Epidemic of middle-class drinkers damaging health with 'hazardous' levels of alcohol

More than a quarter of adults in the most prosperous parts of the country are drinking at "hazardous" levels, a report warns today.

The alarming snapshot shows how the middle-classes in well-heeled towns are damaging their health through regular drinking.

A league table of local authority areas ranked by how many people consume alcohol at "hazardous" levels is dominated by leafy towns boasting the highest house prices in the country. Seven of the top ten areas are in Surrey. Also at the top of the table is the North Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate.

The danger level is defined as regularly drinking between 22 to 50 units a week for men and 15 to 35 for women. The report shows that this routine lifestyle - which many will see as totally harmless - is a real danger to their health.

The study also identifies a more dangerous category of "harmful" drinking, where people directly damage their bodies through their alcoholic habits.

This particular league table is dominated by big urban areas such as Manchester, Liverpool and Salford, where more than 8 per cent of adults are "harmful" drinkers.

But it is the analysis of the "everyday" drinking of the middle classes that is a more surprising cause for concern.

At the top of the league table of "hazardous" drinking is Runnymede, an area of Surrey that includes affluent commuter-belt towns such as Chertsey and Virginia Water, alongside Harrogate.

Both areas had 26.4 per cent of adults drinking at hazardous levels - a rate of more than one in four.

The lowest percentage of hazardous drinkers was found in deprived boroughs of east London.

The alcohol profiles for every local authority in England are published online today by the North West Public Health Observatory, part of the Centre for Public Health at Hazardous drinking levels were calculated by building statistical models using mortality rates, hospital admissions rates and other information.

Last night Dr Karen Tocque, director of science and strategy for the observatory, said the figures should be a "wake-up call" to older drinkers who don't binge drink, but instead regularly come home after work and open a bottle of wine.

"It's people who drink regularly, but not necessarily in huge quantities, who accumulate quite a lot over a week," she said.

"It's not hard to do - wine glass sizes are bigger and alcohol content is higher and I think some people are consuming more without really realising it."

Both hazardous and harmful drinking patterns are contributing to increasing levels of alcohol-related ill-health and pressures on health services across the whole country, the researchers said.

Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health, said much attention had been paid to binge drinking but less discussion has focused on the damage associated with routinely consuming too much alcohol.

He said: "Across England around one in five adults are drinking enough to put their health at significant risk and one in 20 enough to make disease related to alcohol consumption practically inevitable.

"We need to tackle binge drinking, but we must also reverse the tolerance that most communities have built up by simply consuming too much alcohol on a weekly basis."

Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo said: "Most of these are not young people, they are 'everyday' drinkers who have drunk too much for too long. This has to change."

The report follows a Government bid earlier this year to target "middle class wine drinkers" who knock back too much at home.

Figures compiled by the NHS showed that hospital admissions caused by alcohol had more than doubled in ten years.

In June, health ministers announced plans to tackle drinking amid fears that eight million people cannot control their habit.

The £10million alcohol strategy aims to flush out "middle class" drinkers who consume twice as much as they should.