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Road Safety Bill [Lords]

About three years ago, I chaired a conference for the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety—although I no longer chair the conference, I am still a member—on drug-driving. On the day, the big issue was the one that I raised in my intervention on the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr. Chope) about reliable forms of roadside detection for use by the police. At that conference, a manufacturer made a presentation about the latest product, which is used to perform the tests that, as the hon. Member for Christchurch has said, are available in some European Union countries. I was a member of the Standing Committee that considered the Criminal Justice Act 2003, which included a requirement for the police to test for drugs when releasing people from custody, whether or not the offence with which such people had been charged or arrested involved drugs. Stafford police station was one of the pilots for that testing, which allowed me to see what was then the up-to-date technology. I made several visits over a period of months, during which time the technology changed from the analysis of swabs taken from inside the mouth to the analysis of swabs taken from the sweat on the palm of someone’s hand, so the technology is developing all the time. As the hon. Member for Christchurch has said, the technology is catching up, and it allows us to introduce a provision such as new clause 1. However, I suspect that a final product is a little way away, and we need to obtain approvals similar to those for breath tests for alcohol. We also need to debate the precise wording of the law. I have been impressed by the arguments about thresholds, and we need to debate the issues of people who take legally prescribed drugs that contain as a base a drug that is illegal in another form and people whose blood contains a low level of a drug that would not impair a driver. I await the Minister’s response to those points with interest. New clause 30 concerns drink-driving and the legal limit for alcohol in a driver’s blood, urine or breath. Today’s amendment stands in the names of several Liberal Democrat Members. I tabled similar amendments to the previous Bill that we debated before the general election. The Minister will see that I have given up trying to persuade him to accept such an amendment. I recognise that his objection is solid, but that does not mean that I agree with his judgment that we do not need to change the law. In summary, his view is this: we have a robust law with firm penalties, but some people exceed the maximum legal limit by a great deal and cause many deaths, so they are the top priority for enforcement, and when we have got them off our roads to a satisfactory degree, perhaps we can consider changing the limit. I think that my hon. Friend is wrong. I do not see any evidence that we are targeting our policing efforts on catching those people. The number of police officers responsible for policing the roads is not going up appreciably; neither is the number of breath tests carried out by police forces each year. In Committee, I tabled an amendment to give the police a new power on the targeted use of breath tests in order to catch the very people whom my hon. Friend has talked about, but he resisted it. I see no signs that we are cracking down on that group. If, as he suggests, we must wait until we have got on top of that problem, we will never address the issue raised by new clause 30. In the meantime, people are dying on our roads because there are people just exceeding the current limit who would, by any reasonable estimate, adjust their drinking and driving if the law were changed. PACTS commissioned a study that found that reducing the limit from 80 mg to 50 mg would save about 65 lives a year and save about 230 people a year from serious injury. That is why most of the road safety lobby and the British Medical Association support an amendment such as new clause 30. Although my hon. Friend can be congratulated on some further reductions in road casualties in the 2005 statistics, and although one of those is a fall in fatalities due to drink-driving since 2004, I hope that he will not rely on that as an argument for his approach. In 1998, there was a low of 460 in the number of deaths caused by drinking and driving. In 2000, that figure rose to 530, and by 2004 it had reached 590. There is a clear trend of rising deaths owing to drink-driving. In 2005, there was at last a reduction to 560, but that is still high by historical standards, and at a time when the overall figures are showing a reduction in people killed and seriously injured year on year. Something is seriously wrong when drink-driving deaths are not falling in line with all the other reductions.