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| Colin Angus |
HEDS Senior Research Fellow Colin Angus writes for the HEDS Blog about his experience presenting his research to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Alcohol Harm.
Towards the end of 2018 I was invited to present some of my
research to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Alcohol Harm. For those
of you unfamiliar with APPGs, there are many hundreds of these special interest
groups in Westminster. Their membership is drawn from both Houses of Parliament
and they cover topics as diverse as E-sports, blockchain, jazz appreciation, the
country of Liechtenstein and Zoroastrianism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the APPG
with the largest membership, reflecting the subject which interests our country’s
leaders more than any other, is beer. In contrast, the APPG on Alcohol Harm
exists “to promote discussion of alcohol related issues, to raise issues of
concern and make recommendations to government and other policy makers”.
I have recently been working on a project looking at
socioeconomic inequalities in the delivery of alcohol interventions which was funded
by Alcohol
Change UK (formerly Alcohol Research UK). Alcohol Change also run
the secretariat for the APPG on Alcohol Harm, so they invited me to present
this work at an APPG event. I was allowed a mere six minutes to cover the
entire project, which seemed somewhat ambitious. Presenting to actual policy
makers is pretty high on the impact scale and I love an adventure, so I said
yes.
The meeting itself was scheduled to be in Portcullis House,
which is the boring office block over the road from the actual Palace of
Westminster. I was very happy when I received an email on the day to let me
know it had been moved to one of the committee rooms in the ‘proper’ building.
My invitation warned in no uncertain terms to allow 30 minutes to clear
security, so I was a bit alarmed when I arrived 45 minutes early to find a huge
queue. Luckily I bumped into some nice folk from Alcohol Change who knew the
right people and we ended up sneaking in a secret entrance for a completely
different building and then burrowing our way through some underground tunnels
and a maze of corridors to reach the right place, which was all rather
exciting.
The speakers before me spoke eloquently and powerfully about
the hidden harms of alcohol in older people and the Punjabi community, so I was
a little nervous, particularly since they used about three slides each and I
had more like 20 (what can I say, I like slides and talk quickly). Everything
came together nicely though – with the highlight being a shocked gasp from a
clutch of Baronesses when I revealed the end of a graph showing a huge downturn
in intervention delivery, which was one of the most satisfying things that
happened to me all year [a top tip I picked recently – hiding the interesting
bit of your graph lets you explain what it means before you do a big reveal].
And then it was all over and everyone drifted off to an important meeting about
Liechtenstein. Probably.
All in all it was a very strange experience. In the cold
hard light of day, I spent a couple of days preparing and then I had to travel all
the way to London, all for six minutes of talking at a handful of people. It
was fascinating and exhilarating and something really different.