Conservatives would impose ‘treatment tax’ on alcohol?

The prospect of a ‘treatment tax’ being placed on alcohol by a future Conservative government was raised by the Party’s Social Justice Policy Group, chaired by former Party leader Iain Duncan Smith MP.

The Policy Group was established to study the nature, extent and causes of social breakdown and poverty in modern Britain, and to recommend policy solutions to social breakdown and exclusion. Working groups were set up to investigate ‘pathways to poverty’: family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependence, indebtedness and addictions.

The main thrust of the report on the addictions is that alcohol abuse is out of control and that the Labour governments’ drugs policy has failed: there are more drug addicts now than ever before.

A particularly noteworthy recommendation is that the relationship between the affordability of alcohol and the level of consumption provides the government with an effective tool for controlling levels of consumption through the levying of a tax on the product. This tax would, in turn, provide the funding needed to meet the social and economic costs of alcohol related harm, such as police enforcement measures resulting from binge drinking and violence, health service costs and treatment for addicts.

While this is only a recommendation to the Conservative Party which does not commit any future Conservative government, it does suggest that the Conservatives are prepared to consider the kind of controls on the price and availability of alcohol that the Labour government has explicitly rejected, and been roundly criticized by the public health lobby for so doing. In addition to a treatment tax on alcohol to reduce harm, the Social Justice Policy Group also recommends:

• Replacing the current separate drugs and alcohol strategies with an integrated addiction policy: This would be led by a new National Addiction Trust, responsible to a Cabinet Office unit, and controlling funds that would be administered locally by new Addiction Action Centres.0

• Reducing the demand for drugs through a massive expansion in abstinencebased rehabilitation. Spending on drug rehabilitation could be doubled. This would be focused on abstinence, not harm reduction. Both residential and day-care programmes would be supported, and they could be delivered by charities and community groups.

• Introducing dedicated abstinence-based drug rehabilitation wings in every prison. An expansion of abstinence programmes in prison could be cost-effective in the long-term, since they are cheaper than residential programmes in the community.

• Reclassifying cannabis from Class C to B. This could better reflect the dangers posed by new, high-strength strains of cannabis like skunk.

• Introducing abstinence based treatment vouchers: Addicts could be given vouchers to pay for their treatment and rehabilitation, empowering them to make decisions about which approach would work best for them.

• More use of dedicated drugs courts. The existing pilots of specialist drug courts have been shown to be effective: they could be expanded.