Impact of minimum unit pricing on alcohol purchases in Scotland and Wales: controlled interrupted time series analyses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: As a policy option to reduce consumption of alcohol and the harm it does, on May 1, 2018, Scotland introduced a minimum price of 50 British pence (p) per unit of alcohol (8 g) sold; Wales followed suit on March 2, 2020, with the same minimum unit price (MUP). We analysed household purchase data based on bar codes to assess the impact of these policy options in the medium term for Scotland and in the immediate term for Wales. METHODS: For these location-controlled, interrupted time series regression analyses, the data source was Kantar WorldPanel's household shopping panel, which, at the time of our analysis, included 35 242 British households providing detailed information on 1·24 million separate alcohol purchases in 2015-18 and the first half of 2020. With no data exclusions, we analysed the impact of introducing MUP in Scotland, using purchases in northern England as control, and in Wales, using western England as control. The studied changes associated with MUP were price paid per gram of alcohol purchased, grams of alcohol purchased, and amount of money spent on alcohol. FINDINGS: In Scotland, price increases and purchase decreases following the introduction of MUP in 2018 were maintained during the first half of 2020. The difference between Scotland and northern England in 2020 was a price increase of 0·741 p per gram (95% CI 0·724-0·759), a 7·6% increase, and a purchase decrease of 7·063 g per adult per household per day that an alcohol purchase was made (6·656-7·470), a 7·7% decrease. In Wales, the introduction of MUP led to similar results. The difference between Wales and western England was a price increase 0·841 of 0·841 p per gram (0·732-0·951), an 8·2% increase, and a purchase decrease of 7·052 g per adult per household per day that an alcohol purchase was made (6·463-7·640), an 8·6% decrease. For both Scotland and Wales, reductions in overall purchases of alcohol were largely restricted to households that bought the most alcohol. The introduction of MUP was not associated with an increased expenditure on alcohol by households that generally bought small amounts of alcohol and, in particular, those with low incomes. The changes were not affected by the introduction of COVID-19 confinement in the UK on March 26, 2020. INTERPRETATION: The evidence base supporting the positive, targeted impact of MUP is strengthened by the comparable results for Scotland and Wales. The short-term impact of MUP in Scotland during 2018 is maintained during the first half of 2020. MUP is an effective alcohol policy option to reduce off-trade purchases of alcohol and should be widely considered. FUNDING: None.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".