Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (First sitting)
Tuesday 31st October 2017
(7 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 View all Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 31 October 2017 - (31 Oct 2017)
The Chair
Before we begin, I have a few preliminary announcements. Please switch any electronic devices off or to silent. Tea and coffee are not allowed during sittings, but there is an adequate supply of water. Today we will first consider the programme motion on the amendment paper. We will then consider a motion to enable the reporting of written evidence for publication and a motion to allow us to deliberate in private about our questions before the oral evidence session. In view of the time available, I hope we can take those matters formally, without debate. Time Witness Until no later than 10.30 am Automated Driving Insurers Group; TRL; Association of British Insurers Until no later than 11.00 am Unite; ITF Until no later than 11.25 am Robert Llewelyn, presenter, Fully Charged Until no later than 3.00 pm Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders; RAC Foundation; Petrol Retailers Association; Institute of the Motor Industry Until no later than 3.45 pm Quentin Willson, Journalist and TV presenter Until no later than 4.15 pm National Grid; UK Electrical Vehicle Supply Equipment Association; UK Power Network Until no later than 5.00 pm TRL; FiveAI
Ordered,
That—
(1) the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 31 October) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 31 October;
(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 2 November;
(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 14 November;
(d) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 16 November;
(2) the Committee shall hear oral evidence on Tuesday 31 October in accordance with the following Table:
TABLE
(3) proceedings on consideration of the Bill in Committee shall be taken in the following order: Clauses 1 to 16; Schedule; Clauses 17 to 19; new Clauses; new Schedules; remaining proceedings on the Bill;
(4) the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Thursday 16 November.—(Mr Hayes.)
The Chair
The deadline for amendments to be considered at the first line-by-line sitting of the Committee was the rise of the House yesterday, and the next deadline will be the rise of the House on Thursday for the Committee’s meeting a week today. [Interruption.] I have just been informed that the deadline will in fact be one week on Thursday.
Resolved,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Mr Hayes.)
The Chair
Copies of written evidence that the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room.
Resolved,
That, at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(Mr Hayes.)
The Chair
Q
David Williams: I am David Williams. I am technical director at AXA Insurance and chair of the Autonomous Driving Insurance Group.
Iwan Parry: I am Iwan Parry, the head of connected and autonomous vehicles at TRL, the Transport Research Laboratory.
Ben Howarth: I am Ben Howarth. I am senior policy advisor for motoring liability insurance at the Association of British Insurers.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Q
David Williams: I do not think they will become more complicated, because I think the information that should be made available from the autonomous vehicle will make it much easier to establish what has happened. If you think of the sensors that are involved in getting the vehicle around safely, there are traditional cameras, lidar, radar, ultrasound and all those sorts of things; that will give a much more complete picture than we currently have. A lot of insurance claims at the current time are based on different opinions with very little evidence to substantiate them. We still send people out to measure skid marks in the road, for instance; so we will be moving to a much clearer but more granular position. There will be a lot more data, so I suppose it will be more complex in that way, but I think, in terms of establishing who is responsible, things should be clearer.
Iwan Parry: I would add that it is quite important that we establish with these technologies that that capture of the data that David has described is a requirement of the vehicles. That really builds on the kinds of data that are captured by vehicles today but which are not necessarily available for investigators when it comes to investigating road traffic accidents, which could be very useful for in-depth investigations, in some cases. Therefore, as vehicles become more complex, with a greater ability to capture external data in the moments before a collision, we believe that it is very important that those vehicles are able to preserve that information and make it available to the appropriate and authorised investigators, in terms of understanding what has happened during that incident sequence.
Clive Efford
Q
Iwan Parry: It could do. There is a mechanism in the Bill, in terms of the list of vehicles that would be approved as an automated vehicle, and potentially part of qualifying for that list might be that a vehicle would fulfil certain required criteria.
Clive Efford
Q
David Williams: The capability is there. I think we are then drifting into data that motor manufacturers would not necessarily want to share with third parties. They would argue that maybe that driving information is something that they could use for different business purposes. There is currently a big debate in the telematics market about whether there will still be a future for separate telematics boxes being fitted in these vehicles to provide insurance and other solutions when the vehicles are being driven manually; but certainly there would be the capability to record that information.
Clive Efford
Q
Ben Howarth: My view on that would be that when the transition is from the driver to the car, the driver has to be responsible for what is happening to some degree throughout the whole of that transition phase. Once they have actually got confirmation that the car is in autonomous mode, that is the point when they are no longer responsible. In reverse, when the car is transitioning back to the driver, the same applies, but the driver is not responsible until they have taken full control of the vehicle. I think that is the easiest way to deal with that.
Clive Efford
Q
Ben Howarth: I do not know whether other people dispute that. That would need to be consulted on in the process of—
Clive Efford
Q
David Williams: We are involved in a number of the Government-backed consortia. There is Venturer in Bristol; the first trials that were carried out with the Venturer vehicles and in the simulator were with regard to the handover. There are two elements that need to be decided on. I agree with Ben that you should not make somebody responsible until they have fully taken control, whether that is the machine or a human being, but nobody has really worked through that. The other aspect is about making sure that the vehicle has controls that do not try to hand over too quickly. As insurers, one of the things we are very concerned about is that handover. People may be surprised at how long it actually takes a human who has been disengaged to get up to speed, so to speak, so that they are alert enough to be able to drive the vehicle safely. That is why it will take a while for European vehicle manufacturing regulations to catch up, but there will be regulations that require minimum periods and indicators and signalling during that handover phase, because that is essential for keeping these safe.
Ben Howarth: A key point is that while there are lots of data that other parties—police, investigators—might want, insurers are clear that we only want the data when a collision has occurred to confirm whether the car was in automated mode or not. I do not think we are looking to use the Bill as a way of grabbing loads and loads of data and tracking cars from A to B.
Clive Efford
Q
David Williams: No, that is the opposite of what the Bill is trying to achieve. There will be accidents on the roads where nobody is to blame, as there are now. If you can have an accident with a human driver where nobody is to blame, you can have that with an automated vehicle. For instance, a vehicle is driving carefully down a road but there is some black ice and it skids off and takes out a bus queue—I know that is a bit of a dramatic scenario—but everything has functioned perfectly. The Bill makes it clear that is an accident—injury has been caused by the autonomous vehicle—and it would be paid for by the insurer. In that circumstance there is unlikely to be any recovery from the motor manufacturer, but the whole point of the Bill is to give the general public the confidence that if somebody is injured, we do not have to worry about whether we are going to claim that the software was defective. If somebody is injured by an automated vehicle, there will be virtually a strict liability on the insurer and we will deal with that claim.
The Chair
I have had Graham Jones, Karl Turner, the Minister, Iain Stewart, Oliver Letwin and Craig Tracey indicate that they want to ask supplementary questions. Is there anybody else? I will take the Minister next.
The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)
Q
Ben Howarth: Yes, I think so. I think the definition that you have used in the Bill is clear. To me, it is pretty unambiguous that we are talking about cars that are being entirely driven themselves. I anticipate that there will be a pretty detailed consultation on how you actually draw up the list of vehicles and define what is and is not an automated vehicle. We are obviously very keen to be involved in that and to provide views. Within the industry and within the Association of British Insurers’ work, we have made a bit of progress in working out what we think the criteria for an automated car are, and those are views that we definitely want to feed in. So, yes.
Mr Hayes
Q
Ben Howarth: Yes, I think it is very clear. We have a very competitive market for insurance. If we see claims costs coming down, which much safer vehicles would definitely do, we would be looking at a similar effect on insurance premiums. We cannot say exactly what will happen until we have seen the cars in real life.
Mr Hayes
Q
Ben Howarth: Yes, it is very welcomed by the industry. I think it is very clear that the legislation and broadly the development of automated driving are something that insurers are genuinely enthusiastic about. In terms of the work we do in the ABI, it is one of the areas where we get the most engagement and interest from our members.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
Q
“are in the Secretary of State’s opinion designed or adapted to be capable, in at least some circumstances or situations, of safely driving themselves.”
The clause allows the Secretary of State to come up with a list of vehicles that he or she thinks are capable of being driven safely without being operated manually at all. The definition does not seem tight to me.
Ben Howarth: I would make two points on that. On the one hand, we would obviously want to see robust and good consultation on how that list is put together. We would want it to be transparent and we would want the opportunity as an industry to feed into that. The wording does have an advantage in that it clearly states “safely driving themselves”. One of our views is that we want a clear and unambiguous distinction between cars that are completely hands-off—maybe not for the whole of the journey, but for parts of the journey—versus cars where the manufacturer might be saying, “You can do a lot with the automated functions, but you need to be there hovering over the steering wheel as a backstop.” We do not want those things to be blurred, and the definition in the Bill does that.
If I can make one further point, being on the list is clear—there is a definition—but there will also be a role for insurers to play in thinking about, “We have a claims history and car A is brilliant and has a really good safety record, while car B might not be a very good functioning car, but it has got itself on to the list.” Insurers will want to take a view on that in terms of how they approach those vehicles in offering products.
Karl Turner
Q
Ben Howarth: I think the onus to do those software updates should definitely be on the manufacturer. They should ensure that the system works, and I think that links back to part 1. The Bill says that where a wilfully negligent person deliberately ignores what the manufacturer wants them to do and finds a way around the manufacturer’s systems and still takes the car on the road, it would be unreasonable to say that that person is still a victim. I think you need this protection in the Bill, but you also need robust measures to ensure that people cannot override the safety-critical updates.
I think “safety-critical” is the key phrase. That places a strong incentive on the manufacturer to say, “If the update is safety-critical, you have to ensure that the driver knows.” We have got to be absolutely clear that there is a distinction between “nice to have” upgrades, that perhaps involve a slight improvement in the maps functionality or something like that, and an upgrade where if you do not have it, the car is potentially unsafe and we have a problem.
Karl Turner
Q
Ben Howarth: I think what we have in the Bill is the right way. When these cars first come to road, most users/drivers will probably use the automated function for 10% or 20% of the journey. That is why we want to keep to a system with an all-in-one approach. The Government have described this as
“a rolling programme of regulatory reform”,
so if we really move to having cars without steering wheels or genuinely A-to-B autonomous cars we probably need to look again at what the right approach to insurance is, but I think the technology is a long way from that.
Karl Turner
Q
Ben Howarth: We think it definitely should apply. I know that there have been discussions between the MIB and Department officials about the correct way to do that, and it will be interesting to see how the Committee approaches it. My understanding is that the reason for not having the MIB scheme in the Bill is that it is not in the Road Traffic Act 1988 either, so the existing system is not directly in primary legislation. I think the MIB will be assured so long as the Government confirm that it is still the ultimate fund of last resort, which it definitely should be. It does not necessarily need to be in the Bill, but we would like absolute clarity on how it will work.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
Q
“updates that the insured person knows, or ought reasonably to know, are safety-critical.”
That strikes me as very woolly. I would be grateful for your opinion on where the balance should lie. I accept that if someone has wilfully not installed updates or overwritten them, or something, they become liable. However, if the manufacturer has sent through an update, but the person has not taken it to the garage or downloaded the software—or whatever—at what point do they become liable? I have an update waiting for my iPhone, but I have not got round to doing it. That is not safety-critical, but is there a parallel? Do we need a tighter definition than “ought reasonably to know”?
David Williams: It is interesting that you mention the iPhone, because that is exactly the debate that we had in our early discussions. Currently, for most things you buy, you have the right to refuse a software update. You are allowed not to get round to doing your iPhone update; you can continue to bypass it. Our view was that when we are talking about a tonne of metal travelling at high speed on the road, people should lose that right, because it would enable them to take risks with other people’s lives. We think the updates should be implemented straight away, because we see them as being improvements. As for whether they are safety-critical or not, it would be a damn sight easier if all updates had to be implemented immediately and the responsibility fell on the manufacturer, but then you are drifting into trying to impose something in UK legislation that some European territories and motor manufacturers have probably not really thought through yet.
The idea of saying that people have to install safety-critical updates immediately is something that we recommend. As for the detail of how it should be dealt with in the Bill, I have to plead ignorance, but the reason for pushing for it is that we honestly believe that if a manufacturer has updated the software, it is to make the vehicle perform better. These are not iPhones that can only annoy other people; these are vehicles that can kill other people. Those updates should be mandatory in whatever way we can make them so.
Iain Stewart
Q
David Williams: Tesla currently does them over the air.
Iain Stewart
Q
David Williams: I think the Bill is trying to allow for some delay, but a reasonable delay, and does not want people to deliberately and unnecessarily stall. If an update is coming through—if they have found a fatal flaw in the software that is likely to make your vehicle veer off the road—my view is that that vehicle should be immobile until the software update is implemented. The motor manufacturers would be able to build that into their technology and machines if they wanted to.
Iain Stewart
Q
David Williams: My understanding is that that sounds very good in principle, but how do you define that extent? Many upgrades might have a degree of safety- critical improvements in their nature. How would you define the seriousness of the upgrade?
Ben Howarth: Clause 4(6)(b) is a definition—that feels to me like it means that it is unsafe to use. If you started saying at this stage a car must be immobilised, we would potentially be legislating for things that we do not know the manufacturers will do in every circumstance. There might be times when the car could move. It might be safe to move it at 20 miles per hour or so—I am just speculating. Is it right to put it in the Bill at this stage? I would definitely say that it is something that needs to be carefully defined and thought about when you create the list of automated vehicles. I know we keep coming back to “the list is everything”, but I think the list is the mechanism by which many of the potential problems of the Bill will get solved.
Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
Q
Let me lay out an example and ask your view of the Bill. If somebody switches to manual from automated and is involved in an accident while in excess of 30 miles per hour. What happens next? How much of that data becomes available in the case that ensues? For instance, I presume that speed would be used, but what about the on-board cameras or anything else? How much of this data will be kept, retained and used from the functions of the vehicle for a case in which there is an accident with a driver in manual mode? Does the Bill provide a robust framework for accidents and insurance claims and what about road safety? Will it enhance road safety or are we stopping at legitimate information for insurance companies? Should the Bill also include data made available so that road safety is improved?
Iwan Parry: The basis of the question is around the availability of data. My technical background is in forensic accident investigation and in order to investigate accidents—to get to the root cause—we need to start at the before-accident period and understand as much as we can. We are limited today to things such as skid marks, as David referred to earlier, as the tools to reconstruct those accidents. The kinds of data that are potentially available from electronic vehicles increase the amount of data significantly. With the cameras, radar, lidar—light detection and ranging—and ultrasonic sensors we can get a very clear picture of what was going on around the vehicle at the time of an incident. When we look at the consequences of an incident, we can put the two together and have a very clear understanding from establishing liability and whether that indicates that the vehicle in some way behaved unreasonably—or that the driver, pedestrian or cyclist that it was interacting with behaved unreasonably given the context of the situation. That gives us the information that would allow us to make a determination on liability. I think that is critical to insurers, to police investigating such incidents and to road safety in the future.
To advance the future legislation on autonomous vehicles, we will need a method to understand what is going wrong in the real world. We will also need a method to use that information to improve our understanding of vehicle functioning in the real world and how that can be improved by manufacturers or by legislators applying the right tools to ensure that vehicle performance is improved over time.
Ben Howarth: If I could add the insurance perspective on that, for what we need to do for this Bill—to establish whether the car was in automated or manual mode—we need a fairly limited amount of data. You mentioned speed, but we do not necessarily need speed to do that. We just need to know whether it was in automated mode. There are potentially lots of other uses for car data for the police and for accident investigators. In a disputed claim with contradictory evidence in court, you could find it a lot easier to solve cases with data, but I would draw a distinction between the data that insurers need to make this Bill operational and the data from cars that would be useful to understand claims. That might be a valid concern for vehicles not covered by this Bill; as cars get more technically sophisticated with more assisted functions, you might want to understand more about how it works for any car. I think whether it is reasonable to ask for data is still best managed via a judge.
It is also important, if we want the data, that manufacturers record it. My understanding is that at the moment, if you hit a pedestrian in an accident, you will not necessarily trigger an airbag so the data that the car keeps on a rolling basis are not automatically recorded or stored and they would not be available. As part of the work to define an automated car, we need more clarity about what data are recorded and stored and about the process to ensure that the data are sent to the right people at the right time. An insurer is one party that would want some of the data.
Graham P. Jones
Q
David Williams: My view is that the Bill undoubtedly aids road safety because it will encourage the use of safer vehicles on the roads, but in terms of data, no—the Bill does not have a robust framework for provision, storage and transmission of those data. I think that is partly because of the stage that we are at. Some things are contentious and some are not. Data sharing is really contentious, whether because of general data protection regulation or because motor manufacturers are concerned about infringement of their intellectual property. We are very keen for there to be some clarity about the storage and transmission of data, the form that data are transmitted in so that they are useful, and the speed of transmission—there is no point us getting the data three months later. That is not in the Bill.
