Clause 13 - Period of endorsement for failure to allow specimen to be tested
Road Safety Bill [Lords]
1:30 pm
David Kidney (PPS (Mr Elliot Morley, Minister of State), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Stafford, Labour)
Thank you, Mrs. Anderson. It is a pleasure to be serving on a Committee so ably chaired by yourself and Sir Nicholas. I thank you both for selecting new clauses 1 and 2 with this stand part debate in order for such an important subject to be properly and fully debated in Committee.
On drink-driving, it is worth pointing out that other measures in the Bill are welcome: increased use of retraining courses; mandatory retesting of drivers disqualified for 24 months or more; and, as we have just heard, the closure of the loophole regarding high-risk offenders driving again before they have been medically assessed as safe to do so.
It is also worth remembering that in the Road Safety Bill that did not make it on to the statute book last year was a measure that subsequently found a home in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005: the ability for the police to carry out evidential road-side breath testing so that they need not take people back to police stations to ascertain that they are definitely over the limit and committing an offence.
All those things are welcome, but new clauses 1 and 2 suggest that the Bill does not go far enough in tackling drink-driving. It is worth at the outset assessing the scale of the problem. Is there a problem that we, as politicians, should be tackling? I suggest that there is. In 2004, 590 people were killed on our roads because of someone drinking and driving. That figure is almost 20 per cent.—it is exactly 18 per cent.—of all that year’s road fatalities. Some of those people were drink-driving, and they crashed and killed themselves. In that sense, they brought it on themselves, but some took with them their passengers or completely innocent people in other vehicles who did not know that a drink-driver was approaching. Some of the drink-drivers survived their crash and just left other families to pick up the consequences of family bereavements. Any of us who have met the relatives of someone who has been killed on the road knows how deeply distressing it is for grieving families.