You're all missing the point, of course. Longer opening hours means more profits for the big breweries. I think that was probably in the governments calculations, somewhere; they just forgot to mention it, that's all. I suppose it just sort of slipped their minds - funny that! Perhaps they just got a bit mixed up and found themselves stating that longer opening hours means less drinking (an easy mistake to make). Then, having said something silly they thought that withdrawing it would only make matters worse and mentioning profits would just overcomplicate things ... perhaps ...?