When we had the original discussions, we talked about data. We were still forming our opinions about what data would be required—as I say, that is very contentious. Our view was that it was better to support a Bill that would be part of a rolling programme of legislation and acknowledge that more needed to be done on that data piece than to delay it. We feel that delaying connected and autonomous vehicles hitting our roads would have a negative impact on road safety.
The Chair
Waiting to ask questions, I have Sir Oliver Letwin, Craig Tracey, Alan Brown, Edward Argar, Scott Mann and Sir Greg Knight. Is there anybody else? Clive Efford, you wish to come in with another?
The Chair
If the questioners and the panellists could be very pithy and pointed, that would be helpful.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
Q
David Williams: Yes.
Iwan Parry: I am not an insurance professional, so I will not answer that question.
Ben Howarth: Yes.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: They may have another motor policy that would cover them for driving other vehicles. That is common practice in the UK but not every policy provides that.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: There is a chance, I suppose, but I do not think that we would have a dual insurance situation, because the other insurance would insure the actions of that individual, whereas the autonomous policy would cover the actions of the autonomous vehicle. If the vehicle is operating autonomously, it is not being controlled by that driver and therefore they would have no liability.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: They may have, but it may not apply in the event of an accident.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: Transferred control of the vehicle to the—
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: I think so, because if the vehicle is operating autonomously, strict liability applies. If it is about to crash into a wall and he has flicked the vehicle into autonomous mode, but it has not had the opportunity to take control, we come back to one of the earlier questions—
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: So it has taken control.
Sir Oliver Letwin
It has taken control, so strict liability attaches to the—
David Williams: That is my take on it, but I would say that it is difficult for me to imagine circumstances where doing that would be inappropriate and where someone would still be able to switch a car into autonomous mode.
Iwan Parry: I think it is unlikely that an autonomous system engaged in that kind of transfer would accept control in a situation where it was then unable to avoid a high-risk scenario of some type, resulting in some kind of incident.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Williams: But we want the man in the street to know that if a vehicle is operating autonomously, compensation will be available. That is why there is strict liability. We might not like the particular scenario, if we can think of one that might happen, but I agree: my interpretation is that strict liability would apply.
Ben Howarth: The difference being that the driver might not have the same rights.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Q
David Williams: I am not aware of the planned timetable. There are two aspects: first, the vehicle has to get on the list and insurers then need to decide whether they will insure those vehicles. If, for some reason, a motor manufacturer decides they are either not capable of making or are not going to make any of that information available even if it ends up on the list, it will struggle to get insurance in the UK market.
There are lots of things that do need further discussion. These vehicles are not really going to be on the road for a number of years, so setting out the UK’s intention from a headline regulatory view and commenting that data need to be available while we work on that is one thing. I am not fussed as to whether or not it is an amendment, but it would be sad if the amendment took two years to get through because the motor manufacturers’ lobby blocked it.
Ben Howarth: I would also point out that a lot of the technical side will be taken up at a UN/ECO global level, so it might not be feasible to define it in the Bill and then have to change it. The more sensible route might be to see how the technical discussions go at global level and ensure that the way the list operates is robust, rather than put it in the Bill.
Iwan Parry: There are also a number of projects going on right now that will be helping insurers and safety experts to define what those kinds of criteria should be, and the data that should be retained. It would be worth giving those projects time to report on those requirements.
Ben Howarth: If you are interested, we have put a report out and defined what data we think we would want as part of this Bill for the insurance industry, and we have published that.
Alan Brown
Q
Ben Howarth: I think there is a distinction to be made in relation to the data that the insurers would need as a condition of this Bill. The industry would love more data, as that helps with pricing. However, it is appropriate to ask what the insurance company needs and then to regulate that in order to make this Bill work. I refer to insurance companies, but actually it concerns what information the claimant would need for the purposes of verifying whether or not they have the right to make a claim. That is a key distinction. The more data that the insurers can potentially get on a commercial basis the better, but we recognise that there have to be controls on that.
Iwan Parry: I would add to that: as mentioned earlier, there is a difference between the limited amount of information that an insurer might require to understand whether the vehicle was being controlled by the vehicle or controlled by a driver, and information that could be beneficial from a road safety point of view that could also act as evidence from a capture and perspective point of view. This information will inform future policy at governmental level and potentially at legislative level. That is a more detailed source of data, and it would also be of the type that would assist more detailed investigations of what went wrong if an automated vehicle had an accident.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Q
Ben Howarth: We probably do not yet know enough about getting the data from the car to the insurance industry. Some work has started to be done via the Motor Insurance Bureau: as well as being the guarantee fund, they do a lot of data-sharing for the industry. We are confident that once we have data from a car, then the process of getting it to the insurer and settling the claim will be efficient. We would want confirmation that we can get it from the vehicle, but we have already started discussing that with the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders. That is something that can definitely be achieved within the timescales required.
Craig Tracey
Q
Iwan Parry: That relates directly to the point I have just made about the detail of the data. In that scenario, in order to resolve the question you would require a more detailed amount of data than purely who was in charge of the vehicle. It would be a question of what the variety of contributory factors to that collision were, what the vehicle systems saw and what they did in response to what they saw, and whether that can be related back to the functionality of the piece of software that was due for install. You would require a much more detailed set of data to resolve that question.
Craig Tracey
Q
Ben Howarth: In that kind of event, yes, I would.
Edward Argar (Charnwood) (Con)
Q
David Williams: Lots of work has been done on this by insurance companies and by market consultants, and they predict substantial reductions in the total premium pot. A couple of statistics—we think that 93% or 94% of accidents are caused by human error. I have driven in these machines; they are already much better drivers than most human beings. When we look at things like automated emergency braking systems—that is just one component of what will be the autonomous vehicle of the future—we know that they reduce accidents by 15% and injuries by 18%. So even if they cannot prevent the accident completely and absolutely, because they are braking better and faster there are fewer injuries.
We see a substantial impact. There will probably be a slight increase initially because you will have more expensive gadgets strapped around the periphery of vehicles, but once we see a higher proportion of these vehicles on the road, consultants predict a 50%-plus reduction in the total motor premium market. From our perspective, we are planning in that regard. The good thing is that it will not happen overnight, and therefore as we see motor premiums reduce we can move our staff and our capital on to other lines of business.
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
Q
David Williams: One of the consortia we are involved with, Flourish, is looking at cyber-risks and also at mobility, at segments of society that currently feel cut off—people, who perhaps are disabled, living in a rural area and not able to get out and about. That is one of the reasons we want this Bill to go ahead and are keen to support it. Absolutely, it will support that.
In terms of volumes of cars on the road, there are numerous different models. Overall, the view is that there would be fewer vehicles, because this will enable car sharing on a scale that has not previously been seen, but in terms of number of miles covered, there are diverging opinions. One thing that might happen is that, because it will be as easy to get a car even if you do not own one as it is to get a train or similar, more people will move to transport on the road, which will drive up the number of miles. There are other views that there will be an integrated transport network, meaning that more people use public transport because they are much more able to link into it than they are now. I think the jury is out in that regard.
It will absolutely reduce premiums. The other aspect is that even when we have a mixed car park of manual and automated vehicles, because 50% of those vehicles will be safer, although the premiums on manual vehicles will decrease less, they will be less exposed and involved in fewer accidents, so overall that will have a positive impact from a premiums perspective, even on manual vehicles, as the number of automated vehicles increases.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Q
Ben Howarth: Yes.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
David Williams: No.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
Ben Howarth: We are covering the liabilities. I think they are already there in the Road Traffic Act 1988, on insurers, but it would be extending those existing liabilities to the vehicle. I do not think we are responsible for criminal offences such as speeding now. I think you would have to find another way of—
Sir Greg Knight
Q
Ben Howarth: You may need to look at whether or not there are additional criminal offences associated with automated cars. Certainly, this Bill does not compel insurers to pay speeding fines or any other. Ditto if an autonomous car parked illegally in a parking space. If it injured someone or damaged property, that would be the insurer’s responsibility; if it parked and received a parking fine, that would be the responsibility of the owner of the vehicle or another party. You may need to look at that in legislation, but I definitely do not think the Bill does that at the moment, and we would not support it if it did.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
David Williams: But in all honesty, if someone was on a smart motorway and had connected an autonomous vehicle, they would be more likely to notice the reduction in speed than you or I would. It is a hypothetical question. I think the point, from our perspective, is that the Bill does not compel insurers to pay these sorts of fines. Yes, there are some other legal aspects that need to be debated, but this is about extending the Road Traffic Act 1988 to provide protection in line with the RTA, not about other criminal offences.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
David Williams: I think the vehicle will be more likely to notice the reduction in speed than a manual driver.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
Iwan Parry: Yes.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
Iwan Parry: Yes. I think there should certainly be some clarity around the types of data that we would regard as beneficial and that could qualify for the list that will be established. The vehicle’s ability to make available those data would potentially be a qualification criterion.
Clive Efford
Q
Iwan Parry: This is very much part of the research and development that industry is doing right now, but the expectation on manufacturers providing access to an automated control system would be that, in that handover situation, the vehicle would be assessing the circumstances of the traffic and the road conditions surrounding it and would accept the handover only if it was able to respond appropriately to that traffic scenario.
Clive Efford
Q
Iwan Parry: The vehicle would be expected to be aware of what is around it at all times, and during a process—as it was described earlier—of handover, whereby the person or the vehicle that is in control at a particular time will remain in control until the other half of the equation is ready to assume control, that readiness to assume control can be determined only by sensing what is around it in the specific scenario that the vehicle is driving in, and accepting that it is now able to assume that control in a safe manner.
David Williams: This is a key point, because there will be many vehicles that can operate autonomously—initially, at least, only in certain environments, certain designed domains. For instance, I would imagine that the first ones that come to market will be able to operate on motorways and dual carriageways. [Interruption.] Exactly. Therefore, if you are travelling down Clapham High Street and you want to flick the vehicle into autonomous mode, it will not accept control.
Clive Efford
Q
David Williams: It is something we need to be aware of, which is why we asked Venturer to do handover first of all; I think guidance needs to be provided. I think it is less likely to be a safety risk and more likely to be a congestion risk, but the other aspect is that when we are doing these tests, we are deliberating doing on, off, on, off. In my vision of the future and, I think, the way motor manufacturers are designing vehicles, it will not be like that. It might be that you drive on the country roads because you enjoy that and then you hit the motorway and flick the vehicle into autonomous mode for the next couple of hours. But yes, we need to understand and provide appropriate training and guidance on the handover; that is something we still need to understand more about.
Alan Brown
Q
David Williams: We always worry about insurance premium tax increasing.
Mr Hayes
Q
David Williams: I think there will be, in the same way as there are many variations even to the Uber model now, many variations to autonomous vehicles. I think the advantage will be that you will not have to stick your hand out to stop a bus; the vehicle could potentially come into your drive and then go back out and continue its journey.
The Chair
Order. I am afraid that brings us to the end of the time allotted for the Committee to ask questions. I thank our witnesses on behalf of the Committee for their evidence and I also thank Members for their admirable self-control and brevity.
Examination of Witnesses
Diana Holland, Adrian Jones and Rob Johnston gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear evidence from Unite and ITF. We have until only 11 am for this session. Will the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?
Adrian Jones: I am Adrian Jones. I am Unite union’s national officer for road transport.
Diana Holland: I am Diana Holland, Unite’s assistant general secretary for transport.
Rob Johnston: I am Rob Johnston, assistant general secretary at the ITF.
Clive Efford
Q
Diana Holland: I think that is the crux of the matter. Obviously, while the Bill covers a very limited aspect of what the important role of these changes can mean, we are particularly concerned, as the previous discussion demonstrated, that the only concentration is assuming issues around private drivers, whereas the implications of this go into all modes of transport where automation will apply.
We are particularly concerned about the current methods of employment, particularly within certain parts of the road transport industry. That means that liability will be very unclear. There are all sorts of drivers who are accounted as owner-drivers but, actually, in the way in which the contract has been established they are workers to all intents and purposes.
We are very concerned, for example, about bogus self-employment contracts and leasing of vehicles: all those things that will mean that all kinds of people could end up being held liable when they should not be in those circumstances.
Clive Efford
Q
Diana Holland: We have two areas of concern. One is about issues that are not addressed by the Bill but have implications for the impact of driverless technology on the transport industry and on transport policy in our communities. I think there are problems and the House of Lords report is extremely clear about all the outlying issues: job losses, job creation, job shifts. We would want that to be part of the discussion that goes on around this.
We are very concerned about some of the wording, specifically in clause 3(2) and clause 4(4), (5) and (6) around the software engineers. All sorts of people could be encompassed within that or it could lead to knock-on effects on people who work in the transport industry or in software engineering. They could be implicated either by the employer concerned or by the policies of the insurance company. We would want that to be addressed.
Clive Efford
Q
Adrian Jones: It absolutely is. As was said in the previous session, when a driver is not concentrating on driving, their attention is elsewhere and the transition back to driving is a slower process. The agreed trials for platooning are part of the debate and should not be forgotten. If you have three vehicles in a platoon, you have a driver in the front vehicle that is controlling the other two vehicles, what are the other two drivers doing? When they come to the end of the motorway or road where the platoon is taking place, what do they then do?
We also have the concern raised in this very room about 18 months ago. The report from AXA suggested over £5 billion a year savings in labour costs, due to the introduction of automated vehicles. That clearly says to me that there is either a downgrading or lack of recognition of professional drivers who are carrying freight, passengers or anything else. I think there is a real concern that the Bill does not cover any of those aspects at all. If it is not covered in this Bill, it needs to be covered somewhere.
Mr Hayes
Q
On the specific point about job growth and job shift—you made a very balanced point about how some jobs will change, some will grow and some will shift—I want to come back to the issue raised by previous witnesses about people who currently cannot or do not drive. In rural areas, for example, in many places in Cornwall, Lincolnshire, Dorset and similar places, half the parishes do not have access to public transport. Can you imagine a future where autonomous vehicles will fill that void and provide a link to public transport, perhaps buses, trains and so on, and therefore boost the use of that transport for people who currently cannot get there. They will have access to autonomous vehicles because they are straightforward things to drive.
Diana Holland: Cards on the table: Unite is not opposed to technological advances, autonomous vehicles or anything in this area. It is about how it is done, the basis on which it is done and making sure that safety is absolutely critical. We are slightly concerned about the current moves. We believe that risk-based health and safety management needs to be properly built into this and we are slightly concerned that that is not recognised. We are not opposed to this in any way—it provides all sorts of opportunities—but because the overall approach is about private individualised driving rather than about the implications for the whole road transport industry of passengers, as Adrian was saying, with road haulage and taxis, it is also going to operate on a marine basis, in agriculture and all those other things. The concentration on private vehicles is going to advance this in such a way that I think there is a danger that it skews the potential for developments by concentrating on one aspect to the exclusion of the others. Does Rob want to mention your wider point about the commissioners?
Rob Johnston: To pick up on a couple of points, I think some of the challenges are about the definition of automation, which is at the root. We work with a number of global institutions, employers’ bodies and manufacturers. We have developed a framework of five layers of automation. When you look at what we are discussing, at least three or four of those layers need to be included. On the point just made about people who cannot drive potentially being able to drive, there is also a question about the definition of the amount of automation needed to give them that mobility. It is very difficult not to consider the whole piece. In the end, it will not be a journey from where we are today to suddenly having fully automated vehicles. It will be a process as technology slowly comes through. In particular, platooning, which is one of the areas that we are likely to see in a relatively short time period, would not be covered under the Bill in its current format.
Mr Hayes
Q
Diana Holland: Absolutely. We believe that representatives of the workforce need to be part of that discussion but, as trade unions, we are often not included in those kinds of debates. We have discussions with employers where we have recognition, but plenty of people operate in the industry and there are areas where our voices are not heard. We think it is essential that they are.
Karl Turner
Q
Diana Holland: I think it is absolutely essential that there is the transport skills infrastructure body that exists at the moment. I was looking at its terms of reference—
Karl Turner
I am grateful that the Minister is nodding very enthusiastically.
Mr Hayes
It is a good point.
Diana Holland: I was quite concerned when I looked at those terms. Although there is some implication about developments in technology, it seemed that we would need to look at the way it is worded to ensure that it properly reflects this. Otherwise, the Bill will not provide the opportunities that it needs to. So yes, that is a really important point.
Clive Efford
Q
Rob Johnston: There is a definition that the ITF and a number of organisations such as the European Automobile Manufacturers Association and the International Transport Forum at the OECD have worked to establish. It sets out five layers of automation. We believe that will be a useful reference point for looking at how to define what automation really means. In those five layers are different degrees of automation. The previous evidence alluded to that in some ways.
Clive Efford
Q
Rob Johnston: Yes, absolutely.
Clive Efford
Q
Rob Johnston: No, we believe that the Bill should be expanded to cover those five areas. If you look at technological development, it is likely that those layers will come to fruition in their current format.
