New Clause 1 - Alcohol-prescribed limits
Road Safety Bill
9:25 am
Mr David Kidney (Stafford, Labour)
The new clause would lower the legal limit in relation to alcohol in one's blood, breath or urine for drinking and driving. All the relevant levels are referred to in the new clause. I want to concentrate on the 80 mg of alcohol in 100 ml of blood, which the new clause would reduce to 50 mg.
I accept that since the 1970s there has been a big reduction in those killed or seriously injured by people who have consumed too much alcohol. In 1979, more than 1,600 people were killed in incidents relating to drink driving. By the mid-1980s, that had been reduced to about 1,000 a year. A decade later, we had halved that figure. The law in this country is settled. There is a culture in which drinking and driving is socially unacceptable and we have been cutting the number of deaths. However, my argument is against complacency. A number of recent factors, taken together, show that we have come to the end of a phase and that it is time for a new one.
After that laudable reduction in deaths over two decades, the number of deaths is rising. In 1998, there were 460 deaths on our roads due to drinking and driving. By 2003, there were 560. That is 21 per cent. more. As that rise occurred over five years, it is trend, not a blip.