How popular are the plans to reduce the drink-drive limit?

25th Oct, 2024

The very short answer is – more so than you might think! It’s a measure that’s had quite strong support for a while. Here at Scrap Car Network we’ve already spoken about the plans to limit the drink drive limit, but we’ll give you a quick recap in case you need to get up to speed (so to speak).

Basically, recently there’s been a significant rise in road deaths due to drugs and alcohol, and that’s prompted the British Medical Association to call for England’s drink driving limit to be reduced by the equivalent of a small glass of wine or beer. (Alcohol and drug related deaths reached a record high in 2021 and 2022.)

Now, the BMA is not necessarily calling for a massive change. It wants the government to reduce the limit by nearly half for most people, to 50mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, or 0.05%, and to 20mg for new and commercial drivers. The idea is it will prevent collisions that (at best) cause people to prematurely scrap their cars – and at worst, result in deaths.

What’s been the reaction?

As we touched upon above, more positive than you might think! Obviously there’s been some pushback, but a significant proportion of the British public are in favour. This is not a new phenomenon – the BMA’s research says that almost 80% of the UK public support lowering the drink drive limit.

Now, while there’s not that much official data still, there are some indications that opinions are split along a couple of key fault lines, age being one of them. It’s an almost universal rule that we tend to be a little more resistant to change as we grow older, largely because it’s so easy to see so much of our lives up until this point with rose-tinted glasses. People tend to be particularly resistant to new sweeping changes that they may think are unnecessary (let’s be honest, we’ve all heard the phrase “never did me any harm”).

For better or worse, younger people tend to be a little more open to this kind of change. This appears to be broadly the case with this new proposal. Younger generations are most likely to reduce or completely stop their alcohol intake over the next year.

Notably, recent research from Aviva says that “nearly half of UK adults who say they drink alcohol (48%) plan to stop drinking alcohol or reduce the amount of alcohol they drink over the next year”.

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t limits to the public’s tolerance (so to speak). The proposal to limit pints to 2/3 measures in a bid to improve public health has gone down rather more like a lead balloon. The message from the public seems to be: I don’t mind not drinking if I’m a designated driver, but if I’m drinking, let me do it properly.

So that’s the reaction in a nutshell. The next biggest question is…

Does it work?

In general, yes – there’s broad swathes of evidence to suggest that lowering drink drive limits does indeed lower motoring deaths. That’s why the BMA has suggested it, after all! In 2010, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said that more than 150 lives a year could be saved by lowering the drive limit to 0.05%. (That might seem like a small number, but only when considered as a statistic, rather than 150 living, breathing people with families.

Now, reducing the legal limit is not necessarily automatically guaranteed to get results. The University of Glasgow found that a similar measure in Scotland, introduced in 2014, actually didn’t succeed in reducing the number of road traffic accidents. However, the study’s authors stressed that this doesn’t mean there was no point in doing it. Instead, they highlighted that the reason it likely didn’t work on this occasion was because it wasn’t complemented by effective enforcement.

That’s not being overlooked by the BMA, which has made a point of saying that the measure of lowering limits also needs to be deployed alongside a variety of complementary measures. Strong enforcement is one of the biggest ones, but it’s also mentioned programmes to educate the public, as well as more focus on (and funding for) drug rehabilitation programmes, and more support for national and local health services.

As of the time of writing, there’s still no firm word on exactly how highly the government’s prioritising this – but certainly general momentum seems to be behind it, so watch this space!

In the meantime, here at Scrap Car Network we’ll continue focusing on doing what we do best: getting you the very best price when you scrap your car. All you need to do is enter your car reg and postcode into the fields on our site, and we’ll get you an instant online quote before you can say cash for cars. It only takes a few seconds. So then – curious to find out how much your car is worth?