Clive Efford
Q
Rob Johnston: Yes, it would. The layers run from driver assistance at the lowest level to full automation at the highest level, and everything in between.
Clive Efford
Q
Rob Johnston: I think that there is a question, which the Bill tries to deal with, on regulation. In order to accept the fully automated vehicle, you would have to accept a number of criteria around the algorithms that would do that, and they pose some questions. Essentially, the vehicle would need to be able to make choices between certain decisions. For example, if the vehicle was involved in an accident or there was a crash, it would need to have an algorithm that would define which course of action it took. I think that area really needs further regulation. In Germany, for example, they have established a body to deal with that: High-Tech Strategy. In September 2017, they came up with some guidance on how they believe these algorithms should be programmed, and that is a useful reference point.
The Chair
I have Scott Mann and the Minister. Does anybody else want to ask this particular panel a question?
Scott Mann
Q
Diana Holland: On the face of it—
Scott Mann
Just a simple yes or no.
Diana Holland: The potential is there, but it is not automatic unless a range of other things are followed up at the same time. It would be fantastic to find ways of developing this so that there is social inclusion for both rural areas and for disabled people, who are currently denied opportunities, but it has to be part of an overall approach to an integrated transport policy. Otherwise there is a danger that we just end up replicating congestion of one kind with another, with different insurance. However, there is a way of using this to develop a whole range of things, including much broader social inclusion.
Rob Johnston: I would add, as I did earlier, that if we are providing transport mechanisms, whatever they look like, for individuals who cannot drive for whatever reason, we need to provide a transport mechanism that allows the transport method to make decisions for them. That needs to be regulated and we need to be confident that the decisions being made by that vehicle, whatever type it is, are the right ones. That is determined by the algorithms and software behind it, so we need to have confidence that those are right. That is because you could potentially take vulnerable people and put them into a vehicle they are not in control of.
Graham P. Jones
Q
Diana Holland: Again, it does not have to have any impact on employment in terms of the two relatively minor areas that it could be argued that it covers; but the potential is there to enable a wholesale change to a different method, and ultimately saying that the professional driver no longer has a role. There are extremes in approaching this. We would say that it does not have to do away with employment, but plenty of estimates have shown that if it is introduced in one way, that is the effect it will have.
Our immediate concerns regarding the phrasing of the Bill are on the impact on those people currently employed, or under a range of contracts, and responsible for a vehicle, who would find themselves potentially liable in a way that we hope is not the intention. We really think that needs to be looked at to ensure that it does not encompass all kinds of people who we do not think should be liable in those circumstances. There are specific concerns around taxi drivers who own their own vehicles. There are issues around road haulage, where certain people are required to establish themselves as a limited company or to be self-employed to have jobs, but the definition bears questions. We need to ensure that we are not extending liability here beyond where it ought to be, when the operation is run and owned by a third party.
Rob Johnston: If I can briefly add to that answer, KPMG produced a report that said there are potentially 25,000 additional jobs directly working in the automation industry by 2030. A potential 320,000 jobs that could be created, but there is a caveat to that: Government policy is needed to address the growing skills gap, otherwise there is a risk of losing more than £50 billion in GDP per annum. Those are statistics provided by the transport systems Catapult.
Mr Hayes
Q
Adrian Jones: Yes, I would certainly say that we would welcome the opportunity. While the date for roads full of fully automated vehicles is an unknown, as is the impact, our members already have concerns. In manufacturing, the apprentices needed are not engineering apprentices in the traditional sense; they are software engineer apprentices. In road transport, we have fitters and engineers who are up to their elbows in grease, but in just a few years’ time they will be up to their elbows in keyboards, iPads and screens, which is a completely different skillset.
We also need to recognise that there is concern about skills. As you know, Minister, there is a widespread acknowledgement of a driver shortage in the UK. You already know my views on that. Our members already have concerns that the technology is being used as a smokescreen in effect to say, “We can use this technology to address that skills shortage”, but it will not do that, because employers will see it as a way of reducing cost, rather than filling the skills gap.
One expert that I heard on the venerable Radio 4 was asked about the job shift of a bus driver when that bus was fully automated. The expert said, “Jobs will be created. There may be a café on the bus and they could work in the café.” That is not comparable work. Yes, it is a job, but going from a skilled position to working in a café—no disrespect to any café workers—is not maintaining a standard of living or the same income to that family or the Treasury. There has to be a real debate now, not only on the future, but on the impact that new technologies are having on the transport industry and workers today.
Mr Hayes
Q
Diana Holland: I think the approach we see all too often is the race to the bottom that means that even those employers that want to invest are forced to undercut in order to win contracts. There is an opportunity here for Government to say that nobody can undercut on the basis of the standards we think should be set and operating in this industry. If we are approaching skill levels in that positive way, that can be extremely helpful, because it means we are saying that people are recognised for the skills they have, and having those skills will mean we get the kind of industry we want.
Clive Efford
Q
Adrian Jones: I am not sure if it would be included in this Bill. There are already regulations in force through the Traffic Commissioners’ office for operators who infringe on maintenance, for example. The key, for this Bill, is how the driver would know whether or not that vehicle is fit. At the moment, a driver is expected to carry out a daily check to ensure that the mechanical aspects of the vehicle are fit for road use. How can they check that the software has been updated appropriately, and who will be held responsible if it is not? The Bill does not cover that, and it would be helpful, certainly for drivers and for the confidence of other road users, if, when I see an automated vehicle on the road, I know that it has been properly updated and the vehicle has a professional driver or worker who has ensured that the updates have been made.
The Chair
If there are no further questions, I will move on. I thank the witnesses for their evidence.
Examination of Witness
Robert Llewellyn gave evidence.
The Chair
We will now hear oral evidence from Robert Llewellyn. We have until 11.25 am for this session. Can you introduce yourself for the record?
Robert Llewellyn: Hello. My name is Robert Llewellyn; I am a writer, TV presenter and electric vehicle driver.
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
Q
Robert Llewellyn: It starts to go towards that. I am doing many public appearances to discuss the impact of electric vehicles. It is effectively a disruptive technology, in the same way as cell phones and the internet. It has elements of those disruptive aspects, which are never all positive. There are some positives, but there are definitely some negatives. One of the things that it highlights is the ownership model. That is certainly something that motor manufacturers are very focused on: the way we use cars at the moment.
It is the 90:90 dilemma; I have never heard anyone dispute that. At the moment, 90% of the cars we own are idle 90% of the time. When you look at it from that point of view, any other business or industry that kept 90% of its assets idle for 90% of the time would not be in business. It is a really difficult challenge, and I do not have an answer. One of the answers that is emerging, as you have just been hearing, is autonomous vehicles. There are so many complexities, as you have listed wonderfully in the Bill so far. When I started to read it, I got a bit of a fuzzy brain, but that is the actor side of me; it is not an enormous intellect.
The challenges that it raises are fascinating. I fuel my own cars with my own fuel, which I make in my house. That has never been possible before. It is conceivable that, if I lived in the right part of the world, I could have drilled down, extracted oil, built a small refinery and filled my car, but that is pushing it a bit. This technology allows you to do that, although not all year round and not 100% of the time. How do you legislate for that? How do you tax that fuel? All those things are thrown up in the air. It feels a bit wild west at the moment.
That is one aspect of it. The other aspect is the charging infrastructure. Anyone who has an electric car will talk to you about it for a year, because it is such an emerging area. When I first started driving electric cars in 2010, there was one rapid charger in the country. That belonged to Mitsubishi in Cirencester and you had to arrange to go and visit it, so it was like a day out to go down to Cirencester and use a rapid charger. For 90% of the time it did not work; all the instructions were in Japanese; and no one understood Japanese at Mitsubishi, so it was not very reliable.
However, now, if you are stupid enough—I have done it in the winter—you can drive from London to Edinburgh in a Nissan Leaf. It takes a long time, it is a miserable trip, and it is quicker on the train, but it can be done. I have driven all over the country in various electric cars, now relatively easily, so there has been a dramatic change in the infrastructure, but there are very few electric cars on the road. If you doubled the numbers overnight, there would be issues with that. I think 40% of the people in this country do not have somewhere off the street to park their car, so where do they charge them? I will not go on too long.
Stephen Kerr
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Sorry, yes, that was your question. There is one crucial thing that I think could be addressed. It has been addressed in other countries. Ireland and California are two places that I know about where there is one system for paying for electricity. Everyone who uses an electric car is happy to pay for the electricity, but the system is so complex. I could get the collection of cards out of my wallet that I need to be able to use all the chargers, and very often I do not have the specific card for that charger. In Ireland there is one system, an app that you have, and you can use any charger. It is operated by many different companies. They all get paid for it, but you just have one thing. A combination of either that or touch to pay should be addressed.
You can buy a bag of crisps with touch to pay, but you cannot buy electricity from a charger. I know there are complexities and legal difficulties and expense, but that would really make a huge difference. The most common complaint I hear is, “I haven’t got a wallet big enough to hold all the cards.” And you need membership and subscriptions. All that needs to go so that you literally go up to a charger, pay for the electricity you are using and move on. You do not have to join a club to use a Shell petrol pump. You just pay for it. That is a really essential thing.
Karl Turner
Q
Robert Llewellyn: That is a very good system by Ubitricity, a German company. My primary enthusiasm about it is that it is incredibly easy to use. You drive up to it and plug your wire in. The wire has a box that communicates and tells the company how much electricity you use. You plug the other end into your car and it starts charging. You do nothing. We need that frictionless ability to do that.
I cannot remember the figures, but there are many hundreds of thousands of suitable lampposts. One of the aspects of the technological change we are seeing is when a lamppost is converted to LED lights. It has extra juice—electricity—that you can take off it without blowing anything up. It does not need any other infrastructure changes. It is a very simple system. It requires lampposts that are on the kerb side of a pavement, which not all lampposts are, but there are certainly hundreds of thousands of them. They have fitted a great deal of them and they have been very popular.
Karl Turner
Q
Robert Llewellyn: It is in the hundreds rather than thousands.
Karl Turner
Q
Robert Llewellyn: That would be ideal. One of the other problems is that the technology is changing so fast. I recently drove over a strip of road just outside Paris that has an induction-charging strip set in it. I do not think that is going to happen, because I cannot imagine the cost of putting that in the M1—it would be in the billions—but these induction plates for static charging, so when you are parked the car starts charging, are quite common now. That technology is getting cheaper.
It is really difficult—I would feel nervous suggesting that anybody invest an enormous amount. There have been failures in public-invested charging points: they are in the wrong place, they break down, they are not maintained or they are not run by the company that set them up. There have been plenty of examples of that. This is a rapidly emerging technology that keeps changing. Take even the wire you use. Finally, a bit like phones, there is a standardised type 2 connector that goes in every socket and goes in every car, but even that was a mystery a while ago. I would have a certain reluctance in saying, “Yes. Make all councils install thousands of chargers,” because they might be the wrong ones in the wrong place.
An organic development is happening with private companies, including supermarkets, that are starting to put them in car parks. Shell is now putting rapid chargers in its forecourts. It is happening, but quite slowly. I think it is probably chicken and egging like that—so there are more cars, then more chargers, then more cars, then more chargers. I would not know how to suggest where to put them.
Karl Turner
Q
Robert Llewellyn: I think that is a really good idea. If there is one group of fuel suppliers that could probably afford it without too much stress, it is the garage chains. They seem quite keen to do it. I think they can sense a change in public attitudes, which is why Shell has gone ahead and has done what it is doing. I know BP is doing the same. I do not know about any other companies, but it makes sense. All I would beg them to do is to put in nice chairs, wi-fi and reasonable coffee, because you tend to be in the garage a bit longer with an electric car than you are with a petrol car.
The Chair
Before I call the Minister, I have him, Graham Jones, Iain Stewart, Matt Western, Scott Mann and Matt Rodda indicating that they wish to ask questions. Are there any more? No. Well, you can do the maths as well as I can. Will Members be as brief as possible with their questions? And Robert, we really enjoy your eloquence and insight, but if you could be as pithy as possible in responding, that would be helpful.
Mr Hayes
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Yes, I think so—I am trying to be pithy.
Mr Hayes
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Yes, very much so. That has certainly been discussed a lot. If nothing else, like at a garage forecourt, if a row of charging points are under a canopy—say, at a motorway services or at a garage forecourt—with a specific kind of colouring to attract you to it, that would be nice. I do not know whether you can legislate for that, but it would be a great benefit so that you are not standing in the rain when you plug your car in.
Graham P. Jones
Q
I want to ask a particular question at the end about vehicle variations. Does the Bill accommodate what we will see in the future? I believe we will see different types of vehicle variation, because there will be electric vehicles instead of just the four-seater saloon car.
Robert Llewellyn: There are three things that would be wonderful. I am definitely not an expert, but when you have seen this you can see how popular it is: community electric car sharing/ownership/use. When those little systems organised by local communities appear, they are very popular with the local community. I have seen this in small towns rather than big cities.
Graham P. Jones
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Almost, yes. Also, they would have a dedicated place where you would park and charge them, so you would remove that problem. There are a lot of benefits to that.
The thing I have not seen in the Bill, which is a vitally important part of this, is vehicle-to-grid technology, which is appearing rapidly. It has an enormous impact, potentially, not on vehicles but on the grid. Say there were 3 million electric cars plugged in overnight, that would be a staggering amount of electricity—a very large power station’s worth of stored energy. You only need take a small amount from each vehicle. That technology is available now, not much in this country but it is certainly being used. I have been—I am trying to keep this pithy—to an office in Tokyo that is run by 100 Nissan Leafs that are plugged in outside. They do not use electricity from anywhere else. Those cars are discharging and charging all day, with a guaranteed amount for the owner to get home at night. So that technology already exists.
On fast charging, from my experience of driving many hundreds of thousands of miles in electric cars, slow charging is really good. Destination charging is really good. When you go to a car park and you are there for two hours topping up, it is not rapid charging, not “Gotta fill it in 10 seconds”. That, in a way, is a petrol or diesel mentality: “I’m driving a really long way. I need to fill it really fast”. You do do that, but way less than you might expect—way less. I use a rapid charger 15 or 20 times a year.
But if I can go to a car park where I can just plug the car in while I am in a meeting, or have gone to the movies or to a restaurant, and I add 20, 30 or 40 miles, that is an enormous benefit. Having more places where you can do that, more car parks with chargers fitted—that you ping your card on to pay for the electricity—would be a fantastic change. Those are emerging, and every time I can use one it is an enormous benefit. Two or three hours gives you 20 or 30 miles. You think, “That’s not very much”—well, it is 20 or 30 miles.
Iain Stewart
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Absolutely from legislation, yes. The system in California, which I am more familiar with, was chaotic. I do not know quite what happened in Ireland, but it was catastrophic. It was a simple bit of Government legislation from the Californian state legislature that insisted that there was one system, that you could use all public chargers. I believe it is a dongle rather than an app. That might have changed—I have not been there for a while—but it certainly was that.
Iain Stewart
Q
Robert Llewellyn: That would be an amazing change, and I think it would ease in a lot of people who have not adopted electric cars: “How do I charge it?” “You just walk up there and it charges.” That would be a big change.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q
Robert Llewellyn: I was very pleased when I heard that announcement. Technology might overtake it. There is a strong argument for that among the evangelical electric vehicle users, from whom I try to stand one step back and be a little more objective. But it is such a hard thing to do. I have seen so many graphs to describe the uptake of new technologies and how this will be what happens with electric vehicles—the S-curve of adoption.
Our emotional relationship with cars is really complicated. It is deeper than our emotional relationship was with landline telephones or how television is viewed—all those things. It is more complex than that; I do not think it is quite as simple. I think you could be more ambitious. You could go with 2030, the technology is advancing so much.
The simple fact is that the car I have had the longest—a Nissan Leaf—has a 24kWh battery. There is now the new Nissan Leaf and the battery pack is exactly the same size and it is a 40kWh battery. That more than doubles the range of my very battered dirty old Nissan Leaf that I drove to the train station today. Sorry, no more piffle.
Scott Mann
Q
Robert Llewellyn: There is a whole other area of fascinating stuff going on with micro-grids and local community-owned generation. That is something that I am involved with in my village. I think it is actually in many ways easier to have an electric vehicle in a rural area—I live in one—because you have generally got, even if it is a muddy drive or field entrance, somewhere you can park the car off the road. Far more people in a rural area have that ability.
You also generally have a bit more space to install solar panels or wind turbines. There is certainly a lot of that activity happening on a community level, of people generating their own power—they own the assets that do that—and they also install electric car chargers. A farmer local to me who is putting 20kW of solar on his barn roof wants to open a café with car chargers. You would have to drive miles to go there—I do not know why anyone would—though he has some nice cows.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Q
Robert Llewellyn: I feel more confident in answering the second part. When people do install destination chargers—the common term for it—they all notice an increase in time spent by individual customers, because they are there a bit longer, and repeat visitors. Convincing supermarkets that, if they put chargers in their car parks, they will get more customers is the argument that I always try to use.
