My view is that adding health warnings to bottles would add little to consumer perceptions of safe drinking and potentially alienate some people.

There is definitely a duty to give consumers information to help them to make decisions about how much they drink. But putting health warnings on bottles risks being seen as a cureall to cover those people who drink too much. Research around labelling suggests that the people who read labels are aware of risks, whereas those who need to understand an issue don’t pay any attention. For instance, for pregnant women, there are lots of conflicting messages from doctors about how much it is safe to drink. A large number of women are aware of the risks. The consumers who need to be warned are not going to take advice from the label on the back of a bottle.

Labelling on its own will never achieve behavioural change. There is so much information on a product that people develop label blindness. A lot of the time the only information consumers are looking for is about the product itself – what a wine is going to taste like or what food it goes with.

Another limitation of labelling is that there are different unit measurements across Europe. The Portuguese and Dutch have much higher levels of alcohol per unit, for example – so our Government’s sensible drinking message doesn’t apply. There is also the complication of different languages. We operate as a single European marketplace and there is a lot of movement. We already have to include the words ‘contains sulphites’ on wine bottles in 27 different languages which takes up a lot of space; it’s not practical to include a health message from each country. Separate labels for every country would disrupt free market movement.

We need to find better ways of communicating advice, not warnings. Warnings are flawed – people don’t like being told what to do. It’s not as simple as tobacco where you can say that every cigarette kills you. A moderate amount of alcohol is actually good for you. To put “drink kills” on a label would be factually inaccurate.

One of the biggest target groups are young people who binge drink. However, people drinking in those circumstances often wouldn’t see labels. Meanwhile, the education that young people get on alcohol is for the most part poor and telling young people “don’t drink” won’t work because they won’t accept it. We need to inform people about the risks of excess consumption – and what excess means.

They’ve had health warnings on alcohol in the US for a couple of generations with little effect. If you try and dictate to people how to live their lives they will ignore you. You need different tactics and techniques for different groups to get the message right. There are so many reports out on a weekly basis that eventually people switch off because they simply see them as scare stories. Simplistic health warnings on labels risk falling into this trap.

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