British spirits volumes have fallen by 15.3% since the government rewrote alcohol duty in August 2023, and the trade body that represents the industry has written to the Chancellor asking him to cut the tax at the Autumn Budget on 28 October.
The letter, sent to John Healey this month by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, sets out three years of shrinking volumes across the categories it covers. Still wine is down 8% over the same period and fortified wine has fallen by more than 22%. The association's argument is not that the tax is unfair so much as that it has stopped doing the job it was raised to do, taking the market down with it while leaving the Treasury no better off.
The official numbers give that some support. Alcohol duty receipts fell by £182m, or 1.4%, to £12.4bn in the financial year that ended in April 2026, according to the HMRC Alcohol Bulletin. Duty has been increased twice since the reform, both times in line with the retail price index, and is expected to rise again in February 2027 by a forecast 2.9%. On supermarket shelves that would add around 31p to a bottle of gin at 37.5% ABV and around 34p to a bottle of Scotch at 40%.
The system those increases apply to is only three years old. Since 1 August 2023 every alcoholic drink sold in Britain has been taxed according to the alcohol it actually contains rather than by product category, a change the Treasury presented as the biggest reform of alcohol duty in more than 140 years. Spirits absorbed a 10.1% increase on the day it came in. Wine was given a temporary easement that ran until February 2025, after which it moved onto the strength based bands as well.
Miles Beale, chief executive of the WSTA, said businesses were "on their knees thanks to years of painful alcohol tax hikes", pointing to business rates, employment costs and packaging levies arriving at the same time. The association says the wine and spirit trade supports more than 400,000 jobs, roughly 60% of them in hospitality, and cites Office for National Statistics figures showing close to a million people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training.
The case is not settled. Health bodies including the Institute of Alcohol Studies have argued for years that duty has fallen in real terms across recent decades, and that price is one of the few levers reliably linked to reduced alcohol harm. On that reading, falling volumes are the policy working rather than failing. The Treasury has not responded publicly to the letter, and no Budget since 2023 has broken the link with RPI.
For anyone canning cocktails, the arithmetic is unusually visible. Duty is charged on the alcohol inside the tin rather than on the tin itself, so a 200ml can of Purple Rain is taxed on the 1.7 units it contains, and that figure sits on the front of the pack next to the volume. Build the same drink at home from the Purple Rain recipe and the duty was paid further back, in the price of the bottle it was poured from, which is part of why the tax is so easy for shoppers to lose sight of.
"Every time duty goes up we get the same question from customers, which is why the price moved when nothing about the drink did," said David Baddeley, founder of Boozy. "Whichever way the Chancellor goes on 28 October, the least we can do is be straight about what is in the can and what it costs. People are far more willing to accept a price rise they understand than one that just appears."
The Cocktail ABV Calculator on the Boozy site covers more than 100 recipes and works out the finished strength and unit count of a serve, which is a useful check whether the drink came from a can or a bottle. Please drink responsibly. Advice on units and lower risk drinking is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
