Roads: Drink-drive Limit

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, first, I have had no blandishments from the drinks industry and am actually quite surprised by how little effort it is putting into lobbying the Government. Clearly, it is lobbying, but not as much as it could.

Going back to my point about regulated and unregulated drinkers, I think that it is not clear how lowering the BAC, which would have a significant impact on regulated drinkers, would have any beneficial effect on unregulated drinkers who have no intention whatever of meeting their moral or legal obligations.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, in 2009, drink-drivers caused 390 deaths and almost 23,000 serious injuries at a cost to the taxpayer of £15.6 billion. How many of these casualties could have been avoided and how much of this expenditure could have been saved if we had reduced the legal limit to 20 milligrams, as is the case in Sweden? What other measures in the report that has been referred to, such as making persistent offenders pass a test before they can resume driving after a ban, are now being considered?

[Earl Attlee]

My Lords, we need to consider carefully the effect of lowering the blood alcohol limit. Suppose that we lowered the BAC to 50 milligrams and a traffic patrol detected a motorist driving with a BAC of 65 milligrams. It would take the patrol at least an hour to process the suspect, during which time it would be unable to detect the unregulated drinker to whom I referred, who might be driving with a BAC far in excess of the current limits.