The Liberal Democrats have issued a press release bemoaning the increase in alcohol-related deaths in the past ten years. But it's a bit exaggerated.

Deaths are up by 40 per cent, "horrifying evidence of the scale of the alcohol crisis facing this country", says Norman Lamb, the party's Shadow Health Secretary.

This data comes from a question in Parliament actually asked by a Conservative, James Brokenshire MP. Never mind the data is readily available to anybody who can read, and the House of Commons library could have found it for him. Asking a PQ sounds a lot newsier, and may even persuade a few journalists that it is actually news. In this case, the LibDem press release anticipated the Conservatives' version by a couple of hours, even though it was a Conservative question. One-up to the LibDems.

But the data come with a health warning. The classification codes for alcohol-related deaths changed in 2001, which led to a sharpish year-on-year increase. As Health Statistics Quarterly (Spring 2003) reported, this led to the largest annual increase ever observed - a 12 per cent increase in death rates in a single year. That is almost certainly an artefact of the change in classification codes.

If we count deaths only from 2001, after the new codes came in, there has been a 25.9 per cent increase in alcohol-related deaths in men, and a 22 per cent increase in women - hardly figures to be complacent about, but not quite as horrifying as the Lib Dems or the Conservatives claim. Almost a third of the ten-year increase they are talking about occurred in the first two years.

This is not to suggest that there isn't a rising trend, or that it's a trivial issue, or that efforts shouldn't be made to slow it. But let's not exaggerate, eh?