FOI 22244-25 Drink driving

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

For clarity, this request relates specifically to drink driving offences under Section 5 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 (driving or attempting to drive with alcohol level above the prescribed limit).

If your force records drink driving offences under different offence codes, contravention codes, or internal classifications, please provide the equivalent data for offences relating to driving or attempting to drive over the prescribed alcohol limit.

Please exclude drug driving offences recorded under Section 4 and Section 5A of the Road Traffic Act 1988 where possible. If your recording system does not allow drink driving offences to be separated from drug driving offences, please provide the combined figure and state clearly that the data includes both drink and drug driving offences.

Please provide the following for each calendar month in 2022, 2023 and 2024:

1. The total number of drink driving arrests
2. The total number of roadside breath tests conducted
3. The total number of roadside breath tests where the driver was recorded as being over the legal alcohol limit
4. The highest evidential breath alcohol reading (µg per 100ml) recorded in that month

Response:

Custody Searched between 1st January 2022 & 31st December 2024 for all Custody Records whereby the reason for arrest was either:

In charge of motor vehicle - alcohol level above limit (recordable); Drive motor vehicle when alcohol level above limit (recordable); Attempt to drive motor vehicle - alcohol level above limit (recordable);

The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.