With the Road Safety Act of 1967 Parliament decreed that cars and alcohol were incompatible. But it took many years before drinking and driving became socially unacceptable.

Of course, there are still some idiots who indulge in such behaviour. Official statistics suggest that every day around 250 drivers fail a breath test and last year more than 90,000 people were convicted of drink driving. Nearly one in six road deaths involve drivers who are over the legal alcohol limited. And roughly 3,000 people are killed or seriously injured each year in drink drive collisions.

The fact is, you have to be singularly selfish and stupid to mix alcohol and automobiles. Do so, and it will inevitably take you longer to apply the brakes or steer away from danger than it would when sober. Were you travelling at 70mph, as scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory have recently demonstrated, your car would travel another 13 feet than it would under normal conditions before you could react sufficiently bring it to a stop.

So clearly there are good reasons why we should all behave responsibly. And consequently it is no surprise that we condemn others who do not.

However, if you are in the habit of holding conversations on your phone while driving along, beware of casting the first stone.

Even though driving and using a hand-held mobile phone was banned in 2003 the head of road safety at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, Kevin Clinton, thinks this was insufficient.

“Rospa,” Clinton points out, “has always said that the use of hands-free phone kits while driving should have been made illegal at the same time as handheld phones were.”

Significantly, according to research recently commissioned by esure car insurance, 71% of motorists think that using a mobile phone hands-free is indeed a distraction for the driver. Similarly, of those questioned by Direct Line insurance, no fewer than 52% would be in support of an outright ban on using mobile phones while driving.

There is little doubt that the scientists at the Transport Research Laboratory would agree. After all, they found driver reaction times to be some 30% slower when driving using a hands-free mobile phone than when driving whilst over the legal alcohol limit.

Effectively this means that holding a mobile conversation will, at 70mph, delay driver reactions sufficiently to result in the car travelling 26 feet further than it would when driven under ‘normal conditions’ – or twice the distance than when driven drunk!

Nor is it just the phone call that poses the danger. Previous research, cited by TRL in their study, has shown that drivers’ concentration levels are reduced for an average of 10 minutes after any conversation has ended.

In 2007, 2,986 motorists were prosecuted for failing to have proper control of their vehicle while being distracted by hands-free phone calls. But with 16 million motorists regularly making hands-free calls when driving, firmer action is likely to be required.

Even worse, nearly ten million drivers admit to reading text messages when driving. That’s almost a third of all drivers who are simply not looking where they are going.

The fact is, if people are not voluntarily prepared to turn their phones off when driving, then they should be required to do so by law.