Cutting the drink drive limit won’t save lives |
‘Evidence-based policy-making’ is very much in vogue – until, that is, the evidence doesn’t quite support what the government wants to do. Then governments tend to plough on ahead anyway, evidence or not.
Just why is the government proposing to lower the drink-driving limit in England from 80mg/100ml to 50mg/100ml? To many people, government ministers included, it just feels the right thing to do. England does, after all, look a bit of an outlier in Europe, where most countries have a 50mg limit. And then there was a 2010 study by Sir Peter North which concluded that lowering the blood-alcohol limit from 80mg to 50mg would save between 43 and 168 lives in the first year alone, and prevent between 280 and 16,000 injuries. Who, then, could possibly oppose the reduction?
Trouble is that since 2010 we have mountains of real-world data from a real-life experiment. After Sir Peter North’s report was published, the incoming coalition government decided not to enact its recommendation, preferring to engage in better enforcement of the existing 80mg........