Lord Berkeley (Lab)

I thought that the noble Lord was going to tell us about the experience of driving tanks—I know he is a great expert on that—with or without the right alcohol limit, but he did not. I have listened very carefully to all the speeches on this group of amendments. They seem to have one thing in common, which is that it is a way of trying to mitigate the previous scaredom, if you like, of previous Governments to upsetting the motorists: “Let’s do the minimum, because we don’t want to upset the motorists”. That applies to the random breath tests and many other things. My noble friend Lady Hayter listed the various countries with the different blood alcohol limits. If you dig a bit further, you find that there are four European countries that have a zero-tolerance level, where you must not have any alcohol at all. They are the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. Many of us have visited these places; maybe their driving is safer and maybe it is not. Then there is of course the question of bikes. Should you be under the influence of 80 milligrams or 50 milligrams if you are riding a bike? I will not go into that one now; we have talked a lot about bikes today. However, many noble Lords have been fighting to get it down from 80 milligrams to 50 milligrams for many years, led by my noble friend Lady Hayter and the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and I have tried to help. We have all failed because it appears that Governments of whichever hue—the Labour Party, the Tories, or whatever—have been so frightened of the motorists’ reaction that they have refused to go forward with it. The evidence is uncontroversial now, and we should go for this. I favour a 50- milligram limit to start with, but—it is a big but after our discussions today—with much better enforcement and much better reduction in the number of different rules that have to be applied before anybody can be tested with a breathalyser. It has to be simple and, if people will be frightened by it, that, combined with a lower limit, will hopefully make the roads a great deal safer.