Britain is drinking less

Friday 30 January 2026

The United Kingdom is drinking less than she used to. That statement sounds implausible to anyone whose mental picture of Britain is still a Friday evening in a crowded high street pub, or the annual ritual of festive excess. Yet a growing body of data, from health surveys to market trackers, points in the same direction: average consumption has fallen over the long run, and it has recently reached levels described as the lowest since modern records began in 1990. 

This is not however a simple morality tale of a nation “sobering up”. Britain’s relationship with alcohol is changing in ways that are socially uneven, commercially disruptive and, in public health terms, ambiguous. The country is drinking less, but some of her most serious alcohol harms remain stubborn and in certain measures have worsened since the pandemic era. 

What follows is an attempt to describe what is actually happening, why it is happening, and what Britain’s new drinking pattern tells us about class, health, money and social life in a high-cost, high-anxiety decade.

What the decline looks like

Start with the broad headline: recent reporting drawing on industry and survey data suggests the average adult in Britain consumed about 10.2 alcoholic drinks per week in 2024, down by more than a quarter from a peak of around 14 drinks per week roughly two decades earlier, and described as the lowest level since records began. 

Health surveys reinforce the picture of a long, gradual drift downwards in routine drinking. In England the proportion of adults drinking on at least one day each week fell from 54 per cent in 2011 to 48 per cent in 2022. Scotland shows a similar pattern, with weekly drinking declining from 55 per cent in 2011 to 47 per cent in 2023. Northern Ireland’s equivalent measure also trends down over the longer term. 

The change is especially striking amongst teenagers. England’s schools survey reports that only 7 per cent of pupils said they had drunk alcohol in the last week in 2023, down from 9 per cent in 2021, and below levels seen in the mid-2010s using comparable questions. 

Put simply, Britain is moving away from the older pattern in which a large share of the population drank frequently, even if moderately. Fewer people drink weekly, fewer young people drink at all, and many who do drink appear to be spacing alcohol further apart in their lives.

A crucial caveat: less drinking does not automatically mean less harm

Here is the uncomfortable counterpoint. Even with falling average consumption Britain has recently recorded very high numbers of alcohol-specific deaths. ONS figures reported in early 2025 put the UK’s alcohol-related deaths at 10,473 in 2023, a record high in that particular series. 

The relationship between consumption and harm is not linear, because harm is concentrated. If a modest decline in drinking happens mostly amongst light or occasional drinkers, while a smaller group continues heavy, dependent consumption, then average intake can fall while the most severe outcomes do not improve quickly, and may even deteriorate if the heavy-drinking cohort grows sicker, poorer or less able to access support. The pandemic years appear to have been a period when some people cut back, while others drank more, a phenomenon that researchers have often described as “polarisation” in habits. A late-2025 academic paper specifically asked whether English consumption returned to pre-pandemic levels by December 2024, signalling that the post-2020 pattern is still being mapped. 

This is why headline consumption figures can mislead. Britain may be becoming, on average, more moderate, while simultaneously becoming more unequal in the distribution of alcohol harm.

Why Britain is drinking less

Several forces are pushing in the same direction. None is decisive alone, but together they form a persuasive explanation.

1. The young are opting out, and that changes everything

Teenage drinking has fallen for years, and the cohort effect is powerful: young people who do not learn to drink as a default social activity in adolescence tend to carry that habit forward. The NHS survey data for pupils shows how sharply “drinking in the last week” has dropped compared with earlier decades. 

The reasons are cultural as much as medical. Young adulthood is now more supervised, more online and more reputation-sensitive. Nights out are recorded on smartphones and replayed on social media. Universities and workplaces are more alert to safeguarding and misconduct risks. Mental health awareness, and the language of anxiety, have become normalised. Alcohol, which once served as a social lubricant, is increasingly perceived as an amplifier of vulnerability.

There is admittedly a counter-trend worth noticing: recent market reporting suggests that legal-age Generation Z, while still often drinking less than older cohorts, showed some increase in reported consumption in late 2024. This matters because it hints that “Gen Z abstention” is not an iron law. Yet even if some rebound is real, it starts from a much lower baseline than the youth drinking culture of the 1990s and early 2000s.

2. Health has become a mainstream consumer identity

Britain’s decline in frequent drinking coincides with a broader cultural shift: calorie counting, gym attendance, wearable devices, and the popularisation of “wellness” as a social identity. One does not need to endorse every trend in that world to acknowledge its effect: alcohol is now widely understood to be bad for sleep, training, mood, skin and weight. That knowledge used to be niche; it is now banal.

