Thumbprint Insight: the impact of alcohol minimum unit pricing in Scotland
26 February 2025
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This month’s insight focuses on the impact of alcohol minimum unit pricing in Scotland, which was implemented last year. Our Thumbprint Managing Director, Gordon Neil explores the cider and spirits category to assess the impact of the change which took effect last year.
What has this done to sales in each category? How does Scotland compare to England following the new pricing?
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“I’m going to be looking at the Beer & Cider category and the Spirits category, assessing the impact of that minimum unit alcohol pricing.
So let's start with Beer & Cider. What we saw since the change happened to minimum unit pricing in September last year is the price per litre is increased by 3.3 percent in Scotland which is equivalent to 10 pence and actually in the rest of the UK it's declined by 2.2 percent so you can really see the impact of minimum unit pricing on price per litre. However when we look at the actual sales performance what we can see is that Scotland performs better than England and Wales on all of the metrics so price is obviously driving the value growth but actually volume even though it's in decline is performing better than England, the number of units sold is performing better than England and as you'd expect the price is higher.
When we look at spirits the marked increase in that's been seen from minimum unit pricing is obvious there's 6.7% rise in average price per litre in Scotland which is equivalent to £1.68 versus the rest of the UK which was down by which increased by just 0.2% which is a six pence rise so a real obvious increase. What you do notice though is the price per litre in Scotland actually lower than the rest of the UK and that's driven by product mix in Scotland and what consumers buy versus the rest of the UK.
So when we look at that translated into sales what we can see is the obvious increase in value growth and actually volume growth.
Movement is about even with where England is, units are down, price is obviously up as we'd expect so we can see the impact of minimum unit pricing there so in summary what we've seen is clear impact to price across both the beer and cider and spirits category however that's not really impacting volume to the extent you would expect and in fact in beer Scotland performs better than England in that category.
Stay tuned for more insights next month…