Question: How are you going to enforce higher penalties for fare evaders on the railways?

David Jamieson: That is a matter for the train operating companies. At the moment the £10 fine is being enforced by some of the train operating companies and it hasn’t been changed since 1994.

So what we are doing is just consulting with them as to what a new level of fine that would make sense in discouraging people to get on trains without having paid the fare beforehand and we think putting it to at least £20 makes sense.

Different companies operate in different ways. Some of them don’t operate the penalty because they collect the fares on the train.

A good example is the Gatwick Express. Because they collect the fares on the train and you can also pre-pay as well they couldn’t have the penalty system operating there. Because if you just went up to somebody who had just dived off the Gatwick Express and said “where’s your ticket” you couldn’t give them a fine and expect them to pay.

Question: How do you cope with free-riders who taken their chance that the inspector won’t be on the train?

David Jamieson: What we are doing is operating the system on those routes where they don’t have a regular guard collecting the fares. They operate at the level that they think is appropriate.

But where they do inspections, a bit like the buses, where the inspector comes on and checks occasionally, that is where they are operating the penalty system.

Question: How do you distinguish between genuine fare evaders and customers confused by the many and complicated different types of tickets?

David Jamieson: They should be pretty clear. Whenever you go on a train where you are expected to have a pre-paid ticket of some sort, it is usually pretty clear at the barriers and elsewhere when you have actually got to do that.

In some cases of course you have got to go through a barrier and show you have got a ticket. The other day when I got on a train I had to go through the barrier and demonstrate that I had paid by showing my ticket. There is no problem there. You can’t go through to the train without showing your ticket.

I think it is pretty clear. But that again is up to the train operators to make sure they have got clear systems and clear signing for their customers and I think generally they are. What is expected of you is pretty clear even before you get on the train.

Question: Are "alco-locks" deliverable in the short to medium term?

David Jamieson: The Canadians and the Swedes have already got them in operation. What we are doing is a pilot with 200 former offenders to look at how they would operate here.

But yes the technology is there. It is being used in other parts of the world. It is a matter of now how we can use this in this country. How it is going to operate with the people who might use it and how the courts would actually use at that stage, when people are getting near the end of their ban to getting back on the road again.

Question: Why aren’t convicted drink-drivers simply banned for life?

David Jamieson: Because the punishment has to be proportionate to the crime in all cases. There will be some people who will be virtually ban for life who are recidivists and some of them of course face prison sentences.

But somebody who has gone over the alcohol limit who may not have actually caused any damage to anyone else, but obviously may have put other people’s lives at risk, the court has to take an attitude, as with every aspect of our lives, of taking a proportionate action.

Question: But the freedom to drive is not a human right is it?

David Jamieson: No it is definitely not. With it comes a responsibility. When you have got you license it actually places upon you a large number of responsibilities and one is to drive in a way that is not going to put other people’s lives at risk.

But the law will distinguish between somebody who is perhaps careless, which is a low end of offence, to someone who is drink driving and runs away from the offence at the end of it. The courts then give them six years in prison for that, especially if you have killed somebody.

Question: Is it not quite a thin line between being careless and being the cause of a major accident.

David Jamieson: That is what the court has to decide. You have got to make the punishment proportionate to the actual crime.

Remember that the fines in this country are some of the biggest in the world for drink driving. So you are going to face the fine. You are certainly going to face a ban.

But what you could trade in at the end of you ban, when instead of going straight back on the road again, the court may then impose upon you this period of time when you have this alco-lock on your vehicle – that you have to pay for as well, so another burden to you – so that they can make sure that whenever you actually try and start your car that you are sober.

It is just another mechanism, if you like, of getting people back on the road but getting them back safely.

Question: Is penalising uninsured drivers simply penalising the poor who can’t afford to pay for road tax, insurance, petrol and MOTs?

David Jamieson: The vast majority of people who are not insuring and taxing are people who are usually on the verges of other criminality. Some of them are people who are just trying to get away with it.

What we are doing is tightening the net gradually on those people who just seem to think that they can get away without being insured and taxed.

Question: How are you going to do that?

David Jamieson: One of the things in the Greenaway recommendations and one of the things that we want to put through in our road safety bill is, firstly, getting the database of people who have got insurance much more contemporaneous.

So we have asked the insurance industry to make sure that the database is much more accurate than it currently is. Sometimes a broker sells the insurance and it takes a period of time before we get the insurance on to the database.

So we have said to the companies we must shorten that time and make sure the information is more accurate and where people have cancelled insurance that they get that information rapidly on to the database as well.

The second part is that the police at the moment don’t have all the powers we want them to have, to be able to connect up with the automatic number plate reader and whether they are taxed or not. We need some primary legislation which again we want to bring in in a road safety bill in the next session that would give the police more powers to use the information and the subset of the database as to who is insured and who isn’t.

Question: Aren’t 4x4s a greatest danger on the road today than uninsured drivers?

David Jamieson: I don’t know if they are a particular danger. We take action that is proportionate to any particular situation.

I don’t know if 4x4s are a particular danger on the road. It is the person behind the wheel and how they are driving that actually matters.

We are taking action against the uninsured people because we know that they tend to be people who are anything between six and 10 times more likely to have collisions because they are people who just don’t take driving on the roads seriously and safely.

Question: Are these silly season gimmicks or part of a wider transport strategy?

David Jamieson: We have been making announcements now for at least 12 months in terms of road safety.

I suppose some of them have become more obviously to the fore because there is less news about. So some of these stories are becoming more prominent than perhaps they would have been at a time when there is more things happening.

Question: Are you confident the government can deliver on its transport promises in time for the general election?

David Jamieson: Of course we are. Whenever the election is held we will make sure we will deliver on all the promises we have made.