The Member is absolutely correct. That's another deficiency of the proposal. There is no direct connection between the sums of money that will be raised and what the Government can spend on trying to target help to those who really need it. Even those who have an occasional drink problem, they're not going to be affected by this very much. The hospital admissions, which always rise at the weekends, where they're related to alcohol as a result of binge drinking on a Friday or a Saturday, those are very unlikely to be altered by the imposition of a minimum price for alcohol. What we should be doing here is looking at where the problem exists and a microsolution to that difficulty.

So, this is a very badly designed proposal, and it is a sledgehammer to miss a nut, actually. That's what is proposed here. At 50p per minimum unit, if that’s what eventually emerges, it’s very unlikely to have any impact upon more than a small number of people. Of course, demand for alcohol is not price inelastic any more than cigarette smoking was not affected by increases in the taxation on tobacco. In order to make any significant inroad upon the problem that the Government adduces as the justification for this proposal, it would have to be a very, very much higher increase than the one that has been suggested. It would be a brave Government indeed that sought to impose a minimum price of, say, £1 per unit on alcohol. I think that would receive a resounding raspberry from the voters.

But I object to this proposal because it is particularly targeted at those on lower incomes. Like many of these proposals—like the sugar tax in England is going to affect those at the lower end of the income scale as well—these are all impositions upon people who are having a struggle anyway to make ends meet in life, and it's going to make it very much more difficult for very little, if any, improvement in public health or a diminution of the other social problems that excessive consumption of alcohol brings about, which we all know about.

So, it’s actually, in many ways, an irrational tax that’s proposed—if I can call it a tax for these purposes. Like many of the taxes that we’ve got in this country, it's very, very badly designed. We’ve just had a debate about property taxes, which are very badly designed. Here we're deliberately creating another one, rather than inheriting it from our predecessors, as a mass of confusion and counter-productive activity.

So, this is not the time when we should be trying to make these impositions upon people who can least afford to deal with them. If we are going to introduce new taxes, they ought to conform to the general canons of taxation, which is that they be well designed, properly targeted and raise reasonable amounts of revenue, or design to achieve in practice the social objectives that they're supposed to, and this proposal will achieve none of those.

As Mark Reckless pointed out, the principal beneficiaries of this will be the supermarkets and the shareholders of supermarkets, to the extent that, at the borders, there will be leakage across the border into England. It's not going to be a big problem, generally speaking, but it might well be in north-east Wales, or indeed in south-east Wales as well. Then that's going to be a problem for local traders in those areas. This is something that has been, I think, very badly thought out, and it cannot be administered in a way that will produce the answer to what is accepted as a significant social and health problem. So, I'm afraid it will fail at all levels.