7. United Kingdom Independence Party Debate: A minimum price for alcohol

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:52 pm on 9 May 2018.

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Photo of Mr Neil Hamilton Mr Neil Hamilton UKIP 6:52, 9 May 2018

Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. Well, it's been an interesting debate and I'm grateful to everybody who took part, especially the two Members who supported the motion—my colleague Gareth Bennett and Neil McEvoy on the other side of the Chamber. I think that Neil McEvoy did make an important point that we in this house are legislating for others, and there is a general attitude, I think, that we know best and we know what's best for the masses. That's true of all what we might call 'nanny state' innovations of this kind. We can apply the same logic, of course, to other unhealthy practices, like eating too much fatty food or fast food. We could apply the same argument to participation in dangerous sports and all sorts of other activities as well that could produce harm to individuals and a cost to society, but in a free society I think we should be very slow to use legislative powers in order to do that.

I do have a great deal of sympathy with the Plaid amendments. Apart from 'delete all', we can support them. Of course it's sensible that we should have proper evaluation of the effects of this legislation and have the best possible data that is available before it is finally put on the statute book—a point that was made by Rhun ap Iorwerth and Simon Thomas, and very sensible points they are. Modelling will only take you so far, because it's a case of garbage in and garbage out. And in the case of studies mentioned by Dai Lloyd like the Saskatchewan study, the situation in Canada is very different because they have a state alcohol monopoly and the state has powers of control over the access to alcohol in a way that it doesn't have here. So, these international comparisons do have to be treated with a certain degree of circumspection.

Rhun ap Iorwerth hinted in his contribution that, as far as Plaid Cymru is concerned, this 50p minimum unit price that has been suggested is too low and we need to think about having a much higher figure than that—