The Government is coming under increasing pressure to reduce the drink drive limit.

Huddersfield-based road safety charity Brake has joined a wide range other groups including Brighouse-based Support and Care After Road Death and Injury calling for MPs to make a change.

The groups piling the pressure on include the Royal College of Practitioners, The Royal College of Emergency Medicine, College of Paramedics, the AA, the RAC Foundation, the Fire Brigades Union and the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety.

Brake says there is also strong public support for lowering the limit with the British Social Attitude Survey recently finding that three quarters of the public (77%) support lowering the drink driving limit.

The Government says drink driving ‘remains a priority’, but there has been no reduction in the number of drink driving deaths since 2010.

Every year drink driving causes 240 deaths and more than 8,000 casualties in the UK which costs £800m a year.

And 60% of those who are killed or injured are people other than the driver, such as passengers, pedestrians and cyclists.

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In England and Wales the drink-drive limit is set at 80mg alcohol/100ml blood and has been since 1965.

England and Wales have one of the highest drink drive limits in the world. It is greater than the rest of Europe (with the exception only of Malta), as well as Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

It is estimated that lowering our drink drive limit to 50mg alcohol/100ml blood would reduce drink driving deaths by at least 10%.

The Government of Malta recently announced plans to lower the drink drive limit to 50mg this month in a new National Alcohol Policy to reduce harm.

Scotland lowered its limit to 50mg in December 2014 and police figures showed a 12.5% decrease in drink-drive offences in the first nine months.

Northern Ireland is set to lower its drink driving limit before the end of 2016.

Brake’s director of communications and campaigns Gary Rae said: “Drink driving remains one of the biggest causes of devastating road crashes. Often young and inexperienced drivers and passengers are involved and frequently they are the tragic victims. We must continue to send a clear message to all drivers that drinking and driving is a lethal cocktail.

“It’s shocking to see how many crashes, many involving deaths and serious injuries, have involved men in their 20s. This call to action today is a useful stepping stone to a time when there is a zero alcohol limit.”

Katherine Brown, Director at the Institute of Alcohol Studies, said: “Recent decades have seen great improvements in road safety, but progress on drink driving has ground to a halt. With hundreds of lives lost each year, we can’t afford to let England and Wales fall behind our neighbours in road safety standards.

“It’s time the Government looked at the evidence and what other countries are doing to save lives and make roads safer. We need to make drink driving a thing of the past, and to do this we need a lower drink drive limit.”