Eli5 how does minimum unit pricing work exactly?
The minimum price was set to 50p per unit / centilitre of alcohol.
(Keeping easy metric amounts for simplicity. In bars beer and cider is sold in 568mL glasses, though wine and spirits are nice round metric amounts.)
A 1L bottle of vodka, at 40% ABV, contains 40cL of alcohol. The shop or bar must sell it for at least 40×£0.50 = £20. In England, Tesco's cheapest 1L bottle of vodka is £15, so this has increased the price by £5 in Scotland. A fancy vodka which costs £22 in England is unaffected.
A 2L bottle of cheap cider at 5% ABV must cost at least £5. At Tesco in England, this is available for about £2.
Admittedly, 99% of the alcohol on the market is already well above the price minimum,
But I went with what was for sale on the Tesco website. I think I read some time ago that they voluntarily stopped selling "White Lightning" etc.
I bought it once when I was 15, so I'm a bit out of touch.
A bottle of wine containing 10 units of alcohol has to be sold for at least £5, and a can of lager containing 2 units of alcohol has to cost at least £1.
Unlike supermarkets and off-licences, most drinks sold in pubs, clubs and restaurants already cost more than 50p per unit so there is no real difference under minimum pricing.
Minimum pricing is an effective policy because it targets the drinkers causing the most harm to themselves and society, whilst having almost no effect on moderate drinkers.
All alcohol sold is marked with the number of "units" it contains. Multiply that by the minimum unit price (currently £0.50) to get a minimum total price.
Examples: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/scotland-minimum-al...
See also https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/alcohol-scotland-d...
This phrasing frustrates me quite a bit. I assume they're referring to "% concentration of ethanol by volume", but they chose to express it in this obtuse "units" and "strength" nomenclature. (Or is this referring to the "proof" as the strength in their formula? Is that metric used in Scotland?)
If the intent is to communicate to the public, this is not an effective way to do it.
One shot is one unit.
One beer is 2-3 units.
One glass of wine is 2-3 units.
It is very simple maths. The kind you find hard to mess up when drinking.
One shot is one centilitre.
One beer is 2-3 centilitres.
One glass of wine is 2-3 centilitres.
It's not maths at all, it's just communication. There's nothing "simpler" about "unit" than "centilitre", it's just less clear.
It would be like a continental European going to America and going, "What are all these MILES things? It's confusing!".
"Units" reduce the complexity to a single number. For most drinks it will be 1, 2 or 3 units. Simple numbers, single digits.
General health advice will state that n units are the maximum recommended per week or day for men or for women. It's a single number to remember. Make sure the drinks you have total less than that maximum number, and you'll be following the recommendations.
The aim here isn't to be scientifically accurate. It's to reduce the problem to its essentials so that the message is clear and simple, and everyone in the entire population can understand it and follow it. By that measure, it's wildly successful.
Units are an unit of measure. It's literally a different name for a centilitre.
> "Units" reduce the complexity to a single number. For most drinks it will be 1, 2 or 3 units. Simple numbers, single digits.
Centilitres reduce the complexity to a single number. For most drinks it would be 1, 2, or 3 centilitres. Simple numbers, single digits.
> General health advice will state that n units are the maximum recommended per week or day for men or for women. It's a single number to remember. Make sure the drinks you have total less than that maximum number, and you'll be following the recommendations.
General health advice will state that n centilitres are the maximum recommended per week or day for men or for women. It's a single number to remember. Make sure the drinks you have total less than that maximum number, and you'll be following the recommendations.
> The minimum price of alcohol is to be calculated according to the following formula—
> MPU × S × V × 100
> where—
> MPU is the minimum price per unit,
> S is the strength of the alcohol, and
> V is the volume of the alcohol in litres.
It's hard to figure out, but I think "alcohol" actually means "alcoholic beverage" and "strength" means "percentage of alcohol in the alcoholic beverage". So with a MPU of £0.50 and pint (0.56 litres) of 3% alcohol cider, you'd have £.5 × .03 × .56L × 100 = £0.84. So it looks like the "unit" in "minimum price per unit" is "centiliters", although this unit is mentioned literally nowhere in the law.
It's a minimum price per centiliter of pure alcohol in the beverage. That's it.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/alcohol-support/calculating-alc...
Units aren't the only confusing thing here.
You need to read it in context. "Alcohol" is quite adequately defined at Licensing Act (Scotland) 2005 s.2: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2005/16/section/2
s.147 defines strength: "strength", in relation to alcohol, is to be determined in accordance with section 2 of the Alcoholic Liquor Duties Act 1979 (c. 4), thus "the alcoholic strength of any liquor is the ratio of the volume of the alcohol contained in the liquor to the volume of the liquor (inclusive of the alcohol contained in it)".
It's defined in such terms as that makes it easy to calculate - both strength and volume can be looked up from the label of the alcohol. The average person wouldn't know where to start with centiliters of pure alcohol in the beverage. You don't actually need to know what a unit is to calculate it, but it's 10ml of pure alcohol, or 25ml of a 40% spirit (standard sales amount). It'll be familiar to most UK drinkers.
In Ontario, Canada, it works differently. They attempt to apply different minimum prices to various broad categories of alcoholic drink (beer vs wine vs liquor).
By setting it per unit instead of quantity of drink the government targets super strength cheap cider etc that were linked to lots of anti-social behaviour and crime.
The reason this is so fantastically confusing is because sometimes even regulators use "alcohol" to refer to the drink, and not the ethanol.