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Call for drink driving warning on alcohol20 Jan 2012The Institute for Advanced Motoring (IAM) has called for drink driving warnings to be printed on the labels of alcohol-containing beverages. The alcohol industry has already agreed to provide health information on 80 per cent of alcohol labels in the UK by 2013 and the IAM believes that drink driving warnings should be included. According to DfT statistics, in 2009, a fifth of the motorists killed in crashes were over the legal limit. Drink driving killed 380 people in 2009, and seriously injured 1,490 others. There were more than 10,000 incidents involving drink drivers and over a thousand of these happened the morning after, between 7am and noon, underlining the fact that drivers may still be over the legal alcohol limit in the morning after drinking to excess the previous night. In 2010, one in seven road deaths involved drink drivers. 250 road deaths and 1,230 road casualties occurred when someone was over the drink drive limit. IAM chief executive Simon Best says: "We want to see clear drink driving warnings that are just as hard hitting as health warnings on cigarette labels. If the drinks industry softens the road safety and health messages on its labels then the case for a compulsory system of labelling would be compelling. The message to everyone is don’t drink and drive." Part of the problem is that the public are ill-informed about how much they can drink before driving while even those under the legal driving limit are still much more likely to crash than those that have had no alcohol before driving. The only safe choice, therefore, is to drink no alcohol at all before getting behind the wheel. We see no reason why a drink driving warning should not form part of the consumer advice provided within the health warnings printed on alcohol bottles as there is a need to raise public awareness on this issue. From a car insurance perspective, a drink driving conviction can increase the premium by 85%, an increase that continues for seven years. |
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