Lords clash over alcohol pricing claim

Joan Bakewell has clashed with a fellow peer in the House of Lords over the accuracy of a programme she made on drinking among older people.

It was claimed in Baroness Bakewell’s BBC Panorama programme that the lives of 50,000 pensioners could be saved over 10 years if minimum alcohol pricing was introduced.

But after the School of Health and Related Research at Sheffield University accepted it had made a mistake through “human error”, the BBC temporarily withdrew the iPlayer version of the programme and changed the figure to 11,500.

During question time in the Lords Labour peer Lady Bakewell called on the government to introduce minimum alcohol pricing quickly, “to stop wholesalers who are flooding the market with cheap ciders and cheap vodkas that do a great deal of damage”.

Home Office minister Lord Taylor of Holbeach said the government was not delaying but wanted to carry out a consultation.

But former chief executive of the Portman Group, Baroness Coussins, a crossbench peer whose consultancy business advises alcohol companies Brown-Forman and Heineken, told him: “Are you aware that the BBC have now withdrawn the programme from its iPlayer having acknowledged that in the original broadcast there were wildly exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the likely impact of minimum pricing?

“Can you assure the House that when the Government comes to its conclusions on this issue, it will be genuinely evidence-based policy?”

Lord Taylor replied: “I did see it this morning, but it must have been a pirated copy or something, but I apologise if I misled the House.

“The programme did contain a particular inaccuracy about the number of deaths that might have been saved by a minimum pricing policy.”

But he said it did not reduce the “effectiveness of the programme”.

The edited version of the programme is now available on the BBC’s iPlayer.