Scotland’s drink driving hot-spots have been revealed as new figures show more than 20,000 motorists have been disqualified the offence or alcohol-related car offences, figures have revealed.
The postal area covering the North Lanarkshire town of Airdrie (ML6) had the highest number of bans, with 304 over the five years.
This was followed by the Livingston district (EH54) with 249 driving bans – the only Edinburgh postcode in the top 10. In joint second position was Motherwell, and the surrounding towns of Carfin, Cleland, Holytown, New Stevenston and Newarthill which come under the ML1 postal address.
According to motoring experts, the stigma that now surrounds drink-driving has only partly contributed to a 27 per cent fall in the number of drivers being subject to yearly motoring bans by the courts.
The number of drivers being ordered off the road for 12 months – the minimum ban for anyone convicted of the crime – fell by 27 per cent between 2011 and 2015 from 4,904 to 3,597.
Charities called for more to be done to completely eradicate the menace of drink-drivers, although Scotland now has the toughest drink-driving laws in the UK.
Statistics provided by the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) following a freedom of information request showed 21,573 drivers north of the Border have been disqualified since 2011 – an average of almost 12 a day.
Peter Rodger, head of driving advice at the Institute of Advanced Motoring, said: “You would have thought the message not to drink-drive would have got through by now, almost 50 years after the introduction of the breathalyser.”
He was reluctant to attribute the fall in figures down to changing public attitudes to the offence.
Mr Rodger added: “There are other issues. One of which will simply be whether there’s been the police availability to deal with it, or if other priorities mean they have been doing other things than patrolling at the times of day that would be relevant. There has to be the police presence.
“If police priorities have changed to respond to other events then you would expect that to reflect in the drink-drive conviction numbers as what you are measuring is how many people got caught, not how many people did it.”
He called for a combination of education, continued social pressure and enforcement to combat drink-driving.
Eight Scots motorists were disqualified for causing death where alcohol was a factor, while 154 individuals failed to give a breath specimen when instructed to do so by police.
One Glasgow postcode made the list of the top 10 districts with the highest number of bans: G72, covering Blantyre and Cambuslang, was in seventh position with 230 disqualifications.
Half of the postcode districts in the top 10 – ML6, ML1, ML3, ML5 and ML2 – were in the Motherwell area.
In December 2014 Scotland imposed a lower drink-driving limit of 50 milligrams of alcohol per 100ml of blood, down from the 80 milligrams in place in the rest of the UK.
But this does not seem to have had a significant initial impact on the figures, which showed a drop in alcohol-related disqualifications of just 6 per cent in the year after the change, down from 3,813 in 2014 to 3,597 in 2015.
A spokesman for road safety charity Brake said: “It is proven that drivers with 20-50mg of alcohol in their blood are three times more likely to die in a crash than those who have drunk none. That’s why Brake will continue to call on the police to pursue these criminal drivers, and for the courts to hand out severe sentences.”
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