Occasional Paper 101 presents findings from an evaluation of the first phase Alcohol Arrest Referral pilots which operated between 2007 and 2008 in four police forces. Brief interventions to attempt to tackle alcohol-related offending were offered to adults, arrested and deemed to be under the influence of alcohol.

Overall, the intervention did not appear to reduce re-arrests for this client group. Two schemes saw a statistically significant reduction in alcohol consumption but it was not possible to assess how much this reduction was attributable to the intervention as there was no control group. Break-even analysis suggested that the schemes would have needed to reduce between 0.6 and 6.0 arrests for every 100 interventions delivered to break even.