Lowering the drink driving limit

anyoldblu said:
I'll say upfront I am no supporter of drinking and driving at any limit. However you are absolutely spot on. The data completely backs up your argument that this is about diminishing returns and a collapse in policing rather than the limit itself being too high. We actually have a perfect real-world example of this failure next door. Scotland dropped their limit from 80mg to 50mg back in 2014, and the results were damning. There was no statistically significant drop in road accidents or fatalities compared to England. The only thing it achieved was a hit to the pub trade as lawful drivers stopped having a casual pint with dinner, while the dangerous offenders simply ignored the new limit just as they had ignored the old one.

The reason the "rump of arseholes" you mentioned don't care about the limit is that there is no one around to catch them. The drop in enforcement is staggering. In 2009, police carried out around 700,000 breath tests a year. That number has plummeted to roughly 220,000 recently. We are running the road safety network on the fumes of a deterrent that existed fifteen years ago. Drivers know the chance of a random pull is practically zero, so the high-risk ones take the chance.

We can see this in the failure rates too. Even though police are doing nearly 70 per cent fewer tests, the percentage of drivers failing them has actually risen from about 11 per cent to 17 per cent. This shows that police have stopped doing the random checks that scare normal people into compliance and are now only testing drivers who have already crashed or are driving visibly erratically. The deterrent is gone.

On top of that, lowering the alcohol limit is a massive distraction from the real crisis, which is drug driving. While drink-drive deaths fell by 14 per cent between 2022 and 2023, drug-drive deaths surged by 38 per cent in the same period. Since 2014, the number of drivers killed with drugs in their system has risen by over 70 per cent. Cocaine and cannabis are now just as big a threat as alcohol, yet we have a massive shortage of traffic officers—down by over 20 per cent since 2015—to deal with it.

Lowering the alcohol limit now is just security theatre. It looks like action, but without the boots on the ground to enforce it or tackle the rising tide of drug driving, it will change nothing. That said, once we actually deal with that rump of dangerous offenders and restore proper policing levels, that would be the right time to look at lowering the limit. If we can get the hardcore reckless drivers off the road first, tightening the rules for everyone else might then help squeeze those casualty numbers down further, but doing it this way round is putting the cart before the horse.
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More articulate than I could state. But spot on.
 
Trevor Morley's Tache said:
Whilst lowering the blood alcohol levels may not change the number of accidents by much, what it does do is lower the threshold for prosecution under the RTA 1988 for causing death by careless or dangerous driving whilst under the influence of drink or drugs.
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But it makes no difference to the statistics whatsoever so it is pure new Puritanism. Just pissing off the law abiding cItizen and devastating the pub trade.

What is the point of doing that? All it does is provide Reform with new raw meat for the angry brigade to vote for them.
 
Trevor Morley's Tache said:
Whilst lowering the blood alcohol levels may not change the number of accidents by much, what it does do is lower the threshold for prosecution under the RTA 1988 for causing death by careless or dangerous driving whilst under the influence of drink or drugs.
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That is a fair legal point, but it puts a lot of weight on a scenario that the data suggests rarely happens. For that lower threshold to actually make a difference, you need a specific type of offender: someone who kills a person while blowing between the old limit and the new limit (say, 60mg).

The Scotland evidence kills this theory. If there were loads of drivers in that 50mg-80mg bracket causing fatal accidents, we would have seen a drop in deaths when they changed the law. We didn't. That flatline suggests that the people causing the carnage are almost always way over the current 80mg limit anyway. The drivers in that "grey zone" simply aren't the ones filling up the morgues.

Also, the sentencing powers have already ramped up massively. Since 2022, judges can hand out life sentences for Causing Death by Dangerous Driving regardless of alcohol levels. So, if someone is driving badly enough to kill, they are already facing the maximum penalty. Lowering the booze threshold to make it easier to stick a "drink" label on the charge is a bit academic if the driver is already looking at a double-digit sentence for the driving itself.

It brings us back to the main issue. You can lower the threshold for prosecution all you want, but you can't prosecute a driver you don't catch. Until we fix the enforcement gap, tweaking the legal definitions is just shuffling paper while the roads remain dangerous.
 
BlueAnorak said:
Let's look at what's happened to the death stats since the 80s. View attachment 179670
Why have they stopped going down?
I'll tell you why.
1. There are a rump of arseholes who will drive pissed whatever the limit.
2. There are fewer cops on the roads to pull over drivers who are showing signs of bad driving.
Lowering the limit will do fuck all to reduce it hat number - and for what purpose? To wipe out the pub trade and impose the modern equivalence of puritanism.
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Have you accounted for ABS brakes, the introduction of seatbelt laws,airbags all around the vehicle and better safety designs ?
 
Sheikh rattle and roll said:
Have you accounted for ABS brakes, the introduction of seatbelt laws,airbags all around the vehicle and better safety designs ?
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Yes.
The numbers havnt gone down in Scotland where the lower limit has been introduced.
So it's pointless.
Just pissing folks off who will be more likely to vote Reform as a result.
 
This is simply pandering to the 'campaigners' who get on the bandwagon of 'someone I love died' and 'I must do something so it doesn't happen to anyone else'

Notice I'm not even mentioning drink driving, this is just the f**king world we live in where there's 'always a bloody cause' that skews common sense by people who simply can not be objective about a topic because of their personal experience
 
An article in today's Telegraph says that drug drivers are responsible for more deaths than drink drivers. Considering that cannabis, cocaine, heroin etc are illegal can we have a zero tolerance for those who test positive, whatever the level.
 
tweety said:
An article in today's Telegraph says that drug drivers are responsible for more deaths than drink drivers. Considering that cannabis, cocaine, heroin etc are illegal can we have a zero tolerance for those who test positive, whatever the level.
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Probably a time to bring up inappropriate footwear to drive in as well.

Any more suggestions for the zero tolerance list?
 
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