4.00 am start and am picked up by car to get me to GMTV for a 6.12 appearance. Drink driving is on the up. Over the summer the police did a one month campaign and found that 1 in 10 drivers are driving over the limit and that about half the people the police pick up for suspicion of driving whilst having taken drugs and are therefore impaired are also nicked.

Seems to me that there is a bit of an issue going on. Breathaliser tests have decreased in the last nine years. Over the same period fatalities have increased. And not co-incidentally (in my view) traffic police have given way to cameras. Now cameras can nab you in a bus lane, in a yellow junction box and for speeding – but they can’t breathalise you. And I think that the high chance of not getting caught is beginning to make peoples’ fear of losing their license less – so they are beginning to take risks again. Combine that with the hot weather and the extension of licensing hours – and we obviously need to do some new thinking and take some new actions to damp down these figures once again.

The Government have been spending about £3 million on advertising – the shock ones that show you dreadful endings to young lives – but clearly they are not working. Shock wears off – so perhaps the ad agencies need to think how next best to challenge us on drink-driving.

Also, it may be time to look at the ‘allowance’ for drinking and bring it in line with most countries in Europe. At the moment we allow 80 milligrams of alcohol as opposed to 50 on the continent. For me it’s not so much the actuality of the level – but that it is not so easy to measure. It’s over a pint and over one glass of wine. Perhaps bringing it (and associated pub measures) in line with a level that is easier to understand and remember would help.

I would also like rather than just being delivered the new figures of one in ten drink drivers to have some drilling down into those statistics so that we know whether people are just over the limit – or whether they are now really drinking without a care.

We need to know what we are dealing with. The drink driving laws are what I regard as one of the all time successful changes in culture – from a time when no one gave a thought to how much they drank before they drove to making it socially completely unacceptable. It was done through a combination of legislation, tough enforcement, excellent penalties (losing license) and a major education campaign through TV. So if the statistics are changing – then we really need to make a move. I would have though the obvious starting place was to make sure no one feels safe about not getting caught – and accept that cameras don’t do the job on their own.