Certainly, hotels and restaurants have noticed a marked increase of a specific type of customer, particularly if it is a high-end electric vehicle. If they put those chargers in, they appear on the map on the satnav and they get more business like that. That is an argument. I do not know whether you could legislate for that but that is certainly an argument in favour of doing it. As more electric vehicles appear, I feel that will kind of roll itself out in a way.
Matt Rodda
Q
Robert Llewellyn: I would hope that there would be. It would be wonderful if there were encouragements and nudging pressure to say, “When you build this new supermarket with a car park, can you put in 40 car chargers? Not two or four down the far end but to have one whole side for electrical vehicle charging.” It is not that expensive to do low-cost top-up charges; that is not a big expense.
Alan Brown
Q
Robert Llewellyn: I am very uncomfortable about pressuring people in that sense. We should encourage them, certainly, but not pressure them, because of the result of the misinformation that we all suffered from. I had a diesel car, as did a lot of people. I think that is a really difficult area. I feel very unqualified to know how to do that. I work on encouragement and enthusiasm; I would not know how to instigate legislation that would insist on people buying electric cars.
Alan Brown
Q
Robert Llewellyn: Yes—incentivise, certainly.
The Chair
If there are no further questions from Members, I thank the witness for his evidence.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Andrew Stephenson.)
Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Second sitting)
Tuesday 31st October 2017
(7 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 View all Automated and Electric Vehicles Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 31 October 2017 - (31 Oct 2017)
The Chair
Welcome to our afternoon session. We will now hear oral evidence from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, the RAC Foundation, the Petrol Retailers Association and the Institute of the Motor Industry. We have until 3 pm, when there may be votes. Would the witnesses please introduce themselves for the record?
Steve Nash: I am Steve Nash, chief executive of the Institute of the Motor Industry.
Brian Madderson: I am Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association, which is part of the Retail Motor Industry Federation.
Steve Gooding: I am Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation.
David Wong: I am David Wong, senior technology and innovation manager of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
Q
Steve Nash: I will kick off, if you like. Right now, electric vehicles can cost anything up to 50% more to insure than comparable vehicles that are not electric. There are couple of reasons for that. An element of that is the cost of the vehicle, but a large part of it is the relative lack of skilled people to work on them. The insurers, naturally, load the premium because they expect to pay a higher cost to get the vehicles repaired, but provided the right mechanisms are in place to ensure a competitive market to service and maintain those cars, there is no reason they should be more expensive. In fact, if you take it to its logical conclusion, with sufficient fully autonomous cars on the road, accidents should go down.
Steve Gooding: May I echo that? It is a question of penetration—the number of autonomous vehicles out there. In the transition, when there are still a lot of conventional vehicles, someone in a driverless car might be a lot safer but will still face the risk of someone colliding with them. In the early stages, because of the technology built into the vehicle, that might be quite an expensive accident, which might put premiums up. In the longer term, however, as Steve says, as we see greater penetration, a lot of the human error that is the cause of crashes on the roads today will be ironed out by the technology.
David Wong: On the basis that 94% of all crashes involving a fatality are put down to human error, and that the modelling we published two years ago suggests that connected and autonomous vehicles are expected to save 2,500 lives and contribute to the avoidance of 25,000 serious crashes between 2014 and 2030, we certainly hope that with autonomous vehicles, insurance premiums will go down.
Karl Turner
Q
Steve Nash: I feel very strongly that there should be, on a number of counts. First, we have electricity at work legislation that was put in place at a time when electric vehicles were virtually non-existent, although it does refer to electric vehicles—believe it or not, it actually tells people to talk to my organisation about them. But it is patently obvious that there is an inconsistency in regulating people who work on mains electricity, which is 240 V, while being happy for anybody to work on a vehicle that could be between 600 V and 1,000 V if we include commercial vehicles. To be really clear and specific, I am not talking about general licensing. I am talking about regulating people to work on the high voltage elements of these cars, not to change the tyres or to do the mundane stuff. These vehicles are wholly different to internal combustion engine vehicles. In the fullness of time, and it will not be that long, quite large numbers of them will start to come out of warranty and find their way into the open market. Right now, only 1% of those who work on the maintenance of vehicles in the whole country are actually qualified to work on the high voltage electrics and they pretty much all work for franchised dealers. Putting a regulation in place would open up the market to the wider industry and provide a standard that everybody could recognise.
Karl Turner
Q
Steve Nash: Because it will not happen. I have been in the industry for 40 years. We have a great deal of support for this from huge independents such as Halfords, from a lot of manufacturers and a great many independent garages. When we talk about the independent sector, it is an indeterminate number, roughly 40,000 businesses, we estimate, but we do not know exactly who is working on cars, because they do not belong to a body. It could be anyone; there is nothing to stop anybody setting themselves up to service and repair these things tomorrow. It will only be when somebody kills themselves—there have been incidents outside this country already of people being killed or seriously electrocuted working on these things. Don’t get me wrong, they are perfectly safe to ride in and operate, but once you get under the skin, if you do not know what you are doing, you are in just as much danger as you ever would be playing around with mains electricity without knowing what you are doing, except that it is potentially more fatal, because it is direct current and it will not throw you off, it will just keep electrocuting you.
It would definitely help the market, because manufacturers will do what they have to do to sell the cars and make sure that their own people are competent, but it will not automatically happen. It is a coin-operated business outside the main dealers. We have investigated what happened when Corgi or Gas Safe were put into place, similarly with the electricity at work legislation. Very quickly you would undoubtedly have had a lot of practitioners who should not have been doing what they were doing back in those days, but very quickly the industry raises to that level and it becomes a competitive market again and you do not get unreasonable costs introduced. We believe that is the right thing to do here. It establishes a common currency across the industry for knowing what competence means.
Karl Turner
With Sir Edward’s permission, does any other witness want to comment?
The Chair
It is not necessary for all the witnesses to answer all the questions. I am anxious as many colleagues as possible get in. I know the Minister is anxious for his voice to be heard, which we await with alacrity.
The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)
Q
Steve Nash: We are going through what is the biggest change in the industry—
Mr Hayes
That is the trouble with two Steves. I do apologise.
Steve Gooding: I am sure Steve will come in in a second. Yes, the foundation has been very supportive of both aspects of the Bill before you today. Specifically on the electric vehicle side, we think that while there have been significant percentage increases in the take up of ultra-low emission vehicles, they are still a tiny fraction of the overall vehicle park. There are many reasons why the ordinary consumer could get confused by what is on offer to them with various different charging packages for how to pay; with big uncertainties about the availability of different charge plants and on-street charging. We think that if the Government are serious—and we know that you are—about rapidly increasing the take-up of ultra low emission vehicles, something needs to be done to make the world of those low emission vehicles easier for consumers.
The Bill takes the perspective of asking, “What are the things that may currently cause a consumer to think twice or just to think, ‘Not now’?” There is concern about range. Well, the auto companies are dealing with that, because the range of the vehicles is getting longer, but there is also concern about the complexity and ease of recharging, about whether a particular charge point will be available and working when someone pulls up, and about whether it will be the right sort for the vehicle that they have. If we are able to clarify those things and make them simpler, the market will be a lot more attractive.
Mr Hayes
Q
David Wong: The best way to answer that question is to look at what is already available today in terms of automation. We do not have autonomous vehicles yet, just to be clear—we are unlikely to have autonomous vehicles until around 2020 or 2021—but what we do have is increasing levels of automation. The best example to quote is autonomous emergency braking, which is essentially level 1 or level 2 technology, using SAE International’s definition. AEB has already been shown to have contributed to the reduction in real-world rear-end crashes by 38%.
Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)
Q
David Wong: I think it is more likely to be the other way around. That is, it will be a question not of whether the system rejects a request from the driver to hand control over to the vehicle, but of whether the system serves up the offer of automation to the driver, given the right and safe conditions.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Wong: Correct, and I can give you an example. It is not autonomous yet, but it is level 3, which is very close to autonomous; this is the next step towards autonomy. Audi is the first vehicle manufacturer in the world to launch a level 3-capable vehicle. It launched it in the summer, and it will be available on the market, all being well, next year. Its system, which is called traffic jam pilot, is designed to operate at speeds of no more than 38 mph, on dual carriageways with clearly marked road signs as well as lane markings, and where the vehicle is hemmed in by other vehicles on the left and right, and front and back. If the system detects that all those conditions are met and the weather is sufficiently good for the operation of traffic jam pilot, it will offer the driver the option of giving the system control during that use case. Once one of those conditions is no longer in place, no longer valid—perhaps traffic has dispersed and the vehicle is able to travel at more than 38 mph—then the vehicle will ask the driver to take back control. So it is the system that will detect and serve up the offer; it is not the driver requesting.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Steve Gooding: I doubt whether we would need precisely that level of penetration. A report that we recently published—and thinking about how the Bill’s powers might be used if the House grants them—draws out the important point which is to think about the sort of trips that people actually make. For example, in large parts of London, in residential areas where there is no off-street parking, if we are to see a wide-scale move to plug-in electric vehicles, we would need to see quite a lot of roadside recharging capacity, because lots of people would be charging overnight, because that is what is most convenient for them. Elsewhere, if people are charging overnight at their homes and perhaps looking to top up the charge at their destination, it is probably more likely that that destination might be their place of work where there is off-street parking, or it might be a shopping centre or a multi-storey car park. So we are probably not talking about universal coverage but certainly more than we have today.
Quite how fast that needs to happen, I am afraid I could not give you a figure for now. All I can say is that at the moment there are various figures. Research by Addison Lee, for example, suggests that a very intense increase in on-street presence would be needed if we were to have the sort of ramp-up of vehicles that it would be willing to engage in. I would probably focus on making sure that the grant scheme for home charging carries on, so that we encourage more people to have the facility to charge at home. Then I would probably focus on motorway service areas, which will be very important for short and rapid top-up for people making a longer journey but who are possibly anxious about managing the whole journey there and back.
David Wong: If I can quickly echo what Steve said, it is no longer about the number of charge points, because we have around 14,000 in the UK at the moment, which is one of the highest numbers in Europe, if not the highest; it is about where these charge points are—being in the right place to serve particular needs, so it is not every charge point in every corner of a neighbourhood. First and foremost, what the Bill will provide is actually a step in the right direction, and so this is something we totally support in terms of the infrastructure. This calls for a co-ordinated approach involving the Government, the SMMT, the industry, vehicle manufacturers, charge point operators, energy companies and local authorities to come together, convened by Government of course, using the Government’s convening power, to determine and plot where the right charge points ought to be, depending on usage, the likely needs of people to charge and the type of charge points, because they might be fast chargers—rapid chargers—as Steve hinted.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
David Wong: We would suggest a nationally co-ordinated approach.
Brian Madderson: I speak for 75% of the motorway service areas and the one thing that they are really against is any form of mandating, because they want the market to be able to choose what is the best form of charging at the time for them. This is in a great state of flux. Some of them have already entered into agreements that are more binding than perhaps they would have wished with the knowledge that they have just 12 months on. The mandating process seems to be all stick and no carrot. These motorway service areas fully recognise the need and, in fact, many now have both Tesla charging and other forms of charging, so they are working towards that but they think mandating is not appropriate in this case.
One of the other issues the motorway service areas have is that there does not seem to be joined-up government, which I think David was probably referring to. There are planning difficulties in getting car park extensions to put in extra parking bays for Tesla charging, for example. One of the things the Government should perhaps be mandating is not where the charging points go, but that where there are planning applications for charging points, local authorities must deal with them quickly, efficiently and sympathetically.
Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)
Q
Steve Gooding: From a consumer perspective, I would have to say that we do not really know yet, but there is a broad spectrum of what might happen next. For example, there is a clear incentive for a fleet operator who is counting every penny to be thinking, “How could I reduce my costs of operation?” Whether that is a fleet of vans or trucks, the operator would be looking at automation as a way of, first, saving money, and secondly, sweating the asset of that truck for longer hours. In turn, we are seeing a huge amount of investment in the auto sector in vehicles for the private market.
If I were to bet my money, I would say that the guys who are counting every penny will probably be the first in—people running fleets and large numbers of vehicles—but some people are clearly very attracted to the thought of having driverless capability. That could be from time to time, or it could mean freedom and independence for people who are currently denied that by the fact that they cannot drive, and we have just been engaged in a report on what it means for people with disabilities.
Clive Efford
Q
Steve Gooding: I think David would say we are four years off. Personally I think it is probably nearer 10.
Steve Nash: Ten.
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: Correct. In the first instance, when I referred to 2020-21, I was referring to level 4—vehicles that will still have a steering wheel. That means under the right conditions, in the right use cases—for example, from junction to junction on a motorway—someone could let the system drive the vehicle, but could take back control outside that use case. If level 5, which is without a steering wheel, is not going to be as far off as 10 years, it is likely to be deployed in the first instance for first and last-mile journeys, perhaps even in pedestrianised areas—on pavements—as we have seen with some of the trials in Greenwich, as well as in Milton Keynes. As to when those level 5 vehicles without steering wheels are capable of performing end-to-end journeys—from my house in the village to my office in the city—that is anybody’s guess. That will probably be some time in the 2030s. It is quite complex.
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: I suppose you could—
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: Yes. In principle, one would not argue that a computer is less safe than a human being. Obviously, the capability of a human being to perceive and perform the driving of a car is limited and depends on the human being’s condition and the road conditions, as well as the environment in which the human being has been conditioned to perform the dynamic driving task. Lots of evidence has been published. The figures range from 90%; some are at 97%. We are taking the average figure, which is that 94% of all serious road accidents involving fatalities are caused by the human being. I mean that in the sense that it is not mechanical fault, lack of road markings or slippery roads, but the human being that caused the accident, perhaps by being inattentive or sometimes even perhaps by doing things that they are not supposed to do.
Clive Efford
But even the slow-moving vehicle in Greenwich hit a plastic chair when it was put in front of it, did it not? We are going to see accidents during a journey where the vehicle is being driven by software. Those accidents are going to happen. The periods when a vehicle is not driven by a human are going to increase, so we are likely to see an increase in the number of accidents that are not human error. Is that right?
David Wong: We think that overall the number of accidents will fall, but if anything can be learned from one of the trailblazers of the self-driving car experiments and trials—Google—it is that the earliest accidents that they encountered a number of years ago when the car was being trialled were the result of the cars being rear-ended by manually driven vehicles. The learning from that was that Google had to tweak the algorithms to ensure that the self-driving vehicle—the computer—behaved a little bit more like the human being. They succeeded in doing that, and today you do not get so many of the rear-ending accidents.
Steve Nash: It is also important to say that these vehicles will be connected. When one experiences something, the knowledge is passed to all of them, which does not happen today.
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: This is the classic trolley problem question that we get asked almost at every single conference that we attend—
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: Not at this point, but at some point certainly. First, if you take a cue from the ethics commission report that was published in Germany just a few months ago, it suggested that in any case, human life should always be prioritised. If it is a decision between a human and non-human, obviously the human life would have to be prioritised. That is No. 1. Secondly, we should not expect the car to do anything massively different from how a human being would behave. The car should perform a minimal risk manoeuvre to stop and brake in such a way that the impact will be minimal. To expect the car to make an ethical decision to kill A or B is probably not the right approach. I would suggest that none of us has the divine power to decide who to kill. At the end of the day, someone who writes the algorithm will have to decide. If you insist that the car must decide, it is incumbent on the engineers to programme that into the algorithm.
Clive Efford
Q
David Wong: There would be a minimal risk manoeuvre, depending on the situation. There may be evasive action in such a way that it would be the safest possible option. If it needs to stop, it will brake and stop. May I point something out? I mentioned autonomous emergency braking. It has been demonstrated that the technology is improving all the time. Previously, autonomous emergency braking worked perfectly at 30 mph, which is urban speed, but it is becoming increasingly sophisticated. AEB can work well even at 50 mph. It would not surprise me if the technology improved in years to come to the stage where autonomous emergency braking could kick in at motorway speeds of 70 mph to prevent an accident or lessen the impact of an accident.
The Chair
I have a growing list of people who want to ask questions, and I want to try to get everyone in. We want brisk questions and brisk answers. It is not necessary for every witness to answer every question.
Edward Argar (Charnwood) (Con)
Q
Brian Madderson: They are all extremely interested in this new technology and we, in fact, are providing a route to market for many of the charging point suppliers. They come to our regional forums—Northern Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales—and they appear in our market review book, so there is a thirst for knowledge.
The real problem with the Bill as it is currently written is that in mandating motorway service areas and, indeed, large fuel retailers there is a key missing ingredient, and that is the carrot I referred to before. There is funding for charging points at home, on the street, in the workplace and in other public areas but there is no funding available for the fuel retailers who would like to embrace this technology in order to provide a diverse range of refuelling options for their customers. It is the big rump of the medium to small-sized filling stations right across the country that will find this more difficult, because the investment decision at the present time is not something that banks would support. There is almost no money to come back on a perceived return-on-investment basis. So they are the ones who will be holding back the growth of charging points right across the country—it is not just city-centric.
