Organisation: ACPO
Date uploaded: 14th August 2012
Date published/launched: July 2012
ACPO’s bi-annual drink and drug driving campaign brings together figures from all UK police forces and provides a national picture of drink and drug driving.
Figures released by ACPO show that of the 83,224 drivers during the month long campaign in June 2012, 4,857 (5.8%) tested positive, refused or failed a breath test. Although this is slight improvement on last year when 6% of those tested failed a breath test, it is not the significant drop that police officers want to see.
Additionally, there was a small fall in the number of under 25s found drink driving. This is good news as there had been an increase in the number of young offenders since 2010. However, there are still more under 25s drink driving than over 25s: 6.7% compared with 5.5%. Drivers under 25 make up just 6 million of the almost 45 million drivers in the UK.
Police used Field Impairment Tests to check for drivers under the influence of drugs and of those stopped on suspicion of drug driving, 22% were arrested.
Drinking or taking drugs and driving clearly increases the risk of being involved in a collision as 8.7% of people tested after a collision were found to be under influence compared with 5.2% for routine tests.
For more information contact:
ACPO Press Office
T: 020 7084 8946