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The Daily Telegraph reports that an increasingly abstemious younger generation are blowing a large hole in the government’s revenue forecasts:

Clean-living youngsters threaten to blow a multibillion-pound hole in public finances as alcohol and tobacco tax income declines, the head of the spending watchdog has warned.
Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), has questioned whether assumptions about future tax income from what are often dubbed “sin taxes” are realistic. He told the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee: “There are some bits of the tax system which are themselves not sustainable. In a few decades’ time we won’t collect any fuel duty because every car will be electric, and they don’t pay any fuel duty. Nowadays, you have to ask whether young people are drinking and smoking enough for us to be collecting alcohol and tobacco duties at the current rate that we are.”
Around one-third of 18 to 24-year-olds do not drink alcohol, according to surveys from YouGov, up from one in five in 2019. Some experts believe Generation Z are less interested in alcohol because they fear the fallout on social media if they embarrass themselves while drunk.
The number of smokers in Britain has also been steadily declining for years and Rishi Sunak has announced plans to ban smoking for the next generation.
Plans to balance the books are built in part on the assumption of higher incomes from sin taxes, particularly from drinking. Alcohol duty is set to bring in £13bn this year, according to the OBR’s forecasts, rising to more than £17bn in 2028-29, an increase of almost one-third in just five years. A failure to collect this level of tax could be significant for a government whose finances are already finely balanced.

It’s all very well making worthy attempts to cut down people’s consumption, but the risk is that you end up shooting yourself in the foot in terms of the public finances. Although somehow I can’t see our po-faced public health lobby being happy to follow the Japanese example and officially encourage young people to drink more to swell the Treasury coffers.


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