Government still rejects lower drink drive limit

The Government is still strongly opposed to lowering the legal alcohol limit for drivers, as it was ‘minded’ to do when elected to office, but this may not be the case forever.

Appearing before the House of Commons Transport Committee in March, Transport Minister Stephen Ladyman appeared to hold out the prospect that the Government might lower the limit at some point in the future but only when it had made much more progress in tackling drinking and driving above the present legal limit. Dr. Ladyman said:

“Clearly, if everybody obeyed the law and we reduced the blood alcohol level to 50 micrograms, yes, we would save more lives but we think about 500 deaths a year are attributable to people over the 80 micrograms limit and I think the figure is about 50 to 70 lives a year would be saved by reducing it, involving people between 50 and 80. It seems to me obvious that the target for our enforcement, our priority, has to be catching all of the people who are over the 80 micrograms limit and saving the 500 lives before we start diverting police resources to try to catch the 70 or so that are between the 50 and 80 limit. I do not rule out the possibility, once we have strict enforcement at 80, once we have the situation under good control with 80, of the government of the day wishing to move down to 50. Let us focus where the big gain is to be made first.”

Asked whether reducing the legal limit would not help to reduce the number of drink drivers, Dr Ladyman denied thatt here was `the slightest bit of evidence’ to support that suggestion.

These comments are likely to cause dismay in the road safety community, not least because they clearly suggest that the Government is still flatly refusing even to acknowledge the existence of a substantial body of evidence from around the world showing that lowering the legal limit prevents drinkdriving and saves lives. In fact, and contrary to Dr Ladyman’s assertion, the evidence of the benefits of lowering drink drive limits is strong enough for a recent authoritative review to have rated lowered limits as one of the most effective drink drive policies available, far more effective than the designated driver programmes that the alcohol industry and the Government encourage.