Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many deaths in the United Kingdom have resulted from drink driving in each year since 2010.

The Department for Transport only holds information on reported personal-injury accidents on public roads (including footways) in Great Britain, which became known to the police.

The table below gives the number of deaths in Great Britain in accidents involving at least one driver with illegal blood alcohol content in each year since 2010.

These figures are produced from breath tests carried out by the police following accidents and information from coroners in England and Wales and procurators fiscal in Scotland about drivers who died in accidents. Due to complexity of the information from post-mortems and accidents where at least one driver did not stop, there is a considerable uncertainty about precisely which accidents involved drivers who were over the drink drive limit. As a result, the number of deaths is an estimate and the exact figure is unknown.

The figures in the table provide the best estimate of deaths and the upper and lower confidence interval represent the range in which we are 95% confident the exact figure falls.

Years with overlapping confidence intervals do not have statistically significant differences in the number of deaths. Therefore the number of deaths has been broadly the same each year from 2010 onwards.

The figures for 2013 are provisional estimates. Final figures for 2013 will be released in August 2015 alongside a first estimate for 2014.