When the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act 2012 came into effect, it gave local councils the ability to enact enforceable local alcohol policies, where they could impose more stringent conditions on holders of alcohol licences. Councils could require shorter opening hours, or restrict the locations of new alcohol outlets. Nine years on, not all councils have local alcohol policies in place. For those that don't, the default provisions from the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act apply.
The object of the Act is that "the sale, supply, and consumption of alcohol should be undertaken safely and responsibly; and the harm caused by the excessive or inappropriate consumption of alcohol should be minimised". A reasonable question, then, is do local alcohol policies reduce harm? That is essentially the research question that this 2020 working paper by Lauren Tyler-Harwood and Andrea Menclova (both University of Canterbury) addresses. Specifically, they look at monthly crime rates from July 2014 to January 2019 (the first local alcohol policy didn't come into force until August 2014), and compare territorial authorities with different levels of stringency of local alcohol policies (with the least stringent being those that had no local alcohol policy). Over the period they analyse, 32 of the 66 mainland territorial authorities implemented a local alcohol policy, and there was lots of variation in the specific policy elements that were included. The policy elements Tyler-Harwood and Menclova investigated were: (1) a more stringent on-licence closing time (the default is 4am); (2) a one-way door policy; (3) club licence closing times that are earlier than on-licence closing times; (4) a restriction on issuing new licences; and (5) the difference between on-licence and off-licence closing times.
In terms of the overall effect of a local alcohol policy, they find:
...no statistically significant relationship between adopting an LAP and crime.
Looking at the different policy elements, they find:
...little evidence that crime rates fall more in TAs with more stringent LAPs. The only LAP dimension that is consistently negative and statistically significant at the 1% level is the 11pm maximum on-licence closing time. On average, and holding all else constant, adopting a maximum on-licence closing time that is five hours earlier than the national default is associated with a 6% decrease in monthly crimes. However, given that only one TA, Waimakariri, has adopted this closing time (and only for weekdays), and that there is not a consistent pattern of increasingly strict on-licence closing hours being increasingly negatively associated with crime, we interpret this result with great caution.
Then, looking at different types of crime, they find that:
...the introduction of an LAP is associated with a 5% decrease in assaults... However, this result is only significant at the 10% level. We fail to find significant relationships between LAP policies and other types of crime.
Overall, there is very weak evidence that local alcohol policies have had any effect on crime at all. Now, of course, crime is not the only alcohol-related harm that a local alcohol policy would be implemented in order to address. However, crime is among the most acute harms caused by alcohol consumption (in terms of causality here, see yesterday's post).
We could be tempted to interpret these results as disfavouring local alcohol policies. However, there are good reasons not to do so. First, these results are not causal. Local alcohol policies are not implemented randomly, and Tyler-Harwood and Menclova don't apply statistical methods that attempt to extract causal estimates (and, to be fair, they don't claim to be intending to do so). Second, there isn't much of a baseline period included in the data that Tyler-Harwood and Menclova use. Without a longer baseline, it is difficult to establish a suitable counter-factual for what would have happened in the absence of a local alcohol policy.
However, more importantly, it pays to consider what the local alcohol policies that have actually been implemented have entailed. Local alcohol policies with more stringent policy elements generated a lot of push-back from the alcohol industry. Many local alcohol policies went through a long appeals process, and this was costly for local councils. Many councils (including Hamilton City Council) opted to withdraw their provisional local alcohol policies in the face of industry opposition, and the prospect of a lengthy and expensive court battle. Knowing how the industry would react made it more difficult for councils to implement policies with more stringent restrictions on the sale of alcohol.
So, it is not surprising that there are no statistically significant effects of local alcohol policies on alcohol-related harm. The policies that have been implemented have generally been too benign to have much of an effect (on a related note, read this editorial (possibly gated) in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review by Nicki Jackson and Kypros Kypri on the Auckland local alcohol policy).
If local alcohol policies are to have a significant effect on alcohol-related harm, then they will need to actually be stringent enough to shift alcohol consumption behaviour. We don't have that at the moment. However, most of the initial round of local alcohol policies will be coming up for review in the next couple of years. It will be interesting to see what evolves, and whether any councils will attempt more stringent controls.
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