Current status: Answered by Jim Wallace on 18 February 2003
To ask the Scottish Executive whether it will evaluate drink-driving rehabilitation programmes as a method of educating those found guilty of drink-driving.
The statutory scheme of drink-drive rehabilitation courses is a reserved matter. The Department for Transport, which administers the scheme, has commissioned research into the operation of these courses and their effectiveness in discouraging reoffending since the creation of a permanent scheme in January 2000. The research will cover Scotland and the Scottish Executive will have access to the results of that evaluation as soon as they are available. Monitoring of the pilot scheme, which ended in 1999, found that those offenders who had attended a course were between two and three times less likely to re-offend than those who had not.