Summary provisional statistics on breath alcohol screening tests in England and Wales, 2009

The Department for Transport has published provisional statistics on breath alcohol screening tests in England and Wales 2009, according to the arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.

This report provides experimental statistics on the results of roadside breath alcohol screening tests, administered by police forces in 2009, using new digital breath testing devices. They relate to drivers of road vehicles only. Results of breath alcohol screening tests can only be regarded as indicative of the level of alcohol present in a sample of breath and are not used to determine whether a driver was above or below the legal limit to drive.

The analysis is based on data supplied to the Department for Transport by 37 (out of 43) police forces, each of whom supplied at least one month of data relating to 2009 (around 535,000 tests in total).

The data for 2009 are not complete and do not cover England and Wales as a whole. Therefore in order to avoid producing potentially misleading statistics, the analysis in the note is limited to examining proportions and distributions within the data.