Road Safety Bill [HL]

It has been an interesting debate, and I shall be interested to hear the Minister’s response in a moment. However, we need to be careful before we alter the limits that we have in this country. Over the past few years, we have been successful in persuading people that they should not drink and drive. The whole culture in this country is that you know that if you drink too much you lose your licence. I support graduated points for speeding, but people suggested examples from other European countries where you do not lose your licence but get various points and so on. In this country, we have been successful over the past few years in getting people to realise more and more that they should not drink and drive. Therefore, the culture and the way in which we treat the matter is important. Although it has been an interesting debate, I am afraid that I do not support the amendment tabled by my noble friend Lord Dundee that would reduce the levels of alcohol. However, I very much support what we have heard about from my noble friend Lord Attlee and the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw—that there is not a sufficiently successful way of getting to drugs and driving yet. We need to work much harder at how we do that. I believe—I am sure that a lot of us believe it—that that is a bigger danger, particularly with young people who take drugs and then drive. We need to address that. I hope that the Minister might agree with me in a moment that we need to be careful in this area of legislation. We have probably not been as successful as we might like, but we have had success over the past few years. We need to make certain that any legislation that   we pass or changes that we make are not counterproductive. They must continue the trend that we have seen in this country of people realising that they should not drink and drive. Also, we must get something to stop drug driving.