Home Secretary’s Alcohol Briefing

I’ve just returned from a briefing the Home Secretary has given on the government’s alcohol policy.

As trailed in the media she announced that should current law not be sufficient she would legislate to allow the police to confiscate the alcohol of those young people under the age of 18 drinking in public. I think she was saying – but I’ll need to check this against the text of the speech – that she didn’t want to criminalise young people, rather the idea was to take positive action to reduce the harm they were doing to themselves and their communities.

Again as trailed, she spoke about the need for parents to take an active role in helping their children to grow up healthily. She said it was unacceptable for parents to hand their children a six pack and tell them to make themselves scarce for the evening. The government have already put £30 million into extending the support available to parents and it looks like this is another driver to that policy.

Much of the rest of the Home Secretary’s speech was concerned about the development of partnerships between local agencies to try to curb the excessive use of alcohol by older young people. And she made it clear that she expects local alcohol action plans to be in place within the next two months.

Ms Smith did talk briefly about how there was already much good practice on alcohol education, but acknowledged the need to improve on that.

In the Q&A after her speech I asked her whether she felt it was time for alcohol education to be a compulsory part of the school curriculum. To be fair, the Home Secretary didn’t fall back on the line that the science curriculum has a statutory role around substance misuse, but she did seem to think that PSHE was a statutory subject, something that I’ll be following up with her by letter today.

She did go slightly further and acknowledge that teachers could do with better resources for delivering alcohol education, which I’m sure will be welcome.

Srabani Sen, the outgoing chief executive of Alcohol Concern, also pressed the Home Secretary on issues to do with young people’s use of alcohol. She pointed out that much of young people’s drinking was done in the home environment and asked if the government were concerned about that too.

The Home Secretary responded by pointing to the expert group that the DCSF have pulled together to develop messages for parents about young people’s drinking.

The final point I want to draw from the briefing was that the Home Secretary seemed to confirm that the social marketing campaign promised in the alcohol strategy has moved away from being aimed at the under 18s to being for those aged 18 to 24.

The Home Office press release is here.

Filed under: Government, alcohol, alcohol strategy , alcohol policy, Jacqui Smith