---

Road Safety Bill [Lords]

That is a generous offer, but I suspect that it will not be decided by this Bill. I urge the Government to consider seriously whether we should have that debate and whether we could all agree on a proposal for change. We have heard Scots voices in this debate that suggest that the objections to the change are not uniform. I am grateful to Richard Allsop from PACTS for another piece of evidence. Last year, it was estimated that if we reduced the maximum drink drive limit from 80 mg of alcohol in 100 ml of blood to just 50 mg, we could save 65 lives a year. That is a modest change for a valuable saving. I hope that Government and Opposition Front Benchers will give serious consideration to that change, unlike in the last Parliament, when we considered a similar Bill. After all, it would put us back in the mainstream of maximum limits, because at the moment we are out on the edge when it comes to comparison with the legal limits in other countries. Allied to the drink-driving limit is detection of the people who drive with excess alcohol in their blood. I am a member of PACTS, which I mentioned earlier, and it recommends that we move away from waiting for people to commit an offence before we can test whether they are drunk while driving. We should move towards not random testing, whereby the police can stop anyone they like, whenever they like, for any reason, but to targeted testing, whereby, if the police have intelligence that there is a concentration of people driving with excess alcohol in their blood, the police can conduct tests in the area to try to detect them. Those hon. Members who were part of the previous Parliament have largely seen such provisions before. It is pleasing to acknowledge that the Government listened to the debates and arguments during the passage of the previous Road Safety Bill, as far as it got, and that they have made improvements in the Bill. It is a shame that one of those measures—the sentences that magistrates courts could impose for the proposed new offence of causing death by careless driving—was watered down in the other place, and I hope that we can review that decision during the Bill’s passage, to restore something that is strongly supported by hon. Members and the public generally.