Karl Turner
Q
Brian Madderson: It does have to be some form of funding, because if you go to your bank and say that you want to put in a charging point that might cost you a lot of money, you will immediately be asked, “What do you see as the return on investment? I’ve got to get my interest back.” They have no idea at the moment, because the market is in such a state of flux. New systems are coming on. I heard of one relatively recently called ZapGo. I do not know whether it is a big runner, but it is looking at putting storage tanks into a traditional forecourt with charging posts, and being able to meter out the electricity on a basis that I am told Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs would enjoy because you might be able to get fuel duty back on it. This is relatively new. There are all kinds of development in the marketplace, and I think it would be precipitous to ask them to invest 100% of the money now—they could not do it.
Karl Turner
Q
Brian Madderson: It can be up to £50,000 per instalment. What has been happening is that certain companies have gone along and said, “Look, we will take over that cost but we want from you two parking bays for 30 years on a lease basis.” If you are thinking about 30 years, that is a very long time. It precludes you, as the owner of that freehold property, from perhaps expanding your shop or putting up a new car wash— indeed, from perhaps even selling the property to someone else. So most of them have opted away from that style of investment.
Mr Hayes
Q
Brian Madderson: First, I do not agree at all with any form of mandating because this is interventionist by the Government in a market that is so new and in such a state of flux that there should not be mandating. This is a perfect example of where market conditions should encourage investors to invest in the product that is right for them at the time. Mandating may make them make a false decision, which would prove very costly and certainly not be beneficial for the consumer.
Mr Hayes
Q
Brian Madderson: Yes, I think it is good to have a market strategy, but you would certainly need to have proper funding available to not only small retailers but large retailers as well. By this, I mean the independents, certainly. The big oil companies today count for relatively few of the total number of filling stations—less than 15%—across the UK.
Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
Q
Graham P. Jones
Twizy—that is it. I notice even on the continent, particularly in urban areas, we are getting smaller and smaller electric vehicles and cars driving around. Is the legislation adequate for the type and size of electric vehicle that might come on to the market? What changes do you see, for example? How will an automated vehicle work when you add a trailer to it or make some other changes to it? The shape, size and form of vehicles is probably going to change, as you are well aware, so will the legislation be adequate for those vehicles to be on the road when they are automated—of course, when they are operated by an individual manually, there is a human choice—and the automation is making choices?
Steve Gooding: I will start with a very short answer, as the Chairman seeks, which is no. But that is because this is a very immature market. We do not even have the vehicles in the marketplace yet. Having also driven a Twizy, which is great fun, I think the construction and use standards, based on a mechanical testing of roadworthiness, should be sufficient for most of the concerns you are voicing, but they are certainly not sufficient for guaranteeing the roadworthiness of the autonomous software systems; you are going to need something new for that.
When it comes to the size of the vehicle, again, their crash-worthiness, for example, needs to be tested in the circumstances in which the vehicle will be used. Maybe then there will need to be something in addition either to prevent or constrain what other purposes—whether it be towing a trailer, a caravan or whatever—are appropriate for that vehicle.
Graham P. Jones
Q
Steve Gooding: I would say a similar thing as to Mr Efford: as a consumer, if I am being invited either to travel in one of these vehicles because it is the equivalent of private hire, or to buy one, I expect to buy something that has been certified as safe for the use to which it is going to be put. If it is inappropriate for me to hitch a trailer to it and use it in autonomous mode, that had better be made clear to me at the point when I buy it.
Mr Hayes
Q
Steve Nash: Absolutely, yes. There is probably more opportunity than threat from the new technologies. We are interested in ensuring that those skills develop in the right way. If you look at autonomous vehicles—I mentioned electric vehicles earlier—we only know as yet what manufacturers have said about their plans in the future. It may well be, for example, that when we get to level 5, or even level 4, a lot of those vehicles are not sold in the way that they are sold today. A new electric vehicle was launched a couple of weeks ago by a new brand called Polestar, which is owned by the same people who own Volvo. They say that the car will be sold on a subscription model, so it would remain within the possession of the manufacturer.
There is a lot of road to cover between now and then. Whoever is looking after those cars—I have already talked about electric cars, but when we get to autonomous cars as well—they will still have accidents. Things will drop on them and things will happen to them that are not caused by the car. When they are repaired, we have to be assured that they are repaired to a standard that returns them to exactly the same capability they had before the accident, which means we need people who are certifiably competent to do that. That is where we are interested in seeing some clarity.
We have cars with quite substantial autonomous capabilities already—Tesla is a good example—and I have seen second-hand examples of them that have gone beyond the dealer network. You have to wonder about the competence of the people who will work on that car—I am not saying that they are incompetent, but I do not know that they are competent. When someone next engages the autonomous capabilities of that car, will they do the things they are supposed to do? We cannot just leave that to chance. We have to be sure that there is some way of assuring ourselves about the people who work on them. This is not like the days when there was somebody who was “a bit handy”, as I think the phrase used to be, and you could give your car to them and they could look after it. This is a paradigm shift. We need to move with that and recognise that these cars, even though they have four wheels and look a bit like the cars that we have today, are entirely different. The skills base needs to be elevated to deal with them because they are an entirely different prospect.
Rosie Duffield (Canterbury) (Lab)
Q
Brian Madderson: The mandating of motorway service areas and large fuel retailers should be taken out at this stage because the market is just developing far too rapidly. We have even asked the Department for Transport what the definition of a large fuel retailer is, and it has said that it does not know yet and it will consult on that. Is it the size of the plot of a single one? Is it a multi-site organisation that might have filling stations all over the UK? Is it the amount of existing fossil fuel that a retailer is supplying? There is no definition, so I do not think it is reasonable or fair to mandate a large fuel retailer when you do not know what that is.
For similar reasons, I do not think that is fair and reasonable for motorway service areas either. There is just no money in it at the moment to justify huge investments, but there will be at some stage in the future and that is when the market will be able to say, “Let’s move on this now, and quickly too”. Hence my plea that the planning authorities are fully engaged to be able to allow effective planning applications as and when they are required for charge points.
Steve Gooding: Rather than changing something in the Bill, I think we would say that the powers—particularly in relation to electric vehicles—are drawn quite broadly. We would like to see how they are going to be used in succeeding regulations. We published some suggestions on how they might be crafted. There will obviously be some concerns—Brian’s perhaps first among them—about the implications for the operators of service areas, for local authorities and for householders. We would like to see the detail and to be confident—as I am sure we are—that the Department will get it right.
Brian Madderson: I would come back to that and say that the RAC’s report suggests that forecourts—filling stations, as they are at the moment—are probably one of the least best places to put a bank of charging points because of constrained space and alternative use, and because the few that we have today are all pretty busy selling diesel and petrol.
Steve Gooding: Apart from motorway service areas.
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
Q
David Wong: Level 3.
Craig Tracey
Q
David Wong: In the first place, the limiting conditions are such that the vehicle can only operate under the traffic jam pilot functionality at 38 mph, so that is a relatively low speed. If the driver is required to take back control at that low speed, Audi has said that there will be a minimum period of 10 seconds for the hand back to take place at 38 mph. This is completely different from some of the things that may have been heard in the press, where people were saying, “Oh, at 70 mph there is a three to five second hand back, it’s impossible to do that.” It is perhaps impossible. Audi will have a minimum hand back period of 10 seconds at 38 mph.
If the driver still fails to react within those 10 seconds, then a minimum risk manoeuvre will be performed whereby the car will slow down and grind to a halt in the lane safely, flashing the emergency indicators and strapping the seatbelt tight across the driver. The driver might have passed out, or may have become incapacitated. That is the assumption. In the intervening period, there would be a series of warnings within those 10 seconds including visual, acoustic and eventually haptic warnings. So there will be lots of measures that Audi has in fact built in. In any case it is travelling at 38 mph, so it is perfectly possible for the car to gradually grind to a halt in the lane with those measures in place.
Steve Gooding: Some of us are entirely unpersuaded that level 3 makes any sense at all. I accept all of the reassurances set out by David, but you should consider for a moment the Department for Transport’s own research showing that you are much more likely to kill someone when travelling at 30 mph than at 20 mph. I wonder if, at 38 mph, the window being created by Audi in which its system can operate is going to be too narrow. I am not sure that I have ever seen a dual carriageway in an urban area that is free-flowing with clear signs in this country. I think, personally, that we ought to say that level 3 is something that we do not want.
Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)
Q
David Wong: We are informed that the policy intent behind the Bill is to do with the new insurance framework —the single insurer model framework—to cover level 4 and above. Insofar as that is reflected in the spirit and letter of the Bill, then that is adequate because it is at level four that the human being is—technically speaking—out of the loop, to use engineering parlance. The human being has surrendered control to the vehicle. At anything below level 4, the human being is still technically responsible and in the loop. So for these purposes the Bill is adequate.
Stephen Kerr
Q
David Wong: From an industry perspective it is always helpful if the levels are spelled out very clearly in the Bill. Our understanding is that it is rather unhelpful to spell out levels.
Steve Gooding indicated dissent.
Stephen Kerr
You are shaking your head.
Steve Gooding: I would say that the definition in the Bill is adequate because of what David has said. It contemplates a world in which the vehicle can operate in autonomous mode without the driver being responsible. That is fine. It does not facilitate level three and that is fine too.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
Q
Brian Madderson: I have no problems with that.
Sir Greg Knight
Q
Brian Madderson: Yes. It is definitely a good idea. We do that all round—on autogas, diesel, petrol, super-unleaded or whatever it might be—at the present time. The price is displayed, and I think it is a fine idea to do that with electric charging as well. It must be said, however, that since April 2016, when some of the charging point providers moved to pay as you go, the demand on motorway service areas for those chargers has dropped by 50%.
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)
Q
Brian Madderson: It is also about providing the carrot by way of funding. That is going to be the big spur to encourage firms, in a rapidly changing market, to take that investment decision and to ensure that such decisions are supported by their banks, lenders, shareholders and others. At the moment, you do not appear to be mandating hotels, leisure centres or workplaces, all of which are admirably fine locations for charging points; you just seem to be mandating motorway service areas and large fuel retailers, whatever that description means. We do not think that is fair, reasonable or necessary.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
“an automated vehicle when driving itself”,
applies only to level 4? Why does it not apply to level 3?
Steve Gooding: I am not a parliamentary draftsman, so I would have to be reassured about this, but to me “when driving itself” means that the driver of the vehicle is not legally responsible for the vehicle; the vehicle is driving itself. That is what I intended to convey.
The Chair
Thank you very much for your attendance today and for your answers. We are very grateful.
Examination of Witnesses
Marcus Stewart, Robert Evans and Suleman Alli gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Robert Evans: I am Robert Evans. I am chief executive officer of Cenex and chair of the UK Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment Association.
Suleman Alli: Good afternoon. My name is Suleman Alli. I am director of strategy for UK Power Networks. We distribute electricity to 8.2 million homes and businesses in the east of England, London and the south-east.
Marcus Stewart: Hello. My name is Marcus Stewart. I am head of energy insights for National Grid. We are responsible for the balancing of the electricity and gas networks, and for managing all the energy across the UK.
Karl Turner
Q
Marcus Stewart: At the moment, the majority of people who own electric vehicles charge them at home, but there is a limit to how many houses have off-street parking. About 43% of properties do not have access to off-street parking, therefore other forms of charging facilities need to be available. They could be a mixture of charging types at destinations, workplaces, supermarkets, and so on.
From the evidence that we have gathered when we have talked to and interviewed people, key locations on the motorway and strategic network are seen as key enablers for the roll-out of electric vehicles and will help to remove some of the concerns around range anxiety which is seen as one of the main barriers to the take-up of electric vehicles at the moment. Charging and plus charging in particular at key locations across the country will facilitate the roll-out. If you do not have that, it is likely that the roll-out will be slower.
Suleman Alli: I support that. I would say that there is going to be a paradigm shift. It is a bit like when we used to get water from a well and we now get it from a tap in our home. In the same way, I do not think that petrol forecourts will be the only place where we will recharge our vehicles in the future. In our engagement with the marketplace, we are seeing major supermarkets looking at how they can offer fast charging to be a key differentiator for their customers. We are seeing hotels considering the same and local authorities looking to explore how on-street charging can be part of the solution. Based on the engagement we have done, I believe that it will be a much more diversified charging environment: it will not just be petrol forecourts.
Robert Evans: We have members who are very interested to install charge points at these locations. They see them as locations where there will be high utilisation rate and a good economic case for those charge points to be used. We are also talking here about an insurance policy—it is not a mandating per se. If the market does not deliver, the Act gives Government the ability to step in. It is not by definition a mandating until you pass additional legislation.
The members are very interested in installing in these locations, but they are other people’s land. Part of the issue here is the ability to encourage landowners to install charge points at their locations. In some cases it is a fuel supplier, in other cases it is one of the three main companies that operate motorway service areas. You have to recognise that there is a desire to install in those locations, but you cannot put your asset on someone else’s land.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
The Chair
We are now quorate. Sir Oliver Letwin asked a question, which you of course have remembered exactly, and you may now answer it.
Robert Evans: I think your question related to the aspect of there not being so many people with off-road parking, so how do you make provision available for them? Certainly in this city, in London, that is an issue. It is also an issue in many cities across the UK. The availability of charging infrastructure in supermarkets, shopping areas in market towns and leisure facilities is certainly helpful, but obviously if you do not have home parking you are at a disadvantage compared with other motorists. So it is partially self-selecting, in a way, but certainly in London and other locations if you have a certain amount of public infrastructure it will help those people who want to buy an EV to have one.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Robert Evans: From our perspective, no, we have not. We know that UK Power Networks have done extensive study work in their projects, and we know from dialogue with Western Power Distribution that they have also looked at the same. Some of the councils here in London—for example, Hammersmith has a scheme that is looking to leverage the street lighting—
The Chair
Will you speak up a bit, please?
Robert Evans: Sorry. Hammersmith has a scheme that is looking to leverage the street lighting in order to provide charging for residents on the street. Part of that is largely around civil works and some of it is around the electrical works. The DNOs will be able to advise in these cases whether the low-voltage network needs reinforcing, but otherwise it is predominantly a matter of civils and equipment. Members are developing charge points, and have charge points, that can charge from street lighting, albeit that the power supply to that lighting is limited.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Suleman Alli: Yes. It is very difficult to give you a definitive answer on the exact cost. The reason why it is so difficult to do that is that in order to come up with a cost, you have to understand the impact that it is going to have on the network. To understand the impact on the network, you have to understand when people are likely to charge, where they are likely to charge, the amount they are going to charge and the type of charger they are going to use. There are multiple permutations of that.
The only approach that we thought was appropriate to consider was to look at scenarios. Our peak demand across our three networks is around 15 GW. We think that up to 2030, when we might have between 1.2 million and 2 million vehicles, their peak demand could be between 2 GW and 5 GW—so between 10% and 30%. If you think of our track record over the last five years, we have connected 5 GW of distributed generation on our grid. That is equivalent to one and a half Hinkley Point Cs, without much fuss or bother. We have until about 2030 to work out how we are going to do this. My view would be that we are not complacent, but we are confident that we are going to come up with some solutions.
We think the Bill as it is currently presented provides us with a lot of help. In order for us to understand the impact, you need the visibility and the smart charging functionality. If you have the smart charging functionality combined with smart tariffs, you can start actually to deliver the infrastructure at lowest cost. I am sorry that I do not have an exact number for you. Anyway, if I did give you a number, it would 100% be wrong—but we are doing a lot of modelling and work to understand what the permutations are.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Suleman Alli: That is a really exciting area of development at the moment. We are looking at it. As part of the Innovate UK funding, we are going to be supporting five EV trials, one of which is including a vehicle to be trialled with Nissan.
If you look at where distributed generation is connected in the UK today, it has mainly been at grid scale. A lot of our research on storage has been focused on grid-scale storage. We commissioned the largest battery in the UK at the time, 6 MW or 10 MWh, and we are very clear that storage can help peak shaving for the distribution networks at grid scale. We think that same concept can be applied to vehicles, but the trials need to take place for us to understand it fully. That is happening at the moment.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Suleman Alli: I believe within the next 12 to 24 months. We are looking abroad as well at other countries to see how we can generate learnings from those trials. Certainly, in the next 24 months we will start to see concrete evidence that we could present.
Mr Hayes
Q
Robert Evans: Automated vehicles are not strictly my area of operation, so I find that that is something that I cannot strictly answer.
Marcus Stewart: In some of the work that we have done when we have projected forward and looked at various energy scenarios, we see automated vehicles as having an impact on total energy usage. More automated vehicles, and clarity around the question, will allow different business models to come forward. Car sharing is more likely as part of that, and that will reduce the overall demand on the energy system, but we believe that it is still quite a long way out—maybe 2030-plus—before we start seeing any significant impact from that.
