Drinking and driving

Of course, the accidents/collisions figures don’t really give the whole story. The number of vehicles on the road, the distances they drive, the safety of those roads in general and the deterrent effect of the police and social pressure can affect the drunk driving figures and their significance. For comparison sakes, the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales shows 7.3 per cent of self-reporting respondents saying they had driven when they believed themselves over the limit in the year ending September 2010, with just 5.0 per cent reporting the same in the year to March 2024. Equivalent figures for driving under the influence of drugs were 2.3 to 0.4 per cent.

Self-reporting miscreants tended to be men and from a younger age group, though here we come to issues of how honest respondents actually were.

So all good then? Drink driving is going down, we’re all becoming more law abiding and roads are safer. Not so if you listened to new Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander who recently told The Times that the Government was considering reducing the drink-drive threshold in England and Wales from 35 micrograms of alcohol per 100ml of breath to 22 micrograms. It’s one of the proposals for a major autumn review of road safety which also includes compulsory eye tests for drivers aged over 70 years.

The drink driving limits were set in the UK in 1967 and are 80 milligrams of alcohol for every 100 millilitres of blood, 35 micrograms of alcohol for every 100 millilitres of breath and 107 milligrams of alcohol for every 100 millilitres of urine. There’s no certain way of telling how much you can drink, but in what became a bit of annual Christmas event at motoring magazines in the 1980s, where we drank and breathalysed ourselves, I could drink a couple of average-strength pints of bitter and be comfortably under the breath limit and moreover able to pass a driving test on a closed road under instruction.

So, should we reduce the drink-drive limit and would it do any good? Much evidence for the reduction comes from the 2010 North Report, a review of UK drink and drug driving legislation commissioned by the DfT and conducted by Sir Peter North QC.

It was broadly in favour of such a reduction, but with some large caveats.

At the time the arguments raged with objections from the licensed trades that it would result in an even faster closure of pubs. That was partially specious as even then, with existing drink-drive limits, pubs were closing at a terrifying rate and have continued to do so. Since the ’80s the number of UK pubs has fallen from around 69,000 to 39,000 last year. A pub will close every single day this year and maybe more thanks to a combination of pressures: changing fashions, lax change-of-use planning restrictions, cheap supermarket booze, the current drink-drive limit and a smoking ban.

And the Labour Government hasn’t helped much. The British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) reckons the industry will have had to meet a £71m bill from this April after changes to employer National Insurance contributions and one estimate is that the reduction in the level of the business rates discount will be costing pubs an extra £215m during 2025-26. For an industry which employs over a million workers with each pub putting an estimated £80,000 a year into the local area, this is a disaster not only for pub owners and goers but also for The Treasury which still takes a lot of money out of such establishments.

Europe is being claimed to be a shining example to us all in drink driving limits, but while European limits are lower, the penalties for those found over the limit are tiered so the higher amounts of alcohol in the system attract stiffer punishments. North pointed this out and asked if the current penalties of a 12-month driving disqualification, fines of up to £5000 and up to six month’s imprisonment remained in place, it ‘would mean that Great Britain had the toughest penalty regime of any EU country with a 50mg/100ml limit.’

Would those penalties be fair and appropriate?

More to the point, there is a lot of evidence that the seriously risky drunk drivers will take no notice of the drink-drive limits whatever they are. High-risk offenders are those who have a blood-alcohol level of 2.5 times the legal limit and in 2010 North reckoned there were more than 40,000 such offenders in the UK each year. Statistically such offenders are over 500 times more at risk of dying in a road accident than a non-drinking driver.

What’s more these and other drink drivers aren’t being caught and that has nothing to do with the English law restricting the police right to breathalyse only if they suspect the driver has been drinking, or if there has been a mobile traffic offence or an accident. Fact is the system is still antiquated with marginal tested drivers still able to slow the system by calling for the ‘statutory option’ of a blood or urine sample test and hoping that by the time they’ve been taken to the station and the test completed they’re back under the limit again.

And where are all these traffic police to conduct the breath tests? In 2017 the RAC Foundation estimated that there were fewer than 5000 traffic officers on UK roads. And a 2022 report from the Police Foundation found that between 2010 and 2014 the number of dedicated traffic officers fell by 22 per cent and between 2015 and 2019 that number fell a further 18 per cent.

‘This is despite a growing body of evidence that shows cutting the number of traffic officers has directly contributed to making our roads less safe,’ the report continued.

I should cocoa. Most drivers will tell of falling standards on our roads and I was recently hit on the leg while on my motorcycle by a left-hand drive 40-tonne artic whose driver was busy texting…

What’s more, we have evidence of the dubious value of reducing the limit in Scotland which in 2014 cut the blood alcohol limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg. At the time of introduction, a huge number of noisy proponents of the plan were adamant that this move would make roads safer, help cure Scotland’s alcohol issues and do all manner of other good things. Yet a number of studies including one in The Lancet found that the reduction did nothing of the kind and failed to reduce road traffic accidents (RTAs) or affect overall alcohol consumption.

No one should condone drinking and driving and I’m certainly not, but this proposal seems much like those other tick-box, cheap ‘safety’ measures such as blanket 20mph speed limits, neighbourhood traffic bans, and average speed and number plate recognition cameras. They might sound good on the Today programme, but are a poor substitute for the more difficult, expensive but enduring solutions of sensible and visible roads policing, maintaining roads and road markings and improving driving standards.

Not everyone lives in a metrosexual café-culture inner city, where cycling is safe and easy and public transport is cheap and numerous. Not everyone has a vast circle of friends to appoint as designated drivers on every occasion they want to go to the pub. There are plenty of folk who enjoy a quiet pint on the way home from work, are responsible about it within the law and are none the worse for it, but few if any will speak up for this silent majority.

Even the North Report acknowledged that at a lower limit a single pint of beer would most probably be a safe amount for an average driver, but my experience of Scotland is that no one has the least idea what they can drink and so they don’t go out and instead drink as much as they like at home, and that has its own bad effects.

In a febrile atmosphere that will doubtless accompany this debate just as it did when it was proposed by David Cameron’s government in 2015, this is a numbers racket where those with the loudest voices and snazziest statistics hold sway. It’s close to what Alexis de Tocqueville called the ‘tyranny of the majority’.

So, will Keir Starmer’s administration respect the individual’s responsibility to take driving seriously but still enjoy a drink within the law, and the majority of motorists who understand that?

Or will it just tick the box? I think we all know the answer to that…