In July 2025, the UK Government published its 10 Year Health Plan for England. Despite a media leak and subsequent Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) statement indicating that the Plan would contain alcohol marketing restrictions, these did not appear in the final document.

Alcohol industry influence has been identified as a major barrier to the introduction of effective policies to reduce alcohol harm. We were therefore keen to understand to what degree the removal of marketing restrictions from the 10 Year Health Plan might have been a result of commercial influence. To investigate further, we made freedom of information (FOI) requests to different UK Government departments for correspondence with the alcohol industry in the month ahead of the Plan’s release.

From the documents we received, we can demonstrate:

The alcohol industry targeted the Health Secretary and DHSC over potential marketing restrictions – This is a clear example of alcohol companies seeking to interfere with health policy and the NHS.

Other Government departments were leveraged to lobby DHSC on behalf of the alcohol industry – The documents we received show that alcohol companies and industry-funded organisations wrote to the Department for Business & Trade, the Department for Culture, Media & Sport and HM Treasury, encouraging them to put pressure on DHSC to drop the planned marketing restriction policy.

Alcohol industry actors likely coordinated their approach – The existence of joint letters, the timing of correspondence and striking similarities in the content of the letters all suggest a coordinated campaign.

Alcohol industry correspondence contained a range of well-known arguments and rhetorical strategies used by alcohol, tobacco, unhealthy food and drink and fossil-fuel companies, among others – These included: cherry-picking data about alcohol harm trends and the evidence base for restrictions; arguing (contrary to the evidence) that self-regulation is effective; making catastrophic economic claims; arguing that the alcohol industry is an appropriate partner in reducing harm (despite evidence that this is ineffective and even harmful); and stating (contrary to the evidence) that advertising does not increase drinking and benefits society. Specific arguments used are outlined and compared to authoritative sources of evidence and found to be misleading in our full report...

Based on our findings, we make the following recommendations to UK Government:

• Revisit and introduce the proposed alcohol marketing restrictions
• Issue a new national strategy to tackle rising alcohol harm
• Reject industry self-regulation
• Say no to partnerships with the alcohol industry in line with WHO recommendations
• Recognise the inherent conflict of interest between alcohol and health policy as recommended by WHO
• Introduce principles for government departments to manage conflicts of interest arising from the involvement of companies that profit from unhealthy products in health policy