Taking stock: Counting the economic costs of alcohol harm

The World Health Organization’s guidance on alcohol is clear: there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. Alcohol is known to cause at least seven types of cancer and to be a primary risk factor for more than 30 health conditions. The more alcohol someone drinks, the greater the risk. Despite this, alcohol consumption across the UK remains worryingly high. 

The trend is heading in the wrong direction and the health risks are clear. Increased rates of alcohol consumption can already be detected in the rise in both alcohol-related and alcohol-specific mortality since 2019. For example, in 2023, 10,473 people died from alcohol-specific causes in the UK, the highest number on record.

As well as having a deleterious effect on the nation’s health as a whole, harmful levels of alcohol consumption are also a key driver of health inequalities. The health burden of alcohol harm is not spread equally across the UK – people living in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are more likely to die of alcohol-specific causes than those living in England. 

In this report we first use newly available data to dig deeper into the effects of alcohol harm on the UK workforce. We argue that alcohol has clear negative impacts on workforce productivity as a whole. Addressing alcohol harm should therefore be a core part of the UK’s industrial strategy. 

We then look more closely at the effects of alcohol on workplaces, and argue that minimising alcohol harm has important benefits for employers. Given the positive impacts that reducing alcohol harm has in the workplace and the unique position that employers have in shaping our day-to-day lives, we argue that employers have a significant role to play in this area. 

The evidence presented in this report should compel both the government and employers to act. The costs of inaction – measured in lives lost, productivity sacrificed and inequalities entrenched – are simply too high to ignore.