Labour’s proposed new drink-driving laws are a needless imposition that won’t improve safety.
Britain does not have a drink-driving crisis. It has one of the safest road systems in the developed world, a public that overwhelmingly rejects drink-driving, and statistics that compare favourably with countries enforcing far stricter alcohol limits. Yet Labour are adamant that an issue exists.
Britain’s current limit, introduced in 1967 at 0.08 per cent blood alcohol content, is indeed the highest in Europe. The Government has proposed to lower it to 0.05 per cent, with suggestions of an even lower limit for younger drivers. For some, that would mean being legally unable to drive after less than a single pint.
The justification for this shift can be found in Labour’s so-called “bold new Road Safety Strategy”. This document is a familiar exercise in nanny-statism, filled with sweeping restrictions put forward not because they are necessary, but because they are symbolically satisfying. Worse, it threatens to land hardest on rural pubs — heavily reliant on customers who drive — whilst offering little guarantee of improved safety.
The situation is made worse when considering that Britain does not have a serious road-safety problem to solve. A 2023 Government report admits that “Britain ranked 3 out of 33 countries for lowest number of road fatalities per million population”. Road deaths have fallen by 79 per cent since 1972 and drink-driving fatalities specifically fell by 88 per cent between 1979 and 2015 — all without any change to the legal alcohol limit. Few areas of public policy can boast such sustained improvement and as such, one must question why the British Government is spending political capital on an issue of clearly marginal significance or urgency.
But, as Ministers would say, progress has plateaued in recent years and studies such as the 2010 North Report suggest that lower limits could reduce fatalities further. Although that may be true, in a narrow statistical sense, it ignores a fundamental concept in risk management: residual risk.
While we can reduce drink-driving deaths, we can never reduce them to zero. As marginal gains diminish, each new policy intervention yields less measurable benefit than the last, while imposing greater social and economic costs. Lowering the blood alcohol limit is a textbook example of poor opportunity cost: it might save lives, but it might also accelerate the collapse of rural pubs — for limited benefits that are wholly unguaranteed.
This becomes clearer when looking across the North Sea.
Sweden enforces one of the lowest blood alcohol limits in Europe at just 0.02 per cent. Yet drink-driving outcomes are no better, and in some respects worse. Recent figures show that drink-driving accounts for 16 per cent of road deaths in Britain, compared with 18 per cent in Sweden. Alcohol-related fatalities per 100,000 people stand at 0.38 in Britain and 0.37 in Sweden — a negligible difference, especially given that Britain has tens of millions more vehicles on its roads.
The Government must therefore explain how lowering Britain’s limit is justified when a nation whose threshold is 75 per cent lower sees broadly similar or worse outcomes. Again, the question returns to residual risk: how much better can these statistics realistically become?
In that sense, Scotland also offers little comfort to ministers. It lowered its limit to 0.05 per cent in 2014, yet the Government itself now concedes that this change “did not see a significant reduction in casualties”. Instead, it argues that the move “strengthened public attitudes against drink-driving”. Perhaps. But public attitudes in Britain have already shifted dramatically without such measures. In 1979, two-thirds of young male drivers admitted to drink-driving weekly. Today, 92 per cent of people say they would be ashamed to be caught doing so.
This matters because freedom restricting policy should respond to behaviour, not symbolism. Britain does not have a culture of reckless drink-driving, nor statistics to prove that drink-driving is a significant threat to public life. The campaign to lower the legal alcohol limit is one that rests on anecdote and selective statistics, two things policy ought not to be driven by.
Drink-driving deaths are tragic, but tragedy alone is not a sufficient basis for policy. Bubble-wrapping all children would likely reduce child mortality, but at great inconvenience to society. The same is true for lowering the blood alcohol limit.
With the examples of Sweden and Scotland, the Government cannot demonstrate that lowering the limit will produce a meaningful reduction in fatalities. Instead, such a policy would only inconvenience large numbers of responsible drivers who already comply with the law and likely damage our hospitality sector.
Therefore, the Government’s drink-driving proposal is ill-thought-out. This is perhaps unsurprising from a Road Safety Strategy that cannot even correctly identify when the current limit was introduced — 8 October 1967, not 1969. But humour aside, the data simply does not support the policy.
To conclude, consider Transport Minister Lilian Greenwood’s reassurance: “We don’t want to stop people from going to the pub and having a great night out. What we’re just saying is don’t take your car.”
I’m sure that will resonate with the 70 per cent of rural pub-goers who do drive to their local boozers.
It is time to push back against the nanny state. To allow people the courtesy of a drink, and a bit of fun — though that, one suspects, is something Labour remains deeply allergic to.
