My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group. It is a question, as my noble friend Lord Elystan-Morgan said, of flow. The problem for Wales is the flow of alcohol: Wales does not have the ability to control how that flow starts and how that supply chain moves. We in Wales are lumbered with the costs of alcohol abuse, both direct and indirect. There are direct costs in health and social care and
indirect ones in damage to other people, either directly to another person or secondarily, through bereavement and so on. There is a real problem of culture around alcohol consumption in Wales. We should remember that while Scotland has the same culture of drinking, it has been given a degree of control. I fear that it is not always a pretty sight. Things have improved greatly but the Welsh Government does have to have the powers to do something about it.
There is another aspect of this that needs to be considered. We understand very little, really, about the way that alcohol interacts on the brain and on the reward centre, on people developing cravings. It is quite possible that the epigenetics mean that when you have a background culture of a family where there has been drinking, an individual’s reward centre responds differently. It may just be that people in Wales, having been born into a culture of drinking are more predisposed, more likely to develop an addictive tendency towards alcohol. It seems bizarre, when this is such a social problem and when the costs are really all borne at a local level, that the ability to control it is not given to the very Government that has responsibility for dealing with those problems.