Surrey middle class top drinking league

Experts have found that the area with the highest proportion of adults drinking dangerous levels is in Runnymede, the Surrey borough that covers towns such as Chertsey and Virginia Water.

Along with Harrogate in North Yorkshire, it tops the league table with just over one in four adults ( 26.4 per cent) drinking at "hazardous" levels - defined as 22 to 50 units a week for men and 15 to 35 for women.

In contrast, the lowest percentage of hazardous drinkers - 14.1 per cent - was found in relatively deprived Newham.

The pattern of heavy middle-class drinking is widespread across the South-East, with other boroughs in Surrey and Sussex - Surrey Heath, Guildford, Mid Sussex, Mole Valley, Elmbridge, Waverley and Woking - occupying all but two of the top 10 slots in the league table for dangerous drinking.

Seven of the slots in the bottom 10 are taken up by the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham, Lewisham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney, Redbridge, Waltham Forest and Newham. Lower levels in the East End are partly explained by its high Muslim population - up to 28 per cent in Newham and 37 per cent in Tower Hamlets.

The figures for harmful drinking rates - those where men and women exceeded hazardous levels - are concentrated in the more deprived areas of the country. Manchester tops the league table at 8.8 per cent of adults, followed by 8.1 per cent in Liverpool. Middle class wine drinkers who consume too much at home were targeted earlier this year by the government in its alcohol strategy for England, as well as binge drinkers and under-age drinkers.

The alcohol profiles were published by the North West Public Health Observatory which is part of the Centre for Public Health, Liverpool John Moores University.

Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Observatory, said attention should be focussed on regular heavy drinking as well as binge drinking.

He said: "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.

"In order to stop further increases in alcoholrelated deaths and admission to hospital we must reverse the tolerance that most communities have built up by simply consuming too much alcohol on a weekly basis."