Pubs under threat from Labour’s drink-driving plans
Ministers want to cut alcohol limit in new blow that comes after tax rises
TONY DIVER, SZU PING CHAN, TOM HAYNES
Pubs face a new assault under Labour’s plans to cut the drink-driving limit.
Ministers are considering toughening the rules in England and Wales, and could align them with Scotland where one drink can put a driver over the limit.
Their proposal, to be announced on Wednesday, is the latest move by the Government to threaten pubs, following an increase in business rates, the rise in the minimum wage and the increase in employers’ National Insurance, which have brought some pubs to the brink of closure.
The new measure will particularly impact rural premises, which rely on customers driving.
The Telegraph is launching a campaign to save our pubs, calling on Labour to stop their assault on Britain’s locals and to cut tax and red tape.
On average, one pub closed each day in 2025 and almost 2,000 have closed for good over the past five years.
Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, said: “This is a death knell for country pubs across Britain. Labour has no connection to how real life works.”
The British Beer and Pub Association warned of the harm the move would cause to rural pubs in areas without public transport or reliable taxi services.
[…]
Labour’s new road safety strategy, to be published on Wednesday, includes plans to lower the drink drive limit from 80mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood, or 35 micrograms per 100ml of breath.
Scotland reduced its limit to 50mg of blood alcohol content in 2014 in an attempt to reduce road deaths. The same level is now under consideration by the Department for Transport.
After an initial fall when the tougher drinking limit came in, road deaths in Scotland have been rising again in the past four years and were up by 24 per cent in 2024, according to figures by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland.
The latest move against pubs will be proposed despite landlords being in open revolt after Rachel Reeves announced an overhaul of business rates in her November Budget.
A growing backlash over Labour’s attacks on pubs has resulted in MPs being barred from dozens of establishments across Britain, with Ms Reeves banned from her local in Pudsey, West Yorkshire.
The new rates will leave some businesses with tax bills tens of thousands of pounds higher from April, after Ms Reeves closed a relief scheme introduced in 2020, during the Covid pandemic.
At the same time, some village pubs face paying business rates for the first time under a revaluation of their rateable values announced after the Budget.
The Telegraph: continue reading
See Related Article Below
The Scottish Data Which Prove Labour’s Drink-Driving Law Won’t Cut Road Deaths
As part of a new road safety strategy, Labour is proposing cutting the drink-drive limit from 80 to 50 mg, matching the stricter Scottish limits. But data from Scotland since 2014 show no reduction in road deaths or collisions. Druin Burch has more in the Spectator.
Today, as part of a new road safety strategy, Labour is proposing cutting the drink-drive limit from 80 to 50 milligrams per hundred millilitres of blood, matching the stricter Scottish limits.
I have not had to peel the remains of mangled children and adults from cars and pavements, as many police officers and paramedics have. But as an A&E doctor I have heard their stories and looked after those they brought in who survived, sometimes only long enough to die as I tried to keep them alive. Questioning the Government’s plans isn’t dismissing these horrors but taking them seriously. Our responses need to be effective, not performative.
There have been multiple recommendations, nationally and internationally, to cut the drink-drive limit to Scottish levels. The European Commission told member states to do so from 2001. In 2021, two authors from the Institute of Alcohol Studies – dedicated to reducing alcohol-related harms and no friend to the industry – looked at the impact of the 2014 reduction in the Scottish drink-drive limits. Because the reduction took place nowhere else in the United Kingdom, it provided a unique opportunity to measure its impact separately from other potentially confounding influences – changes in technology, culture and other road safety regulations.
“Assembling several new data sources and using careful research designs,” said the resulting research paper, “we conclude that the reform had no effect on accident rates.” There was no effect on major crashes or minor collisions. Across all subgroups, the young and the old, men and women, day or night, weekend or in the working week, there were no benefits. “Taken together, our no-effect results defy pre-reform expectations as well as most of the existing medical evidence, which is predominantly correlational.”
The reduction in Scotland made no difference. Data predicted it would, but those data were poor quality, observational, vulnerable to confounding. The Scottish experience provided a rare natural experiment, a high-quality test of whether stricter drink-drive limits reduce crashes. They don’t – yet our Government now wants to roll out the policy nationwide. This is a Government run by announcement culture, with thoughtless policies churned out to sound virtuous in a press release. …
A Government wishing to tread lightly could stop policing the marginal habits of responsible adults and start fixing the systems failing them so badly. There are many ways in which our government could help improve our lives. Instead, they keep finding ways of making it worse.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Nigel Farage has said the move is a “death knell for country pubs across Britain”.
This is because we’ve got laws being designed by the Islington, North London bicycling classes. What about rural Britain? No-one cares of course, in fact many in Labour seem to hate rural Britain. The drink-drive thing is absolutely ridiculous. Wholly unnecessary. We’ve been where we’ve been since 1967, it’s worked pretty effectively. If you actually look at road casualty figures… we’re now incredibly safe on our roads. Much safer than France, way safer than Germany. We’ve actually reached a level on accidents beneath which it is almost impossible to go. Because there will always be human error of some kind.
Tory Transport Spokesman Greg Smith said:
This is supposed to be a road safety plan, but it reads like another chapter of Labour’s anti-driver playbook. Labour can’t seem to imagine a world where you can own a car without being punished for it. Road safety in rural Lincolnshire is not the same as road safety in central London. Yet Labour has produced a one-size-fits-nowhere strategy that ignores how people travel in different parts of the country.
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