UK drink and drug driving campaign results

The Association of Chief Police Officers' (ACPO) 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

The figures show that of the 83,224 drivers during the month long campaign in June, 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 has been a small fall in the number of under 25's 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 25’s drink driving than over 25’s: 6.7% compared with 5.5%. Drivers under 25 make up just six 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. Police officers are looking out for signs of drivers under the influence and they will target them with both breath tests and field impairment tests to make arrests of people who should not be on the road.

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.