Mr Hayes
Q
Robert Evans: Yes, absolutely. This is part of a process that the Government have played a key role in seeding—the introduction of charging in key locations and providing support to Plugged-in Places and now to the Go Ultra Low cities and others, to create exemplar projects and to encourage the roll-out of infrastructure. Making that infrastructure visible is a key part of reassuring people that owning an electric vehicle is a good thing. Being able to have a home charger, with support from the Government, that meets very high technical standards is also really important, so that people are not charging their electric vehicle from an extension cable or similar on a three-pin plug, which we would not advise.
The Government have played a very important part in dialogue with industry about the process of seeding. Now we are in a situation where we have more than 100,000 electric vehicles on the road, and the car industry is committing to introduce the vehicles, and so the roll-out of infrastructure is occurring largely with market forces, in the sense that businesses and locations are realising that they need to have charging as part of their offer. If it is a tourist destination, it wants to have electric vehicle drivers come to its location rather than another one, and so on.
We have good momentum, but it is still really important that where there is workplace charging, for example, we get conversion of people who work at that location because they see that there is charging that they could use, they start to think and then they buy electric vehicles. We thoroughly commend the Government’s workplace scheme, because we can see the catalytic effect that it is having.
Mr Hayes
Q
Robert Evans: Skills is one of those challenging areas where we have a plethora of schemes. I was told that there are currently about 220 different skills initiatives for the motor industry. The challenge is not necessarily to create another skills initiative, but to work out how best to blend the relevant content into existing initiatives. Certainly on the garage side of the motor industry, greater skills or a spreading of skills for mechanics and engineers in terms of them being familiar with and able to operate on electric vehicles would be helpful. There is a general skills shortage in the motor industry, and that is something that training and development at a local level can assist.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
Q
Marcus Stewart: One of the key things that affects the impact on the grid is people charging their cars. Smart charging is absolutely key to mitigating that. I will give you some examples from the work that we have published. We published our “Future Energy Scenarios” report in July. In a high-growth scenario that aligns with the Government’s target to ban sales of diesel and petrol engines in 2040, we would expect to see around 9 million electric vehicles in 2030. That would add something like 17% to peak demand, which occurs on a Monday or Tuesday evening in the winter, if there was not smart charging. If there was smart charging and people responded to that through time of use tariffs or other incentives, that could be reduced to around 6%. How people charge and how they are incentivised to do it has a real impact.
At the moment, the technology exists—the charging posts that have been put in have that technology—and we support the measures in the Bill to ensure that all charging points have that capability, which would make a significant difference to how easily electric vehicles are accommodated by the network nationally and locally. Smart charging is absolutely key, and we support the approach in the Bill.
Iain Stewart
Q
Marcus Stewart: I believe that the industry, in terms of energy suppliers, will offer smart tariffs. We have already seen that; OVO has published a proposed smart tariff that will actually support vehicle-to-grid when that becomes available. The market is likely to respond. There are also changes in the electricity market around billing for half-hourly meter reconciliation, which will drive the supplier to optimise their portfolio and to offer similar types of tariff. The mechanisms are there to make that happen. At the moment there are only 100,000 to 120,000 electric vehicles, so there is a very small impact, but when we get to millions of cars, we need to have that smart charging capability. People in the market are seeing that opportunity already and want to participate in that. Having the framework and rules that facilitate that and mandate the technology and infrastructure will go a long way to facilitating that.
Robert Evans: I would just like to add that on the one hand I am very reassured by my colleague’s contribution, which recognises that this is a market opportunity and that we have members who are very keen to provide the charging technology and the market mechanisms that would allow a motorist to make their electric energy—their battery—available, so that they do not charge at night, but they can provide power back to the grid when it is needed and manage those smart services.
We are concerned about mandating a specific technology. There is a context around the Bill that says it will mandate a certain technology or approach. We would like to see a recognition of the need to create a market rather than have a situation where, for example, a DNO can effectively turn off charging for somebody because they feel that that is necessary under certain conditions without involving the motorist or without market mechanisms coming in in the first place. We are particularly keen that this paves the way for a market-based approach. We welcome variable tariffs and vehicle-to-grid technology and we see the storage of electric vehicles as exactly what you need in an energy system with a high element of intermittency, as we add more and more renewables. The storage element is going to be a lot more valuable and there need to be market mechanisms to unlock that, rather than a mandated approach that is purely a situation where someone can turn off as they choose to, without the motorist or business—
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Q
Marcus Stewart: We see smart charging for electric vehicles as a key starting point for that. You can get smart technology in your home today—smart thermostats, for example. Commercial premises have smart air conditioning and smart lighting that help to balance their load and can provide services back to the grid today. An electric car will be the biggest asset in the home that uses energy, unless you convert to heat as well, and that will have a big impact on the system. Making that smart at the start is the right thing to do.
Suleman Alli: It is a bit like the concept of offset mortgages in the financial services sector, where you pay your salary into an account and that offsets against the mortgage interest you pay. We are starting to see a new business model emerge where people say, “We can give you price certainty or reduced energy bills if you plug your vehicle in and allow us to provide services to the wider network operators or the system operators.”
I think the market will innovate and start to provide those services. We are already seeing that in the internet market, for example. Some of the trials we are doing will look exactly at that area. It is intuitive for us to think that if you have an electric vehicle you are going to go home and plug it in straightaway. The research that we have undertaken shows there is a diversity. When you have a large population of EVs, not everybody goes home and charges at the same time. In fact, we have seen about 30% of the impact materialise—of the capacity of charge that has been installed. There is an element of diversity that we incorporate into our planning that is based on evidence from the trials we have undertaken.
Alan Brown
Q
Marcus Stewart: I could talk about how we would do that. The primary reason to do it is to understand what network capacity expansions and reinforcements are needed on a national level. We will have different assumptions for different locations, where we have evidence. For example, there may be clustering in cities that we will make assumptions around. I imagine that the DNOs will look at similar things for their networks as well. We look at it on a spatial basis; it is not just a single-number basis.
Suleman Alli: What we are looking to do, particularly with electric vehicles, because there is a lot of data available out there, is try to apply much more advanced analytic techniques. For example, how can we marry up Land Registry data, which gives an indication of people who might have driveways, together with Acorn data about people who might be more able to buy an electric vehicle, together with data on charge points, in order to get a better and more granular view of our network? That is what we are doing at the moment to improve our planning.
Alan Brown
Q
Suleman Alli: Absolutely. I do not think we can ever say we are done.
The Chair
Thank you. We have a lengthening list, so let us have one question and one answer.
Stephen Kerr
Q
Robert Evans: There are standards. There has been a difference between a Japanese product coming to a Japanese standard versus a European product coming to a European standard. Charge points typically have several connectors to accommodate different vehicles. That has been the simple solution.
Stephen Kerr
Q
Robert Evans: I do not know that we in the UK can necessarily say that this is the charger that is required for the global motor industry to produce. In the past, the Office for Low Emission Vehicles has set grant funding regimes that encourage particular types of charger because they are better for safety and for the motorists’ general use. That is to be commended.
Stephen Kerr
Q
Robert Evans: At this stage I would say that was not necessary.
Scott Mann (North Cornwall) (Con)
Q
Marcus Stewart: The high voltage network does mirror parts of the motorway network, but not all of it. There will be locations where there is a clear opportunity to build a connection for high voltage to supply charging, and there will be other locations where it is just not that simple. It has to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Some of the options around that are maybe connecting at a lower voltage tier but using onsite storage, so you are not taking too much stress from the grid in one go. You are managing exactly the same as a petrol station does today, where it fills up a tank of petrol under the ground and feeds it to the cars as they need it.
We have talked to different developers and people who are looking at those kinds of options, and we describe it as a sort of mosaic of different charging routes out there. One of them could be high voltage input, with 350 kV of charging, backed up with a megawatt-scale battery to minimise the connection to the grid and that impact.
Scott Mann
Q
Marcus Stewart: From a national grid point of view, my role is to balance the network and ensure that the energy is balanced. We have a transmission owner part that would own the high voltage network, and certainly the element up to a connection. Anything beyond the connection is available for third party competition. Any service provider could put that in. A deregulated version of the National Grid or another third party could put that in. Our primary role is the reinforcement element upstream to support that.
Mr Hayes
Q
Marcus Stewart: I think it would have some merits. I am not sure whether it needs to be mandated or not.
Mr Hayes
Q
Marcus Stewart: It certainly makes sense to look at where there is good capability on the local or national network, and to consider that in respect of good accessibility for people; for them to be able to come in, connect and charge up their cars. I would expect those to be offering the early take-up points. Effectively there would be a least cost route to getting fast charging points delivered, in particular. A number of parties would have to come together and look at those opportunities: the National Grid, local network operators, charge point owners, service station owners and people like that. That would make sense.
Matt Western
Q
Robert Evans: The answer is no. We are not doing enough.
Matt Western
Q
Robert Evans: Two different things. One is that the size of the power cables running into new developments is typically capped by the developer or by processes, so it is not built to add further capacity at later dates. That is what charging would require, so that is one part of the equation. The second part would involve effectively putting wiring in new homes in such a way as to ensure that a charge point could easily be added. We have repeatedly asked about this but been told that even putting a smoke alarm in some houses is too much for some developers. Any additional input in that area would be very welcome.
Matt Rodda (Reading East) (Lab)
Q
Suleman Alli: From our market, first we need to engage with people to talk about range anxiety. It is down to motor manufacturers to produce vehicles with a longer range. The second thing is availability of charging infrastructure. We have certainly seen an increase in activity from both TfL and local authorities in wanting to understand that more effectively, and we have done a lot of engagement with local authorities to demystify the process and explain what the costs are likely to be. The third thing is just the up-front cost—the capital cost—of buying a vehicle. There is no silver bullet; we would need to do a range of things to increase adoption.
Matt Rodda
Q
Suleman Alli: In urban areas, where people do not necessarily have a driveway and perhaps live in flats, they have to have provision of charge points on the street for on-the-go charging and destination charging—at railway stations, supermarkets and so on. In urban areas you would need to identify those locations—car parks and so on—that have the space to provide destination charging. In that case, it would probably have to be rapid charging to provide the charge that you would need.
Robert Evans: We would be very keen as an industry to work more closely with the DNOs for the roll-out of the charge points, but also the grid reinforcement needed to get charge points in strategic city locations. For example, London, with UK Power Networks, has provided support that has effectively created locations where the power is available for rapid chargers to be deployed. The same is happening in other Go Ultra Low cities. We would like to have a partnership approach whereby we could work with the DNOs in particular cities to make sure that we could get infrastructure in strategic locations. [Interruption.]
The Chair
Given that there is now a Division, I think we can let you go, because it would be unfair to keep you. We will start straightaway in 10 minutes with our new set of witnesses. Thank you.
The Chair
We are now quorate, so we can hear from Clive Efford, but first I should say to our witness, as I do not want to be rude, that perhaps you should introduce yourself.
Quentin Willson: I am Quentin Willson, motoring journalist and television presenter, who has been an electric car advocate for the last seven years. I advise and help OLEV and Go Ultra Low, promoting electric car use among the public. I have done 50,000 miles under the wheels of electric cars over the last seven years, and my day-to-day car is a Nissan Leaf.
Clive Efford
You certainly look good for having done 50,000 miles “under” the wheels.
Quentin Willson: Absolutely!
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: Enormously complicated. It is not my area of expertise, but the question I would ask is: can they co-exist peacefully? Can the connected and the unconnected in the UK’s very limited road space exist? Can those cars that drive themselves be allowed to co-exist with the cars that are driven by human beings? Will there necessarily be some friction during that period? I think that in the short to medium term, it is going to take some time.
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: I think we need to be very careful that we know exactly who is liable, because there will be quite a few accidents, whether it is the manufacturer, driver, network provider or road provider. It has to be established very early on.
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: Inevitably you will get a feeling of complacency, of reliance on the technology, and if there is an emergency situation or you leave the automated road system to the non-automated road system, you will have to have that moment of what we call extreme alertness. Consumers need to be trained for that and we need to be ready. If that is a legal transitional moment, where you take the wheel having been driven autonomously, that could be an issue as well.
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be trained to be able to make those moral decisions, and when we take a driving test we are not trained to make them either, so it is a difficult area to think we can resolve. Can we ever expect artificial intelligence in an automated car to make that split-second moral decision between the child in the pushchair or the old people in the Nissan Micra? I do not think we can. We are not trained to do that and we cannot. It is a split-second thing that happens and legislating for it would be enormously difficult.
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: I am not an expert on artificial intelligence in cars at the moment, but it will be, depending on the sensors, the object that has the least resistance.
Clive Efford
Q
Quentin Willson: It is driven, I guess, by the fact that there is a huge world of opportunity here and that is predicated on the fact that people do not like driving anymore—there is congestion, it is expensive and it is difficult—and on the rent economy, whereby you summon an automated car on your smartphone and it comes to your door. When you look at the research, that is very attractive to the public. The golden era of getting pleasure from driving cars has gone, and I say that with some regret, but it is a fact. There was a survey by Catapult in Milton Keynes which asked this question: if you were to replace your current car with an autonomous car—we are not going to tell you what it is or what it looks like—would you be prepared to change to that autonomous car? Some 58% said that they would change to the autonomous car without knowing what it was, simply because of the liberation of not having to make those decisions and sit impotently in snarling traffic. It is partly driven by commerce and partly by the public.
Alan Brown
Q
Quentin Willson: I sat before this Committee a year ago and was broadly optimistic about the short and medium-term future of electric cars. I think Michael Gove’s announcement in July, coupled with Sadiq Khan’s T-zones and ClientEarth’s relentless pushing on air quality issues, has terrified consumers. It has wiped probably £30 billion off the value of diesel cars. Lease companies are now looking at a collapse in the residual values of the cars that they lease to consumers on personal contract purchase. We are looking at a real issue in the short to medium term.
The consumer now feels that he or she cannot buy a diesel car; we have seen sales of diesel cars absolutely collapse over the last quarter. They are feeling, “Right, I’ve got to buy an electric car.” We need to manage their expectations. I am quite concerned that people who rely on one car as the family vehicle will go out and buy, like me, a second-hand Nissan Leaf for £10,000. That is great, but we must understand that those cars’ ranges are nowhere near viable for an everyday, use-it-all-the-time car. They are a wonderful urban solution, but long journeys—anything more than 100 miles—are really difficult. I came down here in an alternative car; I had to leave my Nissan Leaf at home, because getting here would have required three stops to charge.
It is about managing consumer expectations. Otherwise, this whole thing will go horribly wrong. The new Nissan Leaf, which I saw in Oslo last week on its launch, has a quoted official figure of 235 miles to one charge, but the Nissan engineers tell me that in reality, it is 175 miles for everyday driving. If you drive that car on the motorway at 70 mph, that will fall to about 130 or 140 miles. The technology of the lithium ion battery still has some considerable work to do.
Again, it is all predicated—the mass adoption of electrification in the short to medium term—on having better battery density, maybe of alternative materials such as graphene, and a very robust charging infrastructure network. I am not talking about on-street chargers; I am talking about charging hubs like petrol stations, with 20 rapid chargers that can charge 20 cars in 40 minutes. That is the only way that mainstream consumers will be able to do any form of distance. They are wonderful for town work, but if you are doing more than 100 miles, you are still compromised.
Alan Brown
Q
Quentin Willson: I would rather spend that money on the NHS. Here is an irony: we talk constantly about air quality, but in the MOT, there is no proper smoke test, although it is called a smoke test. The particulates come out the back, and the MOT examiner will fail the car if it loses rearward visibility. If you cannot see out the back when the car is accelerating, it fails. That is why you see all these cars puffing out black particulates. If we stiffened up the MOT with a proper particulate test and then automatically scrapped these cars, a lot of which are old and worn out and pollute much more than we realise, we would not have to finance a scrappage scheme. Consumers would realise, “This car is knackered; it’s got to go anyway.” But at the moment, there is no mandate against either petrol or diesel cars that really pollute.
Again, on the air quality debate, I am not sure that we will solve urban air quality with electrification alone. Even though we get massive amounts of people driving electric cars in cities, we still have 30% of particulate and NOx from industrial combustion, 20% from domestic combustion, 14% from ground machinery such as diggers, trucks, dumpers and cranes—these are London Assembly figures—5% from HGVs, 8% from vans and 9% from buses. We do not know the contributions from aviation and shipping. Certainly in London, with 20 million tonnes of stuff coming in on the Thames tidal, the fact that that is not even quantified worries me greatly. We do not want the unintended consequences of this not to affect air quality significantly and, in the meantime, blow the GDP of a generation while doing it. That is my worry. The fact that we do not know enough about this, and that it is being pushed and pushed and terrifying consumers, is of great concern to me.