Crucially this shift has been commercialised. The rapid growth of low- and no-alcohol options allows consumers to remain within the rituals of drinking without consuming much alcohol. A 2025 study found increased use of alcohol-free and low-alcohol drinks between 2020 and 2024 amongst adults trying to reduce consumption, including amongst higher-risk drinkers.  This is not temperance in the old religious sense; it is substitution inside the same social habit.

3. Money, prices and the economics of going out

Britain’s cost-of-living squeeze has turned the pub into a luxury for many. Drinking at home is cheaper, but even home drinking has become more cost-conscious as household budgets tighten. Recent commentary attributes part of the decline to financial pressure and the reduced affordability of social drinking outside the home. 

Tax and pricing policy sit in the background. Parliament’s briefing on alcohol duty notes a substantial reform of duty structures and rate changes, including changes effective from February 2025 and planned uprating from February 2026. These measures can change what people buy, how much they buy, and where they buy it. Industry reporting has argued that duty changes and higher rates have contributed to weaker sales in parts of the market. 

None of this means that tax is the prime mover of a decades-long cultural change. But it does mean that in a fragile economy, policy can accelerate behavioural shifts already under way.

4. The pub is changing, and so is her social function

The pub remains an emotional symbol of Britain, but its role has evolved. It is increasingly a place for food, family and “experience” rather than the default site of routine drinking. This encourages what the beverage industry calls premiumisation: fewer drinks, but better ones. The Financial Times report on record-low consumption notes that consumers appear to be drinking less overall while choosing higher-quality products. 

That commercial adaptation matters. It allows the drinks industry to remain profitable even if volumes fall, and it allows consumers to feel they are not giving something up, merely choosing differently.

5. Policy and public messaging have had a slow burn effect

Britain’s public health messaging has become more persistent and more explicit. The NHS guideline of 14 units per week, once obscure, is now widely referenced in media and health content, and is echoed in charity and government-adjacent materials. 

Scotland’s minimum unit pricing policy, introduced in 2018, is often discussed as a structural intervention aimed at cheap high-strength alcohol, although Britain does not have a unified UK-wide regime. The larger point is that alcohol has, gradually, joined tobacco and poor diet as a public policy target, even if the political appetite for aggressive intervention remains limited.

What Britain is becoming: moderation, not abstinence

One of the more intriguing claims in recent reporting is that the fall is not mainly driven by rising teetotalism, but by moderation. That matters because it suggests continuity of social rituals, not their collapse.

In practice this looks like “spacing” drinks out, choosing alcohol-free substitutes in between, and treating intoxication as an occasional event rather than a weekly expectation. It is a shift from alcohol as a background condition of adult life to alcohol as an optional enhancement, sometimes enjoyed, sometimes declined, and increasingly negotiated.

That negotiation is also social. In older British culture, refusing a drink could require explanation. Today, refusing a drink is increasingly normal. The new etiquette does not treat abstention as accusation. It treats it as preference.

The political and social consequences

If Britain continues to drink less, the effects will spill beyond health.

First, the hospitality economy will have to keep adapting. If fewer pints are sold, pubs will rely more on food, events, accommodation, coffee culture and mixed-use community functions. That is plausible in affluent areas and fragile in poorer ones. The pub, long a social equaliser, could become more class-segregated.

Secondly, the state’s fiscal relationship with alcohol will become more contentious. Duty reform and uprating debates will intensify if consumption volumes continue to fall and if public finances remain tight. 

Thirdly, the public health system will face a paradox: improving average behaviour alongside entrenched high-cost harm concentrated in deprived communities. Record-high alcohol-specific deaths in 2023, despite falling average consumption, are a warning that population averages can conceal deep social and medical distress. 

Finally there is a cultural shift, quieter but profound. Britain’s old drinking culture was partly an answer to Britain’s emotional restraint: alcohol permitted sentiment, loosened class boundaries and made companionship easier. If alcohol becomes less central, Britain must find other ways to provide the same social permissions. Some of those ways will be healthy, such as sport and community groups. Some will be less benign, such as other substances or the isolation of social media.

Britain is drinking less. The more interesting truth is that she is also learning, unevenly, what to do without the drink she once used to explain herself.