I thought there was another "underage drinking" thread, but a quick search failed to find it.
Its enforcement thats the key, it is illegal to sell drink to under 18s yet even when people do, the penalties are not severe enough. As an employee of somewhere that sells alcohol not ID'ing someone under 25 should be a serious offence - do it more than once and lose your job. Have a pub or off licence get caught doing it more than once and expect it to be shutdown. Anything less is pussyfooting around the issue. Increasing the limit to 21 is totally, totally pointless. With the current level of indifference regarding enforcement, even making it 25 would make little difference.
Binge Drinking:
Did you know it was illegal to serve drunk people more alcohol? Most bar staff don't
Recent licensing law changes to combat binge drinking are ill thought out and will make little difference to the problem they are trying to address. My family run a small cafe with some off-sales - whisky and their own branded beer. They make a maximum of a couple of hundred pounds profit a year on alcohol, yet when they go to renew their licence to sell alcohol the application fee is £800 and other fees are several hundred more. Every staff member who sells any alcohol must have been on an £150 course. Being a seasonal business they trade only from March to October and rarely have the same staff the next season. So it'll be at least £300 a year for the staff, never mind themselves. Strangely, they wont be bothering this year. The local brewer who supplies many such small business is likely to lose thousands. The local supermarket still sells cheap alcohol, maybe it'll cost a few pence more to binge drink...ooh
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