Shops and supermarkets face curbs on offering cut-price alcoholic drinks after the Government published figures suggesting that there are 8.2 million dependent and hazardous drinkers in Britain.

With one in six adults now classed as problem drinkers, ministers are to examine whether pushing up the price of alcohol could reduce heavy drinking among young people and those on low incomes.

Announcing a £10 million national alcohol strategy, they said that they would use legislation to force the drinks industry to carry labels with safer drinking messages.

Underage drinkers, binge drinkers and middle-aged people drinking twice as much as they should in their home are to be targeted in a strategy, intended to change the country’s “drinking culture”.

Vernon Coaker, a Home Office minister, said that the Government wanted to change the culture of people getting drunk.

He said: “It is almost regarded as acceptable to drink to get drunk. We want to change that attitude. The consequences of binge drinking are disorder on our streets. It is not acceptable for people to use alcohol and urinate in the street, vomit and carry on in some of the ways people are carrying on.”

His colleague Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, admitted that the drunken disorder in town centres was a concern. “It can be overwhelming what you see on a Saturday night,” she said.

Last night experts in liver diseases said that voluntary agreements with the drinks industry had not worked. They added that it was taking far too long to produce action to tackle the scale of the drink problem.

Figures in the document suggest that people drink almost twice as much as they think they do or are willing to admit.

In the General Household Survey in 2005, people said that they drank on average 10.8 units a week – the equivalent of 5.6 litres (10 pints) of pure alcohol a year. But data from Revenue & Customs suggested that the average amount of alcohol bought by each adult was 11.3 litres of pure alcohol a year. “We can be reasonably certain that self-reported data . . . understates actual consumption and that people are drinking more than they think they are,” said the document, entitled Safe. Sensible. Social.

Under a voluntary code with the alcohol industry, agreement has been reached on new labelling. But not all parts of the industry have signed up. Professor Roger Williams, of University College Hospital, London, who treated the footballer George Best, said that the Government should raise prices and increase the age at which young people can buy alcohol from 18 to 21.

Professor Ian Gilmore, a liver expert and president of the Royal College of Physicians, welcomed the review but expressed doubts about its focus on voluntary deals with the industry. He said: “It is clear that depending on voluntary partnerships with the drinks industry has not worked.”

Jeremy Beadles, of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said that there was no evidence that the price, promotion or advertising of alcohol played any role in encouraging its misuse.

Cost of drink

— 180,000 Admissions to hospital in 2005 for alcohol-related illnesses or injuries

— 4,160 Deaths in England and Wales from alcoholic liver disease, a 41 per cent increase on 1999

— £20bn Estimated cost of alcohol abuse on healthcare, crime and loss of productivity

Source: Home Office, Times database, Drinkaware Trust

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