Work is the curse of the drinking classes — especially in an era when salaries and spending power have overtaken the cost of alcohol. Higher house prices mean that a generation of young adults are living at home for longer than either they or their parents might have expected. With employment levels high, and no mortgage or rent, they have plenty of disposable income. By day, that means shopping. By night, by and large, it means drinking in an ever-growing number of pubs, clubs and bars, whose proprietors are happy to encourage consumption by extending cut-price happy hours, and by removing chairs from their premises to make high-speed “vertical drinking” more convenient.

Largely as a result of the emergence of this relatively “wealthy” poor group, which drinks too well, alcohol abuse has worsened significantly in recent years. The number of cases of cirrhosis of the liver has risen nine-fold since 1970, when the real cost of drinking was only half what it is today.

Alcohol abuse is costing £20 billion a year and an estimated six million people — mainly under 25 — binge drink every week, according to the Government's alcohol harm reduction strategy.

The Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS) claimed in 2002 that the UK was suffering from an epidemic of binge drinking. Even teenagers were drinking an average of 13.8 units a week, 68 per cent of which was thought to be down to the sweet, ready-mixed, alcopop drinks first marketed in the mid-1990s.

Today, one third of all hospital accident and emergency treatments are drink-related, as are 150,000 hospital admissions each year. The annual cost of alcohol-linked crime and public disorder incidents is estimated at £7.3 billion.

The latest figures show a still more alarming deterioration. Recorded crime figures to be announced today by the Home Office, while broadly stable, show a rise in violent crime. The figures, which are for the last quarter of 2003, are also expected to show that alcohol-fuelled violence accounted for nearly half of all violent crime.

It will be important to check the detail behind the headline figures to define precisely what “alcohol-fuelled” crime is. But it rightly worries a Government planning to relax licensing laws in 2005, in the sensible belief that a lager-lout culture stems from laws restricting alcohol intake to certain hours in the day.

The temptation to get a few drinks in before the bell rings is almost certainly to blame for many of the meandering, singing, and sometimes shouting and fighting, figures leaving British pubs shortly after closing time on a Friday night.

It surely makes sense to move on from drinking laws that reflect the needs of the Britain of 1916 rather than of today — as long as the harm, and self-harm, done by 21st-century bingers can be curbed.

The Home Secretary is wise to target breweries, publicans, off-licences and supermarkets in his latest attempt to grapple with this complex problem. The summer crackdown that David Blunkett envisages includes “sting operations” using minors to smoke out the pubs, clubs and bars where under-18s are served.

The industry’s co-operation in making drinking more civilised and less violent is essential. It is not a cause that one landlord or brewery chain can be expected to advance alone. Simply by willingly serving tap water and cheap soft drinks, or putting chairs back in bars, or cutting back on “happy hours”, publicans and their suppliers could reduce the number of hostile drunks (and crimes) in urban centres — and reduce the need for expensive early-hours policing. Time has been called on the drinks industry.

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