THERE WAS a lot of argy-bargy this week about drink. Headlines proclaimed that The Government is about to announce a ban on happy hours to curb the misuse of alcohol, a drug rated in a paper in The Lancet this year as more damaging to individuals and society than tobacco and Class A drugs such as LSD.

But will this work? There is a great deal of evidence about how to reduce alcohol consumption and there are two things that are known to reduce it: restricting access and raising prices. There hasn't been much of either so far. Banning happy hours and drink discounts is at least a step in the right direction.

But substantially raising prices of booze across the board would make a lot more sense. Given the black hole in the Government's bank account, you would think that the Chancellor would be keen to grab any cash he can. Raising the price of booze, with a substantial hike in duty, should warm the cockles of a chancellor's heart quicker than several drams of the hard stuff.

Pricier bottles not only bring in more revenue but cut costs associated with alcohol-related illness because people drink less. A study from Revenue & Customs estimated that a 10 per cent rise in the price of alcoholic beverages would result in a 28.8 per cent drop in male deaths and a 37.4 per cent drop in female deaths that were directly caused by alcohol.

The cost to the NHS is £2.7 billion a year, with 811,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospital. Then there's £25 billion a year on top of that for policing.

Alcohol is way too cheap. It is 69 per cent more affordable than it was in 1980 and you can buy it anywhere. It wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, there was the offie. Gloomy establishments, they were poorly lit with a miserable bloke in attendance who, if you were lucky, would grudgingly hand over a bottle of sickly Blue Nun (sweet German white wine) in exchange for half your wages. There was no other place to buy booze of an evening except at a pub. You couldn't buy drink on a Sunday and lest you think I am talking of supermarkets, I'm talking about whole areas of Britain. Some counties in Wales were completely dry on Sunday. You certainly couldn't pick up wine with your weekly shop.In 1953 there were just 24,000 off-licences in the whole of the UK; now there are more than 40,000. There were 61,000 so-called “on- licence” premises in 1953; now there are 78,500. The effect of accessibility on consumption is dramatic. When supermarkets were allowed to sell wine in New Zealand there was an immediate 16 per cent increase in consumption.

I'm not advocating a return to the times when you couldn't buy a bottle of wine in a supermarket, but the pendulum does seem to have swung too far. More than that it has created a culture in which it has become normal to drink humongous quantities and to drink to get drunk. It isn't only the young. Middle-aged, middle-class drinkers might not be getting sick in the streets, but some are consuming alcohol at home in levels that are highly damaging.

Changing Britain's national drink intake is about changing attitudes and culture. It is not a question of educating people about drink or hitting them over the head with a classification. The evidence is very clear that education campaigns for alcohol at least are ineffective. They were extensively reviewed in work published by Thomas Babor, Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology, at the University of Connecticut. In a nutshell, they are short-lived, not intense and are motivated by politics rather than evidence of what works.

Compare and contrast the ubiquitous advertising and marketing presence of the drinks companies. The only way to change culture and behaviour is to make drink pricier and less available. Bring it on, Darling.

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