Diageo hopes Labour will help drinks trade

Diageo chief executive Debra Crew is hoping Britain’s new Labour government will act to help the drinks industry.

“We hope they will help us unlock new opportunities to grow Scotch”, she said yesterday, Diageo is the biggest distiller of Scotch whisky, selling nine bottles of its Johnnie Walker range every second.

Crew said that if the chancellor tackled the “domestic barrier of punitively high excise duties that would be helpful for us and the government in driving up revenues.”

“That would also really help the hospitality sector, which has really been through a tough time,” she said.

Lowering duties on spirits “would be a great to help us to unlock some export markets, notably India.”

“That is a really important export market for us. We are doing well there but we could certainly do better.”

India consumes half of all the whiskey produced globally and UK distillers have long argued that high UK duty rates set a poor example to trade partners.

The UK has been trying to negotiate a free trade agreement with India since 2018 but so far with no success.

There are hopes, however, that with this year’s newly elected governments in both Delhi and Westminster being able to take a longer-term view with elections five years away, the two sides will move closer.

Both acknowledge that alcohol duties in India are not an outstanding barrier to an agreement and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds reiterated in Parliament earlier this week that Britain is very keen to conclude a free trade pact with India.

Dan Mobley, Diageo’s global corporate relations director, says that he is now “mildly more confident” that a deal will be struck but that the timing remains unpredictable.