Categories
opinion

The strange case of the 40 litre limit

There’s been a bit of debate in the wake of last week’s Budget: was the Government’s decision to set a 40 litre eligibility threshold for ‘draught relief’ a sinister plot, or evidence of carelessness?

Though we’re by no means experts on the workings of Treasury and Number 11 Downing Street, between us, we have accumulated a bit of experience in this area.

During our time as civil servants, we were both involved in spending reviews and Budgets; Jess has been on teams auditing HMRC; and Ray spent the past three years writing about tax, including editing technical reports on budgets and fiscal statements.

With all that in mind, we reckon this is more cock-up than conspiracy but driven, in part, by biases built into the system.

First, in our experience, Treasury officials are by no means all mathematical geniuses and seasoned veterans, as you might imagine. They’re often careerist twentysomethings who studied arts subjects – assertive, confident, but not necessarily focused on detail.

Secondly, the extent to which budgets are put together in a panic shouldn’t be overlooked.

The details of the speech are often being finessed minutes before the Chancellor stands up in the house.

Policies are often announced before they’ve been fully worked up or, conversely, fully worked up but not announced at all, only coming to light when tax nerds read the background paperwork.

And the driver is very often “I need something that sounds generous I can announce – and I need it pronto!” (See also: veteran political adviser Damian McBride’s account of how Small Brewers’ Relief came to be back in 2002.)

Thirdly, we reckon we can guess how the 40 litre threshold was arrived at: someone at Treasury or on the Chancellor’s team asked someone at HMRC to tell them the usual size of a beer keg. 

Based on the fact that the vast majority of beer duty collected in the UK comes from national and multinational suppliers they said, “Well, usually 50 litres, I suppose.”

And how much is in a standard ale cask?

“That’d be a firkin at just over 40 litres. But it’s more complicated than…”

That’ll do, no time for fussing over details, need to get the dogs ready for Rishi’s photoshoot.

Or it’s possible they just Googled it, like most people would, and got directed to Wikipedia.

If they did check these numbers with anyone in the industry, the chances are that they reached out to those with connections to the Government. That is, we’d guess, Conservative-supporting national brewers who ship most of their beer in larger containers.

Again, that’s not a conspiracy, as such, but, if true, shows why government-by-network can cause problems.

A further indication that this wasn’t carefully worked out to the Nth degree is how tentatively the policy has been stated. It’s not due to take effect until 2023 and what was actually announced in the Budget was a consultation.

Cynics will say “Consultations are meaningless – they’ve already made up their minds!” Again, in our experience, that’s not necessarily true.

It’s likely that this policy will be implemented in some form but there is an element here of the Government asking other people to do its homework.

That means it’s well worth lobbying and responding to these consultations.

Under this government we’ve already seen quite a few policies being rethought when the public responds with anything other than delight. They do like to be liked.

Categories
News pubs

News, Nuggets & Longreads 4 August 2018: Alcohol, Mirages, Contracts

Here’s everything to do with beer and pubs that struck us as bookmarkable in the past week, from alcohol guidance to estate pubs.

First, a bit of news from the other side of the world: Lion, which seems to be on a spending spree, has just bought pioneering New Zealand ‘boutique brewery’ Harrington’s, founded in 1991.

Meanwhile, in Australia, AB-InBev (via it’s ZX Ventures investment wing) has acquired online beer retailer BoozeBud, to go with similar purchases worldwide such as Beerhawk here in the UK.


 

Illustration: poison symbol (skull and crossbones)

For the Guardian philosopher Julian Baggini reflects on the essential problem of alcohol guidance in the UK: the entanglement of scientific evidence-based advice with matters of morality.

[We] like to think in clean, clear categories of good and bad. With our puritanical Protestant history, alcohol has always fallen on the dark side of this divide. So when the truth turns out to be complicated, rather than accept this maturely, we refuse to acknowledge the good and carry on as though it were all bad. Because drunkenness is sinful, moral condemnation of it trumps any other redemptive qualities it might have.

Categories
opinion

Minimum Unit Pricing: Let’s See How it Goes

BrewDog Beers on a shelf.

This week, after much deliberation, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish government can set a 50p minimum price-per-unit for alcohol.

This is a discussion of which we’ve tended to steer clear because following the arguments is a full time job and other people are more invested in it; and because it tends to get a bit frothy as libertarians with complicated connections to think tanks and the booze industry yell at researchers and policy-makers with complicated connections to the historic temperance movement and government, and vice versa.

With that in mind, we can’t say with any confidence whether MUP is a good policy or not, and we’ve heard convincing arguments for and against from both sides.

For example, we do worry that it will make it harder for ‘responsible drinkers’ on low incomes to get tiddly while middle- and upper-class drinkers can continue to get as wasted as they like on whatever they like. (A few years ago we wondered about setting up a Christmas Booze Bank dishing out bottles of whisky or slabs of beer to people who might otherwise have to choose between having fun or having the heating on.) It seems clear that MUP is intended to target very strong white ciders and super-strength lagers — the kinds of thing few people actually choose to drink if they can afford otherwise — but will catch lots of other types of less sinister booze in its net.

Equally, it seems daft to ignore the reality of the problems alcohol causes for some of the most vulnerable in society, especially when it’s wilful ignorance in support of absolutist anti-regulation dogma. Some people drink too much — we’ve all seen the evidence of this, or known family members who demonstrates it — but their lives, and those of their loved ones, might be prolonged and made happier in the long run if they drank at least a little bit less. This is reality, people’s actual lives, not a philosophical parlour game.

We certainly don’t think all alcohol policy campaigners and researchers are cynics and killjoys attempting to introduce prohibition via the thin ends of various wedges. (Even if some of their fellow travellers might be that way inclined.) In general, the thin-end-of-the-wedge argument winds us up — we’d never do anything if point B inevitably leads to point Z. No, we tend to think they are motivated by genuine concern for their brother man, even if that sometimes reads as condescension or meddling; and, in the case of researchers, we’ve no reason to doubt that they are striving for scientific objectivity.

(If you believe otherwise we’d be genuinely interested to know what you reckon motivates them – surely not religion, in 2017? Chronic dourness? Insanity?)

Politicians, government PR people and newspapers on the other hand… Well, they’re prone to over-simplifying, over-dramatising, grand gestures. If there’s a problem, it might be there.

So, again, we don’t know if MUP is a good idea. What we do know is that Scotland won’t be taking this step without due process having been followed. Much research has been undertaken; hours have been spent labouring over every detail and footnote; the final judgement from the Supreme Court seems balanced and cautious (PDF); and there’s going to be a substantial evaluation project to judge its impact.

Good policy or not, this is how it ought to work – small steps, cautiously implemented, challenged in court where appropriate, followed by a serious assessment of whether it has achieved what was intended, and whether they have been any undesirable side-effects.

There is, after all, no way to really test policy without trying it in the real world, and there’s never been any policy, however well-intentioned, that didn’t wing a few bystanders along the way.

Ultimately we have to accept that pubs and the alcohol industry aren’t the only things that matter, even if they’re very important to us, and if the collective judgement is that they have to take a hit for the greater good then, well, that’s part of the give and take of living in a democracy.

Further Reading