THE days of new students being initiated into binge drinking at universities may be numbered. The government is considering plans to clamp down on “freshers’ weeks”, where students are encouraged to consume vast quantities of cheap alcohol.

The prime minister and his policy team have been impressed by experts at a Downing Street seminar who deplored the scale of drunkenness at university. Professor Oliver James, a liver disease specialist and head of the medical faculty at Newcastle University, told Gordon Brown that he was “appalled” by the quantity of drinking during freshers’ week at his university.

“Students are being positively encouraged to go out and get blind drunk for a fortnight during freshers’ week,” said James.

“This kind of practice just imprints the binge drinking culture. It is no longer just for a week and it is no longer just for freshers: all students take part. Universities need a new policy on this.”

In his faculty James has banned advertisements for pub crawls and discounted drinks during freshers’ week. He expects other departments at Newcastle, which has one of the biggest freshers’ weeks in the country, to follow suit.

The alcohol-fuelled induction week for new recruits now runs for two or even three weeks at some universities, with clubs and societies competing to lure new members with free, or discounted, drinks and subsidised pub crawls. At Durham, one social group called the Diced Carrot Club is reputed to encourage members to drink until they are sick.

Brown’s team is exploring whether the Higher Education Funding Council, which distributes public money to universities and colleges for teaching and research, could use its powers to ban universities from encouraging excessive drinking on their campuses.

Students may well accuse ministers of hypocrisy, given the subsidised alcohol that MPs enjoy in House of Commons bars and their own student experiences. Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, was famously photographed playing a drinking game known as “bunnies” in her pyjamas at Oxford University.

Smith once described the rules: “You tap your knees and then point at another member of the group. Then they put their hands up to pretend they have rabbit ears. Those who ‘failed to make the bunny’ had to down the drink in one go.”

As a teenager Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, drunkenly set fire to a greenhouse full of award-winning cacti and Brown, while student rector at Edinburgh in the 1970s, fought against a proposal to cut student grants because recipients were spending too much money on alcohol. He is said to have demanded to know how much money university officials themselves were spending on drink.

David Cameron, the Tory leader, George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, and Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for London mayor, were members of the exclusive drinking and dining society the Bullingdon Club, infamous for its acts of drunken debauchery, while at Oxford University. A contemporary of Cameron’s recalled locking a fellow “Buller” in a portable lavatory and rolling him down a hill.

David Willetts, the shadow higher education secretary who studied PPE at Oxford, said: “I do recall freshers’ week being all about joining things like the photography club for a few drinks, then never going to another meeting. I remember after parties feeling absolutely rotten, terribly hung over.

“But I fear if the government is going to pick a fight with students enjoying a few drinks, the government will lose.”

The proposal for a clamp-down, which will be discussed at a further meeting at Downing Street in the spring, was backed by the Portman Group, an organisation supported by drinks producers to promote responsible drinking.

The group’s chief executive, David Poley, who attended the Downing Street summit, said: “Freshers’ weeks tend to start students off on the wrong path by encouraging heavy drinking. Many young people are away from home for the first time and are impressionable. These weeks help them to develop bad habits which can stay with them for the rest of their student days and into their careers.”

Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students, said: “The cabinet are thinking more about their days at university than the reality of the situation now. The income that student unions make from drink has declined so much that they are now changing bars into coffee and juice bars.”

Additional reporting by Steven Swinford

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