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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention and I hope to deal with that point. To conclude the last point, I should just add that this summer Cleveland police felt it necessary to take out television advertising in their area in order to warn drivers about the consequences of taking drugs and then getting behind the wheel of a vehicle. The Government recognise that we have a serious problem and that is why under schedule 7 to the Road Traffic Act 2003 new powers were provided for the police to carry out impairment tests at the roadside. The problem is that the equipment for doing that is not up to the job, and we also have evidence from a study by Glasgow university that in one third of cases the equipment is not even capable of detecting those who have illegal drugs in their system. To take up the hon. Gentleman’s point, new equipment is now available. It is colloquially called a drugalyser, and it is already being used effectively in Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and, for all I know, in other countries as well. It is, in essence, a hand-held device. It can detect cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine, and from one swab of saliva a police officer can test for a single drug in 90 seconds at the roadside, and he can test for more complex cocktails in six minutes. That is pretty astonishing to me, and it shows the extent to which the new technology has changed over the past couple of years, which we as legislators should take into account. It was a change in technology some 39 years ago that really led to the change in the law, replacing the impairment test for driving with drink in the system with a test for excess alcohol, because we could measure the amount of alcohol in the blood or in the breath.