Night club mogul 'born again' over minimum alcohol prices

Oceana - part of Luminar

Stephen Thomas, boss of Britain’s biggest nightclub operator Luminar, has welcomed the Government's tighter code of practice over cheap booze promotions. But the man that built an empire on cheap drink for young clubbers says that minimum pricing is the key to controlling alcohol excess.

“I’m a huge fan of minimum pricing. There has to be a floor because under the new rules you can sell drinks at 10p if that’s your normal price because you’re not discounting on your tariff. I like the Scottish model, where you have a minimum price based on alcohol by volume [ABV]. That is logical and sensible. Will you act differently if you consume higher-ABV drinks? Of course.”

Luminar has a self-imposed minimum price of £1.20 per drink, although only 22 of its 88 venues get anywhere near that price with a £1.50 promotion - and Thomas claims that the average is “around £3”.

He admits that his company's pricing police has more to do wiith business than socal responsibility: “The maths don’t work for us. Say we have a nightclub with 1,500 customers and we lose 200: we could try to get them back in by discounting, but the trouble is we’d then be discounting to the other 1,300, which would kill us.”

“I’m a huge fan of minimum pricing. There has to be a floor because under the new rules you can sell drinks at 10p if that’s your normal price because you’re not discounting on your tariff. I like the Scottish model, where you have a minimum price based on alcohol by volume [ABV]. That is logical and sensible. Will you act differently if you consume higher-ABV drinks? Of course.”

Read the rest of this article from The Times here