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Road Safety

That is true, but GPs also have a responsibility. I tabled a parliamentary question recently to ask how many GPs, having prescribed a drug for which driving was forbidden after use, then reported to the driving licence authorities that the patient involved should not continue to drive while taking that drug. In many cases, GPs may be reluctant to put their relationship with patients at risk by grassing them up, so to speak, to Swansea. We need a debate on how we should treat drug-driving in the courts if we had drug-testing equipment out in the field. It would be difficult to set a safe limit for the drugs that we are talking about because they are illegal, and that is not the case with alcohol. I have not discussed this matter at any length with my colleagues who shadow the Justice Department or the Home Office but, although we could make it an offence for a person to have any drug at all in his system, I suspect that the Crown Prosecution Service might have to issue guidelines about the level of intoxication at which a prosecution could be brought. There is a precedent with speeding, for which the guidelines laid down by the Association of Chief Police Officers make it clear that a prosecution may be brought if a driver does 10 per cent. over the limit, plus 2 mph. Another example might involve theft: if, God forbid, I stole an orange from a stall in Pimlico market I may be let off with a warning, but if I hijacked a 38-tonner full of oranges I would be for the high jump. We need a genuine debate about how we police drug-driving, once the equipment is being used and deployed. I think that all parties would like to work constructively together to try to reach a solution to that vexing problem. Young drivers have been mentioned, and we have certainly looked carefully at ideas such raising the driving age to 18 and limiting the number of young people to two in a car. We are giving conflicting advice: we are saying that, if young people go out together, they should nominate a driver; but surely, in those circumstances, it is a good idea to have four or five people in the car if the driver has not been drinking. We have rejected the idea of a curfew, but we are very well aware of the risk to young drivers—it is the single biggest killer of 15 to 24-year-olds in the OECD countries, and the death rate among under-25s is double the normal death rate.