Senior doctors are calling for tougher government action on alcohol abuse, after warning that Britain is the only country in western Europe except Finland where liver disease has increased over the past three decades.

“There is a human, social, and financial imperative to act now if the UK’s burden of liver disease and all its consequences are to be tackled and the NHS is not to be overwhelmed by the cost of treating advanced stage liver disease,” said Professor Roger Williams, director of the Institute of Hepatology in London, lead author of a report from a new Lancet Commission.

Professor Jane Dacre, president of the Royal College of Physicians, agreed with the findings and called for the government to take a much stronger line with the food and drinks industries, introducing minimum unit pricing that makes the strongest alcoholic drinks the most expensive.

The report is stark reading, she said. “Over the past 20-30 years, we have not been able to turn the tide of harmful drinking in the way we have been able to reduce the amount of smoking in the UK. At a national level we need the government to introduce national measures such as minimum unit pricing, and reduce the availability of alcohol, and restrict advertising and marketing.”

The report points out that 70-90% of obese people are suffering from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which – like alcohol – causes cirrhosis and can lead to early death.

“As a nation, we should stop pretending that voluntary agreements on alcohol and food will improve the situation – they don’t, only legislation will do,” said Dacre.

Jackie Ballard, chief executive of Alcohol Concern, warned that “the UK is in danger of losing the battle against liver disease, which goes against the trend in much of the rest of Europe where many of our neighbours are actually making progress.

“Figures show an alarming rise in hospital admissions from alcoholic liver disease over the past few years. For the first time we are seeing young people under 30 dying of alcoholic liver disease, the so-called ‘alcopops generation’, who have grown up in a society where alcohol is available at almost anytime, anywhere, at incredibly cheap prices and promoted non-stop.”

The commission said the UK is the only country in western Europe except Finland where liver disease has increased over the past three decades. There have been vast improvements in health and life expectancy in other chronic diseases such as stroke, heart disease and many cancers. Liver disease “stands out as the one glaring exception”. It is the third commonest cause of premature death in the UK. More than one million hospital admissions per year are for alcohol-related disorders. In England and Wales, 600,000 people have some form of liver disease, 60,000 of whom have cirrhosis. In 2012, there were nearly 11,000 deaths. “These figures represent increases of 62% in liver disease and 40% in cirrhosis in ten years,” says the report.

Three-quarters of deaths from liver disease are the result of excessive drinking, but deaths as a result of obesity and also hepatitis C infection are also going up.

In western Europe, the opposite has happened, says the paper, citing France where liver deaths were 25 times higher than in the UK in 1960. “The French health services were prepared to deal with liver disease at every level,” says the report. Controls on marketing were introduced, including bans on TV and cinema advertising and health warnings on bottles. Consumption of cheap strong wine dropped.

“The UK overtook France, Italy and Spain in terms of liver mortality in the 1990s and only Finland, where availability of alcohol has been liberalised as in the UK, has had a similar upward trend in liver mortality,” says the report. In the UK, alcohol consumption has shifted substantially from moderate strength beer sold in pubs to strong lager, cider, wine and spirits sold by supermarkets for drinking at home. Taxation has not kept pace with rising incomes, making alcohol more affordable for heavy drinkers and young people. The report says: “As noted by the House of Commons health committee, ‘The alcohol industry should not carry more weight in determining health policy than the Chief Medical Officer’.”

Radical improvements are needed in services to spot people whose drinking is endangering their health and get them into treatment, says the report. Early detection by GPs is virtually non-existent. The problem is at its most severe in the most deprived areas of the country.

“The evidence outlined in the report, contributed by some of the UK’s leading experts in the field, should leave nobody in any doubt about the present unacceptable levels of premature death and the overall poor standards of care being afforded to liver patients,” said Professor Williams. Reforms would save the NHS money but must happen now. “The scale of the problem is too great for it to take second place to short-term political considerations,” he said.