Rosie Duffield
Q
Quentin Willson: That group of car enthusiasts is quite small now. It is a very small percentage of the market. Most of us just see the grim business of getting from A to B as a necessity. As I said earlier, the idea of the open road with your Porsche 911 is a golden age that has passed. The Tesla P100D is the fastest accelerating car in the world. It does nought to 60 in 2.4 seconds. It is faster than a Ferrari, which is great. But in terms of mainstream electric cars, I think it will be a while before your hardcore car enthusiast really likes them. We have a big Clarksonesque blockage here—he does not like electric cars or the people who drive them—but I think he is an irrelevance and so are those car enthusiasts.
Our concern should be mainstream consumers who have to get to work, to school, to the shops and to hospitals. We have to make it easy, effective and inexpensive for them but also give them that range. Until we get rid of range anxiety through better infrastructure and battery technology, that will not happen. What will happen is that they will buy hybrids that will do 20 or 30 miles on electric but the rest on petrol. That does not really solve the problem, does it? The people in the Mitsubishi Outlanders who hog all the charging stations will do maybe 20 miles on electricity and the rest on petrol. Again, that is something we need to manage. We need to look at the far reaching, perhaps unintended, consequences of the decisions that we are making now.
Mr Hayes
Q
Quentin Willson: I agree. The older classic cars are a tiny proportion and their emissions are a raindrop echoing in an ocean because they are used so seldom—some for only 200 miles a year. We should not worry about them.
Mass electrification is coming, but until I see a step change in battery technology, we will not be able to give consumers the beatific vision of 300 to 350 miles to one 40-minute charge. Will that come by 2040? I do not know. You have heard from the car manufacturers. Will we be able to accelerate that technology? It is good that the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has given the 2040 cut-off date, because up to now they have broadly been compliance cars made to keep emissions down for EU regulations. Manufacturers will be throwing everything they can at developing batteries, but someone like Jaguar Land Rover does not really have any electric product at all, and Mini has only just scrambled together one electric Mini that does not have a brilliant range. They have a lot of work to do to get to that level. It has taken us 100 years to get to the efficiency of the combustion engine as we have it now. I know innovation is not linear and it will start to climb up, but we need to understand that if we do not give consumers that 300 to 350 mile range, it is going to be very difficult. You see Teslas strolling down the motorways, because they do 250 miles to one charge. That is great, but you never see a Nissan Leaf—think about it.
Mr Hayes
Q
Quentin Willson: Completely. We have a lot more consumer awareness to do. I will be doing events with a shopping centre group across the country where we have consumers coming and they have test drives of all these electric cars, plus everything you ever wanted to know about electric cars but never dared to ask, on stage. Go Ultra Low and OLEV do great work; I think we could do even more, but we could also incentivise universities to come up with technology. Danny Alexander and I talked about a battery prize of £10 million. Let us make it £50 million for the real world-class development of a battery that is lightweight and not dependent on rare earth metals. Half the cobalt in the world is in the Democratic Republic of Congo—that terrifies me.
If you can come up with the technology that creates this new, wonderful, miracle battery, then we lead the world and a lot of these problems just disappear, but we need to accelerate that process. The two things—the infrastructure and the battery technology—really need to run, because at the moment we are running too fast with this, because the technology is lagging behind. It is absolutely laudable that we do what we do and put the legislation in place and prepare consumers, but we have to make sure that that technology can support long journeys.
I am afraid you cannot expect consumers just to charge at home at night. They cannot do it. They will want to make journeys. This morning I got into my Nissan Leaf; I had 80 miles on the charge after an overnight charge. It was cold, so I had to defrost the windscreen and put the heater on. I took my daughter to school. The charge went down to 55 miles. If I wanted to go anywhere else, I would have to stop at the end of the 55 miles and charge for 40 minutes, if I could find a rapid charger. If I could not, I would have to do two or three hours. Realistically, we cannot expect consumers to do this in the short to medium term.
The Chair
Thank you very much for your evidence, Mr Willson. As the owner of a beloved 25 year-old BMW, I am grateful that classic cars have a future. Sir Greg Knight will be even more grateful as he is the owner of several vintage cars.
Examination of Witnesses
Denis Naberezhnykh and Stan Boland gave evidence.
The Chair
Welcome. Would you like to introduce yourselves, please?
Stan Boland: I am Stan Boland. I am the CEO of a start-up company called FiveAI. We are building a driverless car system, which we hope to trial in London by the end of 2019.
Denis Naberezhnykh: My name is Denis Naberezhnykh. I am head of ultra low emission vehicles and energy at the Transport Research Laboratory. We work with industry and Government to help to introduce new technologies such as electric and automated vehicles.
Karl Turner
Q
Stan Boland: Safety is the start and finish of whether we can bring these cars on to the streets. A huge amount of attention will be focused on making these vehicles safe, in our case, for use in urban environments, where we will have all sorts of obstacles and agents with all sorts of different behaviours. That really centres on having systems that are able to perceive what is in the scene accurately in 360° and three dimensions and classify what those objects are.
This also talks to predicting what will happen next. We actually have to predict human behaviour, and we have to learn what those behaviours might be ahead of time. Our vehicles will certainly have to be state of the art for perception, but they will also have to be very good at predicting human behaviours. In the case where we identify an object and can tell, just like a human can, that this person, cyclist or whatever it turns out to be has a certain type of behaviour, we will have learnt those ahead of time, and if we are not sure, we will have to propagate that uncertainty through our software and slow down.
The behaviour of these vehicles will be slightly different to that of human drivers, but it will be possible to attain the levels of human safety, and in the long term surpass them, by applying technology. Our systems can pay attention in 360° all the time, and that makes it a bit different to human drivers.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: We are kind of hoping that we can operate at normal driving speeds. To be able to do that, it is important that we can predict behaviours. We cannot have a system that is collision-avoidance only, because that would result in frozen robots all over the city and would make congestion worse. What we humans do is anticipate human action. We actually run more than one world in our heads, and are constantly looking to see whether that world is turning into reality or some other world is going to happen. That allows us to merge on to full lanes of traffic, for instance. We cannot just have a system that is collision-avoidance only, because we would make traffic worse. The idea is that we are operating in normal streets with normal road signs at normal road speeds and obtaining and exceeding human levels of safety.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: At that point it is a trial, so there is a safety driver in the car. The safety driver is able to take control of the vehicle immediately.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: Yes. The safety driver has to be there, literally able to take control of the car instantly.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: You are describing what is called level 3 autonomy, which is a system where the car is under automated control and then there is a warning to give a human driver time—there is a debate about what that warning time should be—and then the human is meant to take over. We think that system is intrinsically unsafe. It is much better if either the human is in control or the system is in control—that is a fully automated, level 4 or level 5 system. We are building a system where the cognitive capability of the car is in control, but for the purpose of testing, until it is actually legal to offer that service, there will always be a driver in the car who can take over instantly.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: While we are testing it. We are talking about a period when we are testing the capability of the vehicle in our existing cities. It is level 4—a highly automated or fully autonomous system—but for the period between now and a regulatory capability of doing this and, moreover, underwriting the risk of it, we have to have a driver in the car to take over.
Clive Efford
Q
Stan Boland: As long as there is a safety driver who can take over the car. That is not the same as somebody watching a Harry Potter movie while the car is self-driving. We are talking about a qualified driver who is paying full attention to the road scene all the time and can take over.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: No, that would be a definition of level 5 in our parlance: something that could literally drive anywhere on the planet and be able to work out what every object was, what the semantics of every scene was, and the human behaviour in that part of the world, so we are definitely not saying that.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: No, I think it would stop in that case. In the behavioural model, we were able to bring up a system that works in a defined geography and in defined driving conditions, but if one day the place is completely wiped out with snow, we probably would not drive on that day. Our business model is to deliver a service. It is a service model.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: No, that is not the model at all. First, you would not buy one of these cars. This is a shared form of mobility that is offered in cities. You would not buy it because the sensors and the compute you have to put in that car make that prohibitively expensive. It adds some £30,000 to the car.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: City-only vehicles.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: Probably all days of the year, but there may be times when humans probably should not be driving, frankly. In those conditions our vehicles would not stop just like that, because that would be unsafe, but they would be able to be carefully brought to a slowdown to stop safely.
Sir Oliver Letwin
Q
Stan Boland: If you like, yes. We think there will in any case be remote supervision so that it would be possible for a control centre to be able to monitor any cars that are stopped and then perhaps carefully move them to some other place. We are expecting a remote control room with perhaps one per 30 cars or something that would be able to take over and carefully manage the car. We are also expecting the cars to have a limp-home system, so if there is a catastrophic failure there would be a limited amount of capability where the vehicles could—at quite a low speed and with warnings—find their way back to a service centre.
Mr Hayes
Q
There is another view that we may go straight to a kind of autonomous vehicle. Indeed I have looked at some of the R and D on that. As you may know, there is an entirely autonomous vehicle at Greenwich supported by Greenwich council, with some Government funding too. That is a vehicle that travels on a straight run of road that is entirely autonomous. You get into it, and it does what it says on the tin. Which of the two scenarios is the most likely, in your view? Or are they most likely to develop in parallel?
Stan Boland: They are developing in parallel today, so I think that is the state of affairs. The first of those can be characterised as the view of the German car industry, which is that these things will happen, but in 2035 or 2040. In the meantime we can just keep adding these features, keep selling people more features, and keep selling cars that people buy. However, I think the world was really shaken up by the challenges we saw in the 2000s and the emergency of Google cars and so on, as well as the idea that it was within touching distance for science to deliver fully autonomous capability in a relatively meaningful timeframe.
That really is the difference between level 2 and level 3 autonomy and what is really a huge jump to level 4 and level 5. Our entire business is predicated on level 4 and level 5 being the dominant model. We think that that is the dominant model for getting to a situation of safety in an urban environment. Significant amounts of algorithms, computer models, training data and sensors are involved in achieving this, which will considerably increase the cost of the car. We estimate that getting the car to human levels of safety will add a further £30,000 to £40,000 to its cost. That is not a car that people buy. That is definitely a service, and if it is a service then it is fully autonomous.
Mr Hayes
Q
Stan Boland: It is impossible to test all of that in the real world, and it would not be safe to do so. It has to be done as a simulation, which is the key to getting to the point where we have safe systems that can operate in our cities. We have to be able to simulate all the sensors on the car and all the different failure modes and so on. We have to simulate all the cases where our predicted models break down, or where somebody in the distance who is wearing a green pullover against a green wall with a reflective window near it cannot, for whatever reason, be seen in our systems. We have to be able to simulate those kinds of things—perception failures. We also have to simulate the extent to which we may not be able to predict human behaviours. We may never have seen a particular behavioural type before, and it may be dissimilar to anything we have seen before.
We have to do all that in simulations, so the money is invested in creating a simulated world that may be like the whole of London, photo-accurate for example, and it may be that we create generative models that allow us to create every angle of a road—instead of 43 degrees, it is 44, 45 or 46. Instead of five objects, there are six; instead of a certain kind of road markings, they are slightly different. We can basically generate all that in simulations, so we can drive potentially billions of miles in simulation ahead of that software actually going in a vehicle and being sent out on the road. That is the way we can really assure the safety of those vehicles—a heavy investment in simulation. It turns out that the UK is good at that. The UK is good at artificial intelligence, gaming and simulation, so we are in a good position to do that.
Mr Hayes
Q
Stan Boland: Exactly. We will find real cases in the real world which we will codify. We are working with TRL to do that, to deliver a curated set of regression test cases.
Mr Hayes
Q
The Chair
We will have to have Ministers with proper skills in future too. Sorry, Mr Boland, please answer the question—that was just a facetious remark. This must be the last answer, because we might have multiple Divisions.
Stan Boland: We definitely need more software engineers as a nation anyway, so we are probably not ready for any of this in terms of the total number of skills that we need to go alongside companies the size of Silicon Valley companies, but I think there is a kind of rarity about what—[Interruption.]
The Chair
Order. Thank you. I apologise, but we have been interrupted.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Andrew Stephenson.)
Nuclear Safeguards Bill (First sitting)
Tuesday 31st October 2017
(7 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Nuclear Safeguards Act 2018 View all Nuclear Safeguards Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 31 October 2017 - (31 Oct 2017)
The Chair
Before we begin, I have a few little parish notices. First, for all the activities that we indulge in when considering the Bill, both here and in the Committee Room, the orders of procedure are precisely the same as in the main Chamber—for example, no eating and drinking; preferably jackets on, unless it is extremely warm, in which case Members may consider taking them off; ties, of course, are now optional, but I always wear mine; and I tend to be a little on the conservative side and maintain standards. Time Witness Until no later than 10.00 am Office for Nuclear Regulation Until no later than 11.25 am Nuclear Industry Association; Prospect Law Until no later than 2.30 pm EDF Energy Until no later than 3.00 pm Prospect; Unite Until no later than 3.30 pm Professor Juan Matthews, Visiting Professor, Dalton Nuclear Institute
We will talk through the procedure later. This stage, for those who have not done it before, is rather like a Select Committee. You are bringing witnesses in front of you to inquire of them their expert knowledge about what is in the Bill. It is different from a Select Committee in the sense that you are not quizzing them, holding them to account or giving them a tough time; you are seeking to extract the maximum benefit from their evidence. This is not party political; it is like a consensual Select Committee.
The Bill is very narrowly drafted. It is about a particular subject, not the entire spectrum of what Euratom does or stands for. We will be reasonably strict about trying to keep people within the terms of the Bill, so that they do not ramble widely. We now have a couple of formalities to deal with.
Ordered,
That—
(1) the Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 9.25 am on Tuesday 31 October) meet—
(a) at 2.00 pm on Tuesday 31 October;
(b) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 2 November;
(c) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 7 November;
(d) at 9.25 am and 2.00 pm on Tuesday 14 November;
(e) at 11.30 am and 2.00 pm on Thursday 16 November;
(2) the Committee shall hear oral evidence on Tuesday 31 October in accordance with the following Table:
TABLE
(3) proceedings on consideration of the Bill in Committee shall be taken in the following order: Clause 1; the Schedule; Clauses 2 to 5; new Clauses; new Schedules; remaining proceedings on the Bill;
(4) the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 5.00 pm on Thursday 16 November. —(Richard Harrington.)
Ordered,
That, subject to the discretion of the Chair, any written evidence received by the Committee shall be reported to the House for publication.—(Richard Harrington.)
The Chair
Copies of written evidence that the Committee receives will be made available in the Committee Room, and all the papers are on the table behind you.
Ordered,
That, at this and any subsequent meeting at which oral evidence is to be heard, the Committee shall sit in private until the witnesses are admitted.—(Richard Harrington.)
The Chair
We will now discuss the general line of questioning during this sitting. Let us try to do that reasonably briefly, because we do not have much time. As soon as we have agreed what questions we want to ask, we will have the witnesses and the public in to start the sitting.
The Chair
If Members of the Committee have interests to declare, they should please do so now.
Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)
My husband, father and brother work at Sellafield, as well as many other family members.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
I am a member of Unite.
Examination of Witness
Dr Mina Golshan gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Dr Golshan: Thank you for that introduction. I am director and deputy chief inspector at the Office for Nuclear Regulation. My main responsibilities are Sellafield, decommissioning fuel and waste, but I am also senior responsible owner for ONR’s work in relation to establishing a state system of nuclear materials accounting and control.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Richard Harrington)
Q
Dr Golshan: Establishing a domestic safeguards regime, now that the policy decision has been made that the UK will be leaving the Euratom treaty, is fundamental to the industry in the UK. It is the cornerstone of establishing nuclear co-operation agreements. It is essential for the industry to operate. Without a domestic safeguards regime in the UK that works in line with the International Atomic Energy Agency requirements, the industry simply will not be able to operate.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Dr Golshan: Perhaps I should start by saying that, given our membership of Euratom, it has not been necessary for the UK and ONR to build capacity and resilience in this area. Now that we are in a different position, we have started to recruit. The first phase of recruitment is complete. We successfully recruited four individuals, three of whom have already started with us. An area of shortage for us was subject matter expertise. That was a worry for me, but I am pleased to say that we will hopefully be in a position to rectify that by the middle of this month.
Broadly, we need to continue with our recruitment if we are to staff ourselves in order to deliver the new safeguards function. In the first instance we need an additional 10 to 12 inspectors, which will bring us to a level that allows the UK to fulfil its international obligations, but we have already heard from the Secretary of State that the intention is to put in place a regime that is equivalent to Euratom. That will require ONR to recruit further and will mean around 20 additional inspectors. We know that we are dealing with a limited pool of expertise, and our success so far, although encouraging, is by no means the end of the story.
