British adults drinking less than five years ago

Published: 14 April, 2011

The total number of adult drinkers in Britain has increased by about 300,000 every year, according to new research published in the Wilson Drinks Report Annual Review of 2010.

But total volumes of alcohol consumed over the last five years have decreased for all the major categories except cider, the review finds.

The analysis uses the latest UK mid-year population estimates from the Office for National Statistics and research carried out by YouGov for WDR, which measured the percentage of non-drinkers in Britain every month during 2010.

Tim Wilson, managing director of the Wilson Drinks Report, said: "Most of us are very aware that the UK population has been steadily increasing over the last few years. What is particularly interesting is when you work out how many additional adult drinkers there are each year.

"We have extracted the total number of additional British adults from the ONS data, and then applied our estimate of the proportion of adults who don't drink (ie 17%). We calculate that the total number of British adult drinkers has increased by about 300,000 every year between 2004-05 and 2008-09."

Wilson added: "In our view, most industry pundits and lobbyists fail to take into account this increase in the total population of adult drinkers when analysing the amount of alcohol consumed in Britain. If the number of drinkers is increasing by nearly 1% every year, you might expect the total volume of alcohol consumed to also increase by the same amount, which it is clearly not.

"According to HMRC data, between 2004-05 and 2008-09, beer volumes decreased by 16%, wine volumes decreased by 1% and spirits volumes decreased by 7%. Only cider volumes were up over this 5 year period (up 40%)."

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