Binge drinking is costing UK taxpayers STG4.9 billion ($A9.49 billion) a year, a study has suggested.
Researchers looked at hospital emergency admissions, road accidents and police officers on duty.
They estimated that binge drinking increases the average daily number of injury-related admissions to hospital emergency departments by eight per cent - equivalent to 2,504 additional daily admissions nationally.
The average number of road accidents each day go up by 17 per cent - equivalent to 82 additional accidents a day nationally - while they said the average number of alcohol-related arrests increases by 45 per cent, which is equivalent to 786 additional arrests per day nationally.
The problems associated with binge drinking also lead to the number of police officers on duty having to be increased by around 30 per cent equivalent to an additional 3.2 police officers on duty at the weekend for every 10,000 people in the country, researchers said.
The team from University of Bath's Institute for Policy Research and the University of Essex calculated the cost of all these measures to be STG4.9 billion.
The figure does not take the long-term costs of binge drinking into account, such as reduced productivity, lost employment and health problems, and was worked out by using data from a number of government departments.
Share
