Courts        

Background to Scheme

At the end of the 1980s the Government commissioned a review of the UK Road Traffic Law.  One of the major recommendations made by the Review Committee was for a long term experiment to provide alcohol awareness training for drink-drive offenders, with the aim of reducing the re-offend rate.

The Scheme was introduced on a trial basis in 1993 in 19 Courts across the UK.

The experiment ran for 6 years, during which the Department for Transport contracted the Transport Research Laboratory to capture data about those who were prosecuted for drink driving and to analyse the effectiveness of the training courses.

At the end of the experiment, a report was produced. Some of its main findings included:

• Only 3.4% of offenders attending a training course re-offended within 36 months.
• 9.6% of offenders not attending a course re-offended within the same period.

An additional 27% of those attending a course considered that, if they wished to be safe when driving, they should not drink anything at all.

Due to the success of the experiment, an Order in 1999 changed the trial to a permanent scheme available in all Courts throughout the UK.