Safe Speed Forums

Just ONE glass of wine or a pint of beer could put you over drink-drive limit

By RAY MASSEY
Last updated at 08:39am on 29th March 2008

Just one small glass of wine or a single pint of beer could soon put motorists in the dock for drink-driving.

The crackdown, which has won support from ministers, could see up to 200,000 drivers a year losing their licences - double the present number.

Road safety experts say slashing the drink-drive limit will save up to 65 lives a year.

Ministers are said to be "minded" to cut the limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood to 50mg - the legal maximum found in most of the rest of Europe - and such a move could come in within 18 months.

Lowering the limit would be accompanied by increased enforcement with police likely to be given wider powers to introduce random breath-testing.

This could lead to 24-hour road blocks and cordons around pubs where drink-driving is a particular problem.

Ministers are considering three options for penalising drivers who are caught between the proposed 50mg limit and the existing 80mg.

These are to: keep the existing penalty of a ban and a maximum six months imprisonment and £5,000 fine; introduce automatic participation in a drink-driver rehabilitation programme; or imposing SIX penalty points for a five-year period on first time offenders, followed by automatic disqualification for a second offence.

This has been dubbed a "two strikes and you're out" option.

Ministers believe growing concern about binge-drinking means the climate is now right to lower the limit.

They have been stung by criticism that they are failing to get to grips with the drink-drive problem because there are too few traffic police to enforce the law - and an overreliance on technology such as speed cameras which cannot catch such offenders.

Rob Gifford, of the Parliamentary Advisory Committee on Transport Safety, a respected road safety charity, said: "There was a move a decade ago in 1998 to lower the limit but it foundered because of pressure from rural pubs and motorists who wanted a pint or two.

"But the climate has changed because of growing concern over binge-drinking and the health impact of it. The mood music is now more conducive to lowering the limit, which has widespread support.

"Lowering the limit may not affect those who are two or three times over the limit, but it will have a sobering effect on those at or just over the current limit."

They have been stung by criticism that they are failing to get to grips with the drink-drive problem because there are too few traffic police to enforce the law - and an overreliance on technology such as speed cameras which cannot catch such offenders.

It sugessts that this years road death figures will be worse than last years so they have to "do somthing".

we need a small team of people ready to collate and find out publication dates of these statitics and run some serious pr's

... other wise safespeed might as well close down!

we need a small team of people ready to collate and find out publication dates of these statitics and run some serious pr's

... other wise safespeed might as well close down!

The binge drinking reference it disgraceful. Nothing to do with drink driving at all. As was said above, enforce the law and there would not be a problem.

There must be a tax take somewhere, otherwise Labour would not be signing it off. Maybe the manufactured increase in drink-driving convictions will be used as justification for higher taxation on beers, wines & spirits.

Road safety experts say slashing the drink-drive limit will save up to 65 lives a year.

Road safety experts say slashing the drink-drive limit will save up to 65 lives a year.

taking just one line...


1, I believe car pasenger road deaths will go up not down.
2. I believe if people have to use a taxi to go to the pub they will have 6 drinks not two.
3. They will be more drunk pedestrians getting run over.
4. Once people are banned from driving they drink more. When licences are returned these people find it even harder to remain sober.

This policy is a disaster for road safety.

A pint and a half sir? You're nicked

20:40pm 31st March 2008

These people never give up, do they? The Government has again dusted off plans to lower the drink drive limit.

As many as 200,000 motorists, who currently drive perfectly legally, could lose their licences.

That, of course, is not an unwelcome consequence, it is the whole point.

Ministers may try to dress it up as a major contribution to road safety, but the truth is that it's just another excuse to punish, bully and fine us.

Coincidentally, this latest assault on motorists comes at the same time as the introduction of new "fairer" parking enforcement, which will see penalty notices issued not by traffic wardens but by CCTV cameras and is expected to significantly increase the £3.5billion a year which councils already make out of parking fines.

Now before the "if it saves one life" lunatics start bouncing up and down, I don't drink and drive and I've never had a speeding ticket in my life.

My sympathies go to anyone who has ever lost a relative as a result of a crash caused by a drunken driver.

But this latest proposed measure won't bring them back, nor will it prevent future road deaths.

"Experts" claim that if the limit was lowered to just one pint of beer or a single glass of wine it would save "up to" 65 lives a year.

Come on, chaps, you can do better than than that. Why not 10,000, or a million? What does "up to" 65 lives actually mean - 64? One? They haven't got a clue. They made it up.

Even if it was true, in the context of a population of 60 million, 65 is statistically irrelevant. Britain already has the safest roads in Europe, which given the state of our highways and the saturation levels of traffic is little short of a miracle.

And what they don't tell you is that the 540 "drink-related" road deaths also include drunken cyclists and drunken pedestrians who have stumbled in front of cars driven by people who are stone-cold sober.

Motorists who drink a pint and a half or a couple of small glasses of wine before getting behind the wheel are not the problem.

It's those who drive after swallowing 16 pints of Wifebeater or a bottle of scotch. And, as this column has long maintained, they wouldn't take any notice of the limit if it was cut to half a pint of milk.

Perhaps if a few more coppers could be taken off diversity training, filling in forms and gawping at CCTV cameras all day and diverted to traffic patrols that might serve as a deterrent.

Don't hold your breath. This government wants us to break the law.

It needs the money. Does anyone seriously believe that speed cameras exist primarily to save lives? Of course not.

They're there to raise money and pay for the burgeoning bureaucracy set up to collect the fines. It's just another stealth tax.

If police forces were serious about tackling dangerous driving, they'd be mounting highly visible patrols. Instead, they're skulking behind bushes, hoping to catch us going a few miles an hour over the limit.

Only yesterday it was revealed that the Mad Mullah's latest wheeze is hiding members of the North Wales Traffic Taliban in a horse box to prey on unsuspecting drivers.

One of the main reasons ministers have revived cutting the drink-drive limit is simply to give themselves something to do. They're clutching at straws to find any kind of justification.

Listen to patronising pipsqueak Rob Gifford, of the parliamentary advisory group on road safety.

"The climate has changed because of growing concern over binge drinking and the health impact. The mood music is now conducive to lowering the limit."

No, it hasn't. And no, it isn't. The idea that this has got anything to do with binge drinking is a monumental insult to our intelligence.

Since when was one-and-a-half pints of beer "binge drinking"?

This won't do anything to address the tanked-up hooligans who pour out of the rock-around-the-clock drinking barns which this government is so keen on.

And as for the "health impact". For heaven's sake.

You could drink a pint and a half every day and still fall way within the Government's own "safe" drinking guidelines - which are in themselves fictitious nonsense.

To put all this in perspective, last year 70 people were killed and 99,000 seriously injured in DIY accidents in the home. If they're so keen on saving lives, why don't they make electric drills illegal and send in the police to close down Homebase?

More to the point, if they really gave a stuff about preventable deaths they might do something about our filthy NHS hospitals, which kill at least 7,500 patients a year by infecting them with superbugs.

As I've argued before, they could start by bringing corporate manslaughter charges against hospital administrators. That would put a stop to it overnight.

What we're really dealing with is a government which has run out of sensible ideas (not that it ever had many), hasn't a clue what to do about the real problems and is flailing around firing in all directions just to give the impression of activity.

This is a bankrupt government of punishment freaks and tax junkies, who see the law-abiding paying public as a lumpen rabble to be persecuted and bled dry - none more so than the poor bloody motorist.

They long ago lost any sense of justice, common sense or proportion.

It's enough to drive you to drink.