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Road Safety Bill [HL]

I want to follow on from what was said by my noble friend Lord Faulkner. The increase in people killed and seriously injured in the past five years is something like 22 per cent. For 2002—the latest figures that we have—that is 560 people killed and 2,820 seriously injured in crashes involving illegal alcohol levels. That is very significant. Why can we not have random breath tests? What are we doing? The noble Baroness, Lady Gardner, is right to say that it is as though we are at a sporting game. Let us have a sporting chance of getting away, like the fox in the fox hunting debate. Give it a chance; give us a five-minute start and we will get away. With this level of accidents, we cannot afford that. It is not a game—or it is a game with people’s lives and we cannot have that. We need random tests and lower limits. Then we might make some progress in reducing significantly figures such as the 560 people killed in 2002 in alcohol-related accidents. Yes, education has been a success and the figures have reduced, but I agree with my noble friend that now is the time to move to the next stage to get the figures down. The figure is now much too high and we cannot play games any more.