Pressure mounts for action on duty fraud

Pressure is mounting on the Government to take stronger action on duty fraud as a result of campaigning by the FWD.

On Friday the FWD chaired a summit meeting of senior wholesalers and brewers and representatives of HM Revenue & Customs, which agreed to look at action on several initiatives.

In the House of Lords Lord Campbell-Savours has highlighted the scale of the problem with a series of questions.

In his first intervention he asked for figures on the amount of beer and wine that had been seized by HMRC for each year from 2006 to 2009 due to excise duty not being paid. The reply showed that seizures of beer over the period had more than doubled while seizures of wine quadrupled over the same period.

In a second question he asked how many people HMRC had prosecuted for alcohol fraud in England and Wales. The reply was 15 in 2006, 10 in 2007, and just seven in 2008.

Meanwhile a leading wholesaler, who did not wish to be named, has carried out research that demonstrates how severe the problem now is in wine. They compared sales of their top 10 ten branded wine SKUs for the six months to the end of December with the same period a year earlier and found volume was down by 41%.

He said: "Branded wine is vitally important for the independent sector, far more so than for the major multiples, and this near halving of volume on our top selling lines shows how bad the problem has become."