Bitter vintage

This blog post was published on September 07, 2012 at 02:04 pm GMT

Panorama, the BBC’s flagship documentary series, has aired the issue of excessive drinking by older people as a growing health problem in the UK, citing figures that suggest 50,000 elderly lives could be saved in the next ten years by simply increaasing the minimum consumer price of alcohol to 50p per unit.

We tend to associate alcohol abuse with rowdy youths, fighting and puking in city centres on Saturday nights. So it comes as a sobering thought that the majority of hospital admissions for alcohol-related injuries and illnesses in England last year were from over-65s rather than 16 – 24 year olds. In one sense that’s hardly surprising. There are, after all, 10.3 million people over the age of 65 in the UK, compared to 7.5 million 16 – 24 year olds, and the number of frail elderly within that population is rising.

However, as the proportion of older people in the UK grows, the health-fallout of drinking too much in later life can only get worse left unchecked. Raising the price per unit of alcohol on the proposed Scottish model (however unpopular with the drinks industry) is likely part of the remedy. But only part. Many older people can afford to pay a bit more for their drinks , though a price hike might render a tipple more of an occasional treat than a regular indulgence. As usual with any attempt to change behaviour, there is no magic bullet. We need to understand more about why people (of any age) drink too much.

One reason is social conditioning. Given the availability and relative cheapness of alcohol, I’d imagine most people who enjoy a drink would be taken aback by how little you have to imbibe to reach the government’s advisory daily limit (and even the concept of ‘daily limit’ could be taken to imply that it’s normal to drink every day). Another is the effect of loneliness, isolation, and boredom — again not limited to senior citizens but a problem for many of them through bereavement or lack of family nearby. Health-threatening behaviour may offer a temporary respite. Even the marketing industry makes it easy to forget about older people, in spite of their attraction as customers (unfettered by children or mortgages). With some notable exceptions, display advertising operates as if the world of consumers was uniformly under 40.

If the issue of excessive drinking in later life is going to be addressed effectively it needs an adjustment in thinking as well as in pricing.