Well, that's not the question. The question is amongst those who are really addicted: addicts. We don't know, of course, what the minimum price is going to be. Of course, if you increase the minimum price of alcohol by £5 rather than 50p, it would have a dramatic effect, but until we know what the minimum unit price is going to be, we can only talk in general terms. But what we can say, I think, with reasonable confidence is that the people who are least likely to change their behaviour as a result of a moderate increase in price are those who are most dependent upon alcohol. They will actually spend less on other things in order to feed their addiction. That is the nature of addiction, I would have thought.

There's been a study done of British Columbia, which did introduce minimum pricing, which has been cited as a justification for this Bill, but, actually, that also suffers from all sorts of methodological flaws. For one thing, the sale of liquor in British Columbia is entirely a state monopoly, and that's very different from the situation in this country. A fall in crime was attributed in British Columbia to the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol without, of course, saying that similar falls in crime were experienced everywhere else in Canada that didn't have a minimum price for alcohol.

Indeed, these are global trends as well. We've seen a dramatic reduction, actually, in levels of alcohol consumption generally in this country in recent years—a 12 per cent fall between 2004 and 2011. So, disentangling all these different effects from a single cause is almost impossible to achieve. So, I think we should argue about this in general terms, rather than trying to introduce some kind of bogus mathematical exactitude that is likely to shore up or undermine the prejudices with which we come to the debate. 

We know that in some countries there are much higher levels of alcohol consumption than in this country, and yet they have fewer problems of excessive drinking. France is one of them, which was referred to in the health committee's report in paragraph 73. In paragraph 75 in this report as well, it states that in the United Kingdom alcohol consumption has gone down in recent years, but there's been no parallel decline in alcohol-related harm. So, these two things are not necessarily connected. If this is going to be a targeted measure, it has to target the people who are the problem, not the overwhelming majority of people who drink alcohol who are no problem to anybody at all, even to themselves.     

There will be ill effects that the introduction of a minimum price for alcohol will have on the poor and those who are on the lowest incomes, as many people have pointed out in the course of this debate. The champagne drinkers are not going to be affected by this measure, but those who go and buy a few cans of lager at Aldi or Lidl or wherever will be affected, and I think it is an unfair measure that cannot be anything other than regressive. 

I'd like to draw attention also to paragraph 178 of the health committee's report about the likely impact upon the homeless and those who are problem drinkers who live on the streets, and what is likely to happen to those. That shows that, in fact, their problems could actually be made worse as a result of measures of this kind. I haven't the time to go into the detail of it now, but we'll have plenty of time in the course of this Bill's process through to explore these things in detail. I certainly think that the point that has come out of almost everybody's speech today is that we need to have an evidence base to any decision that is ultimately made.