Meeting of the Parliament 18 November 2014
I say at outset that Scottish Labour supports the motion. I will speak to the amendment from Scottish Labour.
We have no reservations in our support for the Government’s intentions in this matter. To reduce the drink-drive limit is the right thing to do and this is the right time to do it. If the motion is agreed to and the policy is implemented, we hope and anticipate that it will bring about greater safety on Scottish roads and protect citizens throughout Scotland.
The cabinet secretary was good enough to rehearse the statistics. The situation is maddening, because it does not need to be this way. Few members, and few of the people who are listening to the debate, will not have been touched in some way by an incident in which a driver who was under the influence of drink—not just a drunk driver, as we might imagine them, but someone whose abilities were impaired through alcohol—caused an accident. Such accidents cause enormous angst, injury and sometimes, unfortunately, death.
In 2010, the UK Labour Party commissioned a review from Sir Peter North. He recommended that the blood alcohol content limit be reduced to 50mg, estimating that up to 168 deaths would be saved in the UK in the first year of implementation. It is depressing that the UK Government refused to accept Sir Peter North’s recommendations. As the cabinet secretary acknowledged, that was a missed opportunity, which we hope that the UK Government will revisit sooner rather than later.
The measure that we are considering today is a bit like the ban on smoking in public places. Mr MacAskill was right when he said that, in the 1960s and 1970s, people accepted as part of the culture the notion that a man—it was men in particular, I have to say—would get behind the wheel of a motor car while impaired or, as was often the case, drunk. Machismo was involved, and people thought that everyone was able to make a judgment about their fitness to drive.
The introduction of alcometers and breath tests changed things. However, we need to acknowledge that even in modern Scotland we have been involved in all sorts of arguments about how fairly the technology for detecting impairment is used and that we have made it very difficult for police officers to obtain the evidence that is necessary for prosecution.
I am pleased that much of that is behind us and that we realise that this is a public safety issue, rather than a matter of criminalising members of our community. I do not expect much antagonism in this afternoon’s debate. I anticipate that all members will support the Government’s intentions.
I have done some research into how the proposed change will affect communities. When Ireland indicated that the standard limit of 80mg per 100ml of blood would be reduced to 50mg per 100ml, the council in Kerry, in south-west Ireland, moved that the proposal should be amended to enable the garda to issue permits to respected members of the local community who would be trusted to drive with a higher level of alcohol in their blood. The idea was debated with some strength and was proposed to the justice secretary in Dublin, but I am pleased to say that no further steps were taken and no decision was offered—the proposal merely fell by the wayside through lack of support.
However, that indicates the concerns that exist in rural communities about the impacts of the changes, which we should acknowledge; hence, the Labour amendment seeks to add a reference to an educational and media campaign to the Government’s motion. It is important that we further educate the community. If we tell them 10 times, we will need to tell them 10 times more and 10 times more again. Only when they are personally involved in incidents involving drivers who are under the influence of alcohol do people take these things seriously. We need to get it into the minds of people like me that those drivers are not evil people; they are careless people who do not think ahead of time. The Government and the Parliament have a duty to bring to people’s attention now the impacts of what could happen, particularly over the festive period.