Drink-drive limit won’t be lowered – as it hasn’t cut deaths in Scotland

CALLS to lower the drink-drive limit in England and Wales have been rejected by ministers after figures showed road casualties in Scotland have risen since it introduced tougher restrictions.

The Scottish limit was reduced in December 2014 from 80 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood – the level in the rest of the UK – to 50mg.

But the latest figures from Transport Scotland show there were 580 drinkdrive casualties, including 30 deaths, in 2016, compared with 460 – with 20 deaths – in 2014.

Safety campaigners have urged the Government to follow the Scottish example and lower the drink-drive limit, and there were indications it would consider doing so if evidence north of the border supported it.

But transport minister Baroness Charlotte Vere has confirmed that the Government now has no plans to take action because the change appears to have made no impact in Scotland.

She said ‘rigorous enforcement and serious penalties for drinkdrivers are a more effective deterrent than changing the drink-driving limit’.

In her written answer to a question on the subject in the Lords, Baroness Vere cited research by the University of Glasgow that found overall road traffic accident rates in Scotland have increased slightly since 2014.

The researchers concluded that the most plausible explanation was that the ‘new blood-alcohol limit was insufficiently enforced, publicised, or both’.

Baroness Vere said: ‘The study found that lowering the drinkdrive limit was not associated with any reduction in total road traffic accident rates or serious and fatal road traffic accident rates.

‘There are no current plans to lower the drink-drive limit in England and Wales.’

Official estimates show that across the UK 290 people were killed in a drink-driving accident in 2017 – up from 230 the previous year and the most since 2009.

Campaigners have expressed alarm at the increase, renewing calls to reduce the alcohol limit in England and Wales – one of the highest in Europe.

But figures from the DFT also show the proportion of casualties in drink-drive accidents is higher in Scotland at 6 per cent than in England (5 per cent).

AA president Edmund King said: ‘All the evidence suggests that the drink-drivers who kill are way over the current limit rather than just under or just over.

‘We believe targeting the hardcore drink- drivers and driving them off the road would actually have more effect than lowering the limit. For this to be effective we need more cops in cars to target the criminal drunks. The Scottish experience suggests lowering the limit in isolation has little effect on road safety.’

Neil Greig, of the road safety charity IAM RoadSmart, acknowledged the Scottish move had had ‘minimal provable effect’.

But he said the Government should cut the drink-driving limit anyway as ‘anything that helps prevent potentially life-threatening incidents occurring in the first place can only be a good thing’.