IN the Comment column (LET, January 6), your newspaper criticised Lancashire Constabulary for not providing all of the statistical information it wanted on the Christmas and New Year drink drive campaign.

You questioned whether the force has something to hide. The answer is no, but I will explain why only certain statistics were released.

This force has been participating in a national initiative and there was agreement at the highest level of the service about precisely what information should be released and when. This makes sense if we are to avoid an unhelpful confusion of information from different forces, which is likely to baffle and frustrate the public.

For this reason, Lancashire Constabulary will not buck the system by doing something outside that agreement. We defend the principle of a national approach. It is reasonable, however, to question whether the detail of our national agreement, about precisely which information should be made public, should be reviewed.

Any publicity campaign is about helping to inform and reassure people and to influence their behaviour and if we find evidence that we are failing to do that, we need a rethink. I am sure there will be a debate on this before the next campaign and that we may well make some changes as a service. As far as Lancashire is concerned, let me reassure you that there is no cynical attempt to twist the facts to justify a wasteful operation: we are always the first to question the value of activities and their cost.

Preventing death and injury is one of our priorities and the figures show that the ongoing combination of drink-drive education and enforcement is making a difference to driver behaviour.

We have now released more detailed information about a month-long county initiative, which indicates that drivers really are getting the message.

Whether we can maintain public support for our drink-drive enforcement is a question we had to ask ourselves, so we recently invited a university to carry out an independent survey of public opinion.

The researchers cannot yet provide a full analysis, but tell us that early indications are that the public strongly supports this kind of operation. When we have the full results, we will be happy to release them.

PAULINE CLARE, Chief Constable, Lancashire Constabulary.

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