A "unit" of alcohol is 1cL. This amount is commonly used in the UK -- the amount of alcohol in a drink is often printed on the label in "units", and people have some ideas around how many "units" one can drink safely. It's used in personal health education at school.
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.
5% is considered weak for that kind of cheap cider too, white lightning was far stronger than that for a similar price. (And if I remember correctly usually came in 3L bottles)
The higher end makers are probably glad the price curve is flattening. They can make a bit more profit and still be minimally more expensive than the cheap competition.
Stronger drinks that contain more units of alcohol have a higher minimum price than drinks that contain less alcohol. Drinks that have been most affected include strong white cider, own brand vodka and gin, and super strength lager.
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.
Christ, that's terribly written. Legalese is not a good way to communicate even very basic scientific concepts.
> 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.
UK drinkers are generally familiar with the "unit" system - although I had no idea how much a "unit" actually was, the rule of thumb of it being roughly one standard measure of spirits or half a pint of beer is easy to remember.
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.
> strength is taken to be the alcoholic strength by volume as indicated by the mark or label
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?)
As Symbiote explains above, units are just (volume * %ABV) expressed in a standard unit -- centiliters. It seems like a great system... it's like "standard drinks" in the US but actually printed on bottles. I imagine removing the need for people to do multiplication in order to figure out how much they are drinking is probably a good thing.
It's absolutely effective. Much of the public aren't as educated as we might like, and communication needs to be as simple as possible. Using units of measure will only serve to confuse, because it adds additional complexity in interpreting the advice.
"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.
> Using units of measure will only serve to confuse, because it adds additional complexity in interpreting the advice.
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.
A "unit" is a specific amount of alcohol though. Not very obtuse if you are familiar with it, and know that, for example, a pint of session ale is around a couple of units. The minimum price is applied per alcohol unit.
A 'unit' in Scotland/UK is 1cl of pure alcohol. So to get the number of 'units' of alcohol you multiply the the 'strength', in % ethanol by volum, by the volume of the container it is sold in. So a 1 liter bottle of vodka is 1l x 40% = 40 units and a bottle of wine in 0.75 x 13% = 9.75 units.
You must pay at least a certain amount of money for a certain mass of ethanol.
The minimum price of any container of ethanol is determined by how much ethanol is in that container.
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).
Yes - per liter of pure ethanol. If you buy a pint of regular lager beer you are buying basically 0.56L times 5.2% alcohol which is 2.9 cl pure ethanol, or as a brit would some times say "about 3 units". So a minimum proce per unit is the same as a minimum price per litre of pure ethanol. The minimum price per liter of ethanol is 100x the minimum price per unit (since one unit is 1 cl pure ethanol).
The reason this is so fantastically confusing is because sometimes even regulators use "alcohol" to refer to the drink, and not the ethanol.
Basically. There is a minimum price set of 0.50 per unit. This means a bottle of whisky, 70cl at 37.5% ABV cannot retail for less than £14 whereas previously these would be on promotion sometimes at £11/£12/£13.
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.
