Should 16 year olds be allowed to drink in pubs?

When a senior police officer proposed raising the legal drinking age to 21 last year, I nearly spat my beer out. Peter Lahy, Cheshire chief plod, was the culprit. Outside of the Islamic world, only a handful of countries are as restrictive as that. It would be an affront to young people, and put Britain out of step with the rest of Europe.

In sharp contrast, Phil Dixon - a drinks industry consultant and journalist - has suggested going in precisely the opposite direction in an effort to encourage responsible drinking. During a BBC Radio 2 debate hosted by Jeremy Vine, he argued that 16-year-olds should be allowed to drink in pubs:

“It’s a stark choice of reality – you either have them in a controlled, supervised environment or you send them up alleyways and into parks and round the back of bike sheds, where according to teachers, they are drinking neat vodka. Now, which is best for society? The Government needs to look at the more difficult solutions.”

Graham Taylor, a former police officer who believes the drinking age should be raised to 21, angrily responded to Dixon's arguments:

"Pubs are not well managed. My daughter is 16 and regularly goes to pubs and clubs and drinks . . . You can’t tell me these people are going to be very vigilant because they are not . . . You are saying this because you are selling the stuff and you want kids in the pubs so you can sell more alcohol to them and get them drunk."

I've been thinking about the issue based on my own experiences. I'll hold my hands up: I started drinking in pubs, bars and clubs at the beginning of my fifth year at secondary school. I was 15 (and three-quarters). We weren't drinking in the area's finest alehouses - far from it. The venues of choice were filled with dry ice, loud music, and reeked of cheap perfume smothered over spotty adolescents. Aggressive bouncers held sway, while the police sat outside waiting for the fights to kick off at closing time. We'd spend most of our night in bars with drinks offers: a pound for a pint of cheap lager (UK-brewed Labatts and Fosters were popular) or a triple measure of house spirits. Most weekends, we'd get wrecked.

Were we safer than the kids who confined their drinking to the "alleyways and parks"? I think not. If I'm honest, I wouldn't have had it any other way back then. But looking back, Taylor is right: the pubs and bars teenagers drink in aren't safe for inexperienced young people. They're binge-drinking dens run by unscrupulous people, who are happy to allow the law to be broken if they can turn a profit. And it's they who would benefit from a change to the law. 16-year-olds wouldn't want to drink in the adult environment of a properly-run pub, and probably wouldn't be welcome there anyway.

I do think we have a problematic drinking culture in Britain, and I do think government should seek to tackle it, through legislation if necessary. But baby steps to prohibitionism aren't the way forward, and they terrify me. So a part of me wants to cheer on Dixon's bold approach. Instead of pandering to the prejudices of Middle England bigots, who dislike youth and have little time for communal activities like pub-going, he's tried to steer the discussion onto a more sensible path. However, I just don't think lowering the legal drinking age is helpful, let alone politically feasible.