amount, which it is clearly not.
According to HMRC data, between 2004-05 and 2008-09, beer volumes decreased by 16%, wine volumes decreased by 1% and spirits volumes decreased by 7%. Only cider volumes were up over this 5 year period (up 40%).
The report used HMRC Alcohol Bulletins as an approximate measure of total volumes consumed in the UK, as well as estimates from the Office for National Statistics and research carried out by YouGov for WDR, which measured the % of non-drinkers in Britain every month during 2010.
