Alcohol - minimum unit pricing: public attitudes research

Introduction

The Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) (Scotland) Act 2012 ("the 2012 Act") allows the Scottish Parliament to set a price below which alcohol cannot be sold in Scotland. Minimum unit pricing (MUP) for alcohol was implemented in Scotland on 1 May 2018. MUP is a strength-based price floor for alcoholic drinks, meaning that licensed premises cannot sell an alcoholic drink for less than a certain price, determined by the alcohol-by-volume percentage of the drink. The price floor in Scotland is 50 pence per unit of alcohol.

The policy aim of MUP is to reduce health harms caused by alcohol consumption by setting a floor price below which alcohol cannot be sold. In particular, it targets a reduction in consumption of alcohol that is considered cheap, relative to its strength. It aims to reduce both the consumption of alcohol at population level and, in particular, those who drink at hazardous and harmful levels. In doing so, it aims to reduce alcohol related health harms among hazardous and harmful drinkers, and contribute to reducing harm at a whole population level.

The Scottish Government commissioned Ipsos Mori to carry out public attitudes research towards MUP for two reasons:

1. The 2012 Act contains a sunset clause, stating that the minimum unit pricing of alcohol (MUP) provisions will expire after they have been in place for 6 years (30 April 2024), unless the Scottish Parliament vote for it to continue. As part of work to ensure a strong evidence base to inform the Scottish Parliament's upcoming decision on the potential continuation of MUP, Scottish Government analysts conducted an evidence gap analysis in 2022 on the impact of MUP in Scotland. This identified that there was little evidence on public attitudes towards minimum unit pricing post-2019. This was considered a key data gap, particularly given the potential impact of COVID-19 and the cost of living crisis on public attitudes.

2. The 2012 Act requires Scottish Ministers to lay a report on the operation and effect of MUP as soon as practicable after the first five years of MUP implementation. The 2012 Act requires that, in preparing this report, Scottish Ministers must consult with relevant groups and anyone else they feel is relevant. Scottish Ministers determined that seeking the views of the general public would provide insight into the level of support there was for MUP across Scotland. The findings of public attitudes research would therefore also inform the preparation of this report on the operation and effect of the minimum pricing provisions.

Previous work on public attitudes towards MUP was carried out by Public Health Scotland (PHS) as part of the 5 year evaluation of MUP. This element of the evaluation compared attitudes towards MUP pre- and post-implementation using data from the 2013, 2015, and 2019 waves of the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. This new research uses a different methodology to the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey and is therefore not comparable to previous findings. While it would have been preferable to use the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey for this work to enable comparison to previous data, this was not possible due to the timeframes of the survey.