|
Mr. Knight: I will be brief. I have two points to make. First, I would find it helpful if the Minister could give members of the Committee a copy of the MG DD forms. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Taunton would welcome having sight of them, if that is not too onerous a task.
Mr. Chope: It might also be useful if the Minister was able to explain what the initials he is using actually stand for.
Mr. Knight: I am sure the Minister will have heard that; now that he has his glasses perhaps he can indeed tell us what the initials stand for. My other point is really a question as to whether this Bill should become law in its present form, with clause 11 in it. How does the Minister see this change being implemented? Does he envisage the police trialling this new procedure in certain counties first, to see if there were any problems with it or whether any new procedural guidance was necessary? Or does he see it being implemented across the whole UK?
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford) (Lab): May I ask the Minister a question about clause 11? Clearly we are amending the Road Traffic Act 1988 regarding procedures for breath testing, but we are not amending the parts of that Act about when police may test. I
Column Number: 126
wonder whether the Minister has given thought to that and decided against making any difference. Can he explain whether the Government have any further plans in that respect? To take him through the situation, clearly the present worry is that in recent years we have seen a rising number of deaths where drink-driving is involved. At the same time, there is apparently a falling number of roadside breath tests by the police. The question must be asked as to whether we are going in the wrong direction and whether something extra needs to be done to try to reverse that trend, so that deaths start to fall again.
So far, what we have agreed in clause 11 is valuable. The police may carry out the evidential test at the roadside and also at the hospital bedside, instead of at the police station. That is a valuable addition to the police's powers in terms of deterrence. It is also potentially a massive saving in police bureaucracy back at the station, where all those forms must be filled in for every single detention. So there are some good things. But are we doing enough to deter drivers from drinking and driving, by showing them that there is a great risk of being caught, if they dare to risk it? I know that the British Medical Association thinks the answer is to allow a power for random breath testing.
The hon. Member for Christchurch touched upon that in a slightly different context; the argument being that if anybody could be stopped at any time by the police and be tested for drink-driving, it would be a massive increase in deterrence. Now that does sound a bit draconian; yet looking across to the continent, it seems several countries do have random breath testing as part of their law. I gather a Swiss study of 1998 found that random breath testing was one of the most cost-effective safety measures that could be implemented. It seems that at a European Union level, the European Commission recommendation on enforcement in the field of road safety was that there should be an element of random breath testing in each country's strategy.
Now, we do not have random breath testing and we seem to set our face against it, but some people argue for an intermediate stage between it and the present law. They call this targeted breath testing, which the Government themselves referred to in their road safety strategy ''Tomorrow's Roads -Safer for Everyone''. The sentence reads:
''At present, the police can stop any driver but can only carry out a breath-test only if there has been a road traffic offence, an accident, or if they suspect that the driver has been drinking. We are looking at rationalising the law because the current practice is too restrictive. We want the police to have powers to breath-test people driving at locations where it is reasonable to assume an amount of drinking may have taken place.''
That is consistent with what is now called the intelligence-led model of policing. The question is whether our present law allows this intelligence-led policing. I know some police forces think it can be squeezed into the reasonable cause basis of being able to breath-test people, but others are a bit uneasy that they would be pushing the boat out too far. It has acquired great significance recently. Last week I mentioned that on the same day as the Second Reading
Column Number: 127
debate, the Secretary of State published his written statement about responses to his discussion note on graduated penalty points.
Also on the same day, the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Home Office and the Department for Transport published a new agreement; a commitment to a new road safety strategy within which the police made four commitments. The first is a highly visible police presence on the roads. Hooray to that. The second was a national police seat belt campaign, which is valuable. The third was the continued operation of the national safety camera programme, which I think is important.
The fourth commitment, crucially, is a national police drink and drug-driving campaign to ensure that people are deterred from those activities by a significantly increased risk of detection.
3.15 pm
At the moment, I am not convinced that we will suddenly start to reverse the fall in roadside breath tests every year unless we change who gets stopped and tested. I repeat my question to the Minister: does he think the present law allows for targeted breath testing, or did he intend, in his 2000 statement, to do something more that has not yet appeared in the Bill?
Mr. Jamieson: Clause 11 amends certain sections of the Road Traffic Act 1988. Section 6D deals with arrest; section 7 deals with the provision of specimens for analysis; section 8 concerns the choice of breath specimens; section 9 deals with protection for hospital patients; and section 10 relates to the detention of persons affected by alcohol or a drug.
Regarding the questions asked by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire, we will make the forms available for the Committee as soon as possible. They are available on the Home Office website, so if anyone wanted to have a look, particularly if they had been accused, they could scan through them there. The right hon. Gentleman asked about implementation. We hope that that will be as soon as possible, throughout the country, although type approval of the equipment is required first. As I was saying in reply to the hon. Member for Taunton, we would need to be satisfied that we had good equipment, that it was accurate and fit for the purpose, that it would give us results and that it would not be challenged in court. Once we have the type approval, the roll-out and use of the equipment is an operational matter for the police. It will not be for my Department or the Home Office to instruct them on their new power.
One of the main advantages of the proposals, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) said, is that they streamline the process for the police. If, on a busy night when they are out on patrol, they can curtail the time needed to take a drink-driver back to the station and get the evidence they need for a court appearance, so much the better. Then they can capture more drink-drivers, or people who have committed other offences. I hope that that is helpful to the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire.
Column Number: 128
My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford asked about random testing. Section 163 of the 1988 Act gives the police the power randomly to stop vehicles. That means that an officer in uniform can stop a car at any time, and talk to the driver or examine the vehicle. Section 6 of the same Act means that, having randomly stopped the vehicle, the constable can then administer the preliminary test. If the constable then has good reason to suspect that the person has been drinking and is under the influence of alcohol, he can apply the test. As hon. Members must know, where the person has been committing a moving traffic offence or there has been a collision, the test can be administered then as well.
The response from the police is that they are satisfied that their current powers enable them effectively to capture people who are obviously drunk and over the limit. There is one other thing about blanket random testing: the police operate in this country generally with a lot of good will from the public, and they do an excellent job, not just on road safety but on other issues as well. I would be concerned if there were widespread random testing, because even late at night there are many drivers who are perfectly law-abiding and have not been drinking. The attitudes against drink-driving in this country are very strong indeed. The overwhelming majority of people here do not drink and drive, and would not dream of doing so. That is not just a generational attitude—it applies to young people as well, and many of them are seriously responsible about drink-driving. The problem is the small minority who are not responsible. They are the ones who are breaking the law.
I would be reluctant to advocate stopping lots of good, law-abiding drivers. Firstly, because it is not a good use of police time—it takes a lot of time to stop people. Secondly, we should not be inconveniencing people who are going about their business lawfully. Thirdly, it could drive a wedge between the people and the police if drivers are constantly stopped. One young constituent of mine has a job that leads him to come home from his place of work at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, and he is stopped by the police every other night. He gets quite cross about that as he says, ''All I want to do is go home and get to bed, but they keep stopping me and inspecting my car''. He does smell of alcohol because he works in a bar, but he has not been drinking. In cases like that I am aware that stopping drivers could lead to bad feeling between the police and the people. The discretion that the police have at the moment is quite adequate. It is for the officer on the ground, in the street, to make those decisions. They have the power to stop somebody randomly, but they do not have the power to start giving the alcohol test—they can only do that with good reason.
| 