The Chair
Dr Golshan, can I ask you to speak up slightly, because this is a very large room and we are having trouble hearing you. I am getting older—you know how it is.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Dr Golshan: May I start by saying that we do not have the responsibility for CNC; we regulate civil nuclear security. We currently have a safeguards function, as set out in the Energy Act 2013, but it is not a regulatory function. The main purpose of that function is to facilitate the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Euratom in the UK, among other things. The Bill will give us the powers, on a par with safety and security, to regulate nuclear safeguards on civil nuclear sites.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
Dr Golshan: We have a small project team that helps us deliver this function. I have a project manager and a project lead, and we have interactions with our human resources department and our IT department, which in itself is a small group. We need to grow this project team in the first instance to enable the project to deliver and go forward. All in all, we have five key people in the project team—project manager, delivery lead, policy lead, myself and a subject matter expert—and the team overall has links with the HR department and so on, as I described. We will need to grow this project team to help us deliver when we come to 29 March 2019, and we are in the process of doing so.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
Q
Dr Golshan: It is fair to say that this is unprecedented territory for us as far as the size of the job is concerned. In the past we have not had to establish a new function from afresh to this extent, but we have got experience of setting out and working with officials from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—and previously the Department for Energy and Climate Change—to bring forward new regulation.
We are working closely with officials at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and we have engaged with the industry—I have had a number of meetings with the industry. We are explaining what we are doing, how far we have gone down this route and what there is left to do. We are working with all our stakeholders to make a success of this.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Dr Golshan: Let me break it into two bits. Our intention is to start recruiting in the new year for the additional 10 to 12 people we will require. The reason is that we were waiting for the Second Reading of the Bill to give us some certainty in relation to the people we are going to take on permanently. That process will start. In relation to your next question, on Euratom’s numbers, for its own purposes, Euratom carries out activities in the UK that, as a state delivering an equivalent regime, we would not need to deliver. The order of 20 to 25 is not far from what we need to staff ourselves to deliver this function.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Paul Blomfield
Can you give us a little more understanding of the talent pool from which you are drawing, the recruitment opportunities and the training needs there might be to fulfil the skills needs you anticipate?
Dr Golshan: As I mentioned at the beginning, although these do not seem like large numbers, we are dealing with a limited talent pool here: the expertise is unique. As I said, the UK as a whole has not had to focus on developing resilience in this area, so we are limited in what and who we can recruit.
The next step, if we are getting the right expertise in these people, is to turn them into regulators and inspectors. That means that our training function—training materials and expertise in training these individuals—needs to develop. We have started that process, but it is a long road and I am not going to sit here and pretend that it is all going to be a smooth run.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Dr Golshan: Our aim, currently, is to have a system in place that enables the UK to fulfil its international obligations by March 2019, which is when we intend to leave Euratom. I have been very clear in the past—I will repeat it here—that we will not be able to replicate Euratom standards on day one. That is unrealistic, and given the scale of what needs to be put in place, I fear that if we go that way, the best will become the enemy of the good. So it is important that we focus our efforts on delivering a regime that enables the UK to meet its international obligations.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
Q
Dr Golshan: There are a number of aspects. The first one is to ensure that the secondary legislation is in place at the right time, because that provides us with the mechanisms to exercise our powers. The Bill itself is an enabling part—it gives us the fundamental powers—and the secondary legislation gives us the mechanisms to deliver. Secondary legislation will also give us some certainty in relation to what guidance and standards we need to develop to make this happen.
For us, we need to have an IT system; a safeguards information management system. It is a live system that enables us to get data from our licensees, to process those data and to put them into a reporting format that the IAEA currently receives from Euratom. We are working on that; it is at proof of concept stage at the moment. Once we have established that we are able to do it, we will need to move into a phase that determines whether we are going to do it in-house, tender it out, or have a combination of the two.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
Q
Dr Golshan: I should say that, on negotiating nuclear co-operation agreements and completing the discussions with IAEA and Euratom, although we provide advice to the Government, it is not for me to sit here and determine or estimate a timetable. It is really strictly for the Government to conduct those negotiations, and I think that it is perhaps a question better answered by them.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Dr Golshan: It is fundamental to it. We need to have a basic safeguards regime—a domestic safeguards regime—in place that enables the UK to demonstrate that it is fulfilling its international obligations under various treaties. Once that is in place we will be able to demonstrate that we have a rectified domestic safeguard arrangement in place.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Dr Golshan: Yes.
Dr Whitehead
In order to demonstrate to the IAEA that we are able to fulfil a function relating to nuclear safeguards outside Euratom.
Dr Golshan: Absolutely.
Dr Whitehead
And those discussions, I understand, are proceeding at the moment but have by no means reached any conclusion. Are you confident that in terms of replicating the UK’s safeguarding function, the basic structure you have outlined to us this morning that needs to be in place will be able to fulfil its functions and, in particular, assure and satisfy the IAEA that it can safely proceed with new treaty arrangements with the UK?
Dr Golshan: Yes is the short answer. We do not have to have a regime equivalent to Euratom in order to be able to proceed with concluding those agreements and negotiations, so what the IAEA needs the UK to have in place is a domestic safeguards regime that meets its international obligations under the non-proliferation treaty and others. So although there are risks here for us to complete the work we are doing, I think it is a much more achievable objective for us to aim for, rather than replicating Euratom in the first instance. I should again emphasise that having a regime that is equivalent to Euratom is not a prerequisite to complete those agreements and negotiations.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Dr Golshan: The Bill is an enabling Bill. It gives us the broad powers in parallel with nuclear safety and security. It gives the Secretary of State the powers to make nuclear safeguards regulations. That is the secondary legislation that I referred to. In relation to what is possible at our nuclear sites—
Trudy Harrison
Q
Dr Golshan: There is a nuclear co-operation agreement and there are a number of states that, as a matter of policy, will not engage with a third country that does not have a safeguards regime in place. So our aim, and the Government’s aim, is to establish a nuclear co-operation agreement with these states as a matter of priority. We are advising the Government and providing subject matter expertise. As to what will be possible on nuclear sites, we will continue to provide reports to the IAEA; that is a fundamental aspect of what a safeguards regime needs to deliver. As I said, the safeguards information management system that we will be putting in place is fundamental to achieve that.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Dr Golshan: I cannot comment on how long it should be; I think that depends on the scope of the negotiations and what can be achieved within the timescales we have left. From our perspective, a transitional arrangement will be extremely helpful. It will enable us to have parallel working arrangements in place with Euratom to conclude the discussions that we need to have with it, first, to understand what activities it currently undertakes on nuclear sites, but also the Secretary of State has mentioned that there should not be any weakening of standards in the UK following our departure from Euratom. The transitional period, as I see it, will seek to achieve that.
Dan Carden
Q
The Chair
As a very tough Chairman, I am going to say that we are not allowed to discuss things that are not in the Bill; we can only discuss those things that are in the Bill. Therefore, no matter what your thoughts on that subject may be, I am very sorry, but you will have to raise them in another Bill Committee at some other time. I am sorry—I hope people do not mind—but we have got to keep to what is actually in the Bill itself.
Andrew Lewer (Northampton South) (Con)
Q
Dr Golshan: Numerous examples—a Canadian regulator, the US regulator, the Swiss regulator, and even though Finland is out of the European Union and part of the Euratom treaty, given that safeguarding is the responsibility of state, the Finnish regulator sees itself as being responsible for providing assurance to the state in that regard.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Dr Golshan: I think that is probably a question better answered by our legal colleagues, but that aside, I am aware that the Euratom treaty provides for associate memberships, either as a whole or in particular aspects, and that article 206 of the treaty in particular facilitates that. However, I am not an expert on that and I think it would be inappropriate to comment as to whether an association membership is possible or on how it would be possible.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Dr Golshan: I think that is primarily probably a question for those individuals, and more broadly for the Government, to negotiate with Euratom. As far as I understand it, however, the number of these inspectors is no more than a handful and we will need significantly more than that, as I explained earlier. It is a matter of choice for them. If they wish to join the regulator—ONR—then I am sure that we will be more than happy to absorb them.
The Chair
Unless there are further questions from colleagues, I thank you very much, Dr Golshan, for your excellent and most interesting information, and indeed for expressing it in such careful, precise and brief terms, which gives us an extra five or 10 minutes for the following panel. So thank you very much indeed for coming.
Dr Golshan: It was a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Examination of Witnesses
Tom Greatrex, Jonathan Leech and Rupert Cowan gave evidence.
The Chair
I welcome the next panel to give evidence, and—without meaning any disrespect to the other two gentlemen—I particularly welcome back our former colleague, Tom Greatrex. Good to see you back here. You probably remember the tough time that you gave me at various times—you are going to get a tough time, too. Welcome to the other members of the panel, from Prospect Law. We have until 11.25 am, which is a reasonable time; but we will have to stop at 11.25 even if we are speaking, so I will try to wrap up a little bit before. First, I ask the three witnesses to introduce yourselves and, if you wish, to give a brief introduction to your thoughts on the Bill.
Rupert Cowan: I am Rupert Cowan, with Prospect Law. My background is advising, as a lawyer, the nuclear industry, providers of services, operators and generators. I am a very worried lawyer at the moment, having seen the Second Reading debate, and I am concerned that, despite the obvious excellent progress that ONR is making towards introducing a safeguards regime, that regime on its own will not enable the industry to continue to operate without interruption.
Jonathan Leech: I am also a lawyer specialising in nuclear law and regulation, working with industry. In terms of my initial views on the Bill, as far as it goes it is, of course, merely an enabling power. One thing I did want to lay out, though, is that it is emphatically not a contingency. Unless we have a radical change in direction of travel now, we will need it; it is not something that can be set aside. I am sure we will come back to discuss that in further detail. I also have some views on the scope of the powers that the Bill confers. But the real task will lie in the secondary legislation, how that is implemented, and how that relates to the nuclear co-operation agreements that we will need before any exit from Euratom, if we are not to disrupt the industry.
Tom Greatrex: Tom Greatrex. I am not a lawyer; I am the chief executive of the Nuclear Industry Association, which is the trade body for the UK civil nuclear industry, representing 260-plus companies across the supply chain. The industry concern is very similar to that just expressed by my two colleagues—namely, that the Bill does one small part of a whole range of things that need to be done to ensure there is not disruption as a process of leaving Euratom. I am, similarly, intrigued by the ministerial comments in the Second Reading debate, particularly around this being a contingency, because that is something different from what we have been discussing to date. My overall concern is that we need to do a whole range of different things, not just what is in the Bill, to ensure that we have a position that avoids any disruption to activity in the civil nuclear industry.
Richard Harrington
Q
Tom Greatrex: If we are to have a domestic safeguarding arrangement and system, we will need to have the power conveyed to the ONR to undertake that role. I have described the Bill before as being a necessary legislative step. It is; but obviously, a whole range of other steps need to come after that, which are contingent upon it. That is where the majority of the concern lies.
Rupert Cowan: May I add to that? Emphatically yes, it is necessary to pass a Bill that puts in place a domestic safeguards regime. The Bill is a step towards achieving that. But what needs not to be lost is that the terms of that Bill, and the secondary legislation that it creates the opportunity to provide, must also be in terms that do not prevent those that we currently have nuclear co-operation agreements with courtesy of Euratom, continuing to co-operate with us. There is a very substantial concern among those that want to be our friends and continue to co-operate with us, and those that may not—who, for slightly more opaque reasons, do not want to make it easy to continue to co-operate with us—that the Bill, as it stands, will not allow a safeguards regime that is neutral in its application to the commercial parties that are participating in the industry. We have given you a note; if you read the end of it you will see that, although we are not entitled to, we are suggesting a possible amendment that you might consider to achieve that neutrality. It is in paragraph 4.
The Chair
Q
Jonathan Leech: Obviously, the Government’s stated intent appears to be to replicate, as far as possible, the current safeguarding regulatory regime that we have in place with Euratom. In a sense, all we should be looking for in the Bill, as a piece of enabling legislation, is to see wording that allows that to happen. Our concern around the way that power is expressed is that it appears currently to be written more from the perspective of the IAEA voluntary offer safeguarding agreement text than the Euratom treaty text. You might argue it is a fairly subtle distinction, but if we are seeking to replicate what we have, I would suggest that a good place to start is the high-level requirements of the treaty, which talk in terms of not diverting from declared use, and those at least should be considered as an additional scope that would be brought within the power, rather than purely focusing on material being diverted from civil activities. Hence the wording that we have proposed in the note is rooted in the treaty and would not take anything away from current scope, but would merely ensure that it is within the power to replicate.
Alex Norris
Q
Jonathan Leech: No.
Rupert Cowan: Absolutely not.
Jonathan Leech: There are obviously links between the two. There are statements in the treaty that article 50 does apply to the Euratom treaty, but there are sound legal arguments available that it is not an automatic consequence and in fact you have to follow a separate but similar process to exit Euratom. In a sense we have moved beyond that, to the extent that the withdrawal notice makes express reference to Euratom, so to the extent that there are two separate processes, we have already triggered both of them. That has maybe put us in a more difficult position in negotiating a potential extension period or remainder within Euratom, which would alleviate a lot of the concerns around the current two-year timetable, which creates some serious problems for the industry. The advice would be that you do not have to accept this and it may not be in your interests to do so.
Rupert Cowan: I would add, the Minister has made statements—
The Chair
Briefly, as we are starting to get outside the scope of the Bill.
Rupert Cowan: Fair enough.
The Chair
By all means comment briefly if you wish to—I would not want to be declared a tyrant—but I would stick to the terms of the Bill, which is nuclear safeguards, rather than the extempore bits.
Rupert Cowan: Fine. The point that lies within the Bill and should be connected to the question is that the next step chronologically is to renegotiate the nuclear co-operation agreements. Unless the Bill provides a basis for safeguards, which gives reasons to those that do not wish to co-operate easily with us to co-operate, then you will find renegotiation very difficult.
The Chair
That will be a matter for another day. I tend to be quite strict with the Committee because it is a topic that can spread its wings in a whole variety of different areas. We are tasked by the House of Commons simply with discussing the terms and the wording of the Bill, rather than the wider consequences or circumstances.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: Not necessarily.
Jonathan Leech: There is no question of that material being sent back.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Jonathan Leech: It is the UK’s responsibility.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Jonathan Leech: Ownership will transfer to the UK on exit from Euratom.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Jonathan Leech: I think technically that material belongs to Euratom at the moment.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: That is the effect of the treaty.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: It is difficult to answer that question and remain entirely within the Bill, so I expect that James Gray will jump at me.
The Chair
You may digress very slightly, but don’t get too carried away.
Rupert Cowan: Essentially, the safeguards regime is the first step. The second step is the replacement of the existing nuclear co-operation agreements with the jurisdictions that have them with us, notably the European Union, the United States, Korea and Japan. If Euratom is no longer included in our safeguards regime, each of those agreements must be renegotiated, and each of them will require a substantial resource to achieve that. For example, America requires a section 123 agreement under the US Atomic Energy Act. If there are any members that—for their own reasons—do not immediately wish to agree, they can rely on the fact that the safeguards are different from the Euratom safeguards, and say, “We are not able to agree a nuclear co-operation agreement with you yet,” or “in the future,” depending on what is driving them.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: Absolutely.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: Correct, and nothing that we are saying suggests that this Bill should not go forward, save for the amendment we suggested, which would make those negotiations more straightforward.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Jonathan Leech: May I first go back to the point about the Bill being a contingency? It is very important that the Bill is no sense a contingency.
The Chair
Perhaps you could speak up a little. We are having slight difficulty hearing you.
Jonathan Leech: The Bill is in no sense a contingency, unless we get into a position where we simply do not need our own domestic safeguards regime. Otherwise, it is necessary—it is essential. We have to have it, and we have to have it now. We need the secondary legislation on the table as soon as possible, if not now, and then we need the resource within ONR that we heard about earlier. Critically, it is not just that we need all that in place at the end of the two-year period; we also need to be able to demonstrate that to all those we seek to negotiate replacement nuclear co-operation agreements with, so that we can also have those agreements in place seamlessly at the end of the two-year period.
There is another point to clarify in relation to the role of the IAEA. We are not negotiating nuclear co-operation agreements with the IAEA; we have to negotiate with them on the voluntary offer agreement. Those negotiations are progressing, but I suspect that they are not negotiations that will be critical from a time perspective; it will be the negotiations of the nuclear co-operation agreements, and there we are at the mercy of political will in any number of counterpart states. That is where it becomes extremely uncertain as to whether it is even possible to have those things in place within that timescale. Certainly, to stand any chance of that, we should be in a position today to say, “These are our proposed regulations, this is our resource, this is where we are with IAEA. Can we start talking to you seriously about an NCA?” It is not enough to be able to say, “This is our enabling legislation.” We need to be a long way ahead of this if we are going to have any chance of meeting that two-year timescale.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Tom Greatrex: It could do. You heard from the ONR earlier about the attractiveness of having a period of parallel working. That is in relation to the safeguarding activity and carrying out that function. It is a similar position with relation to co-operation agreements which currently exist under the Euratom umbrella. So the nuclear co-operation agreement we currently have with the US is as a member of Euratom. We will need to have a bilaterally negotiated nuclear co-operation agreement in the future, because it is a legislative requirement in the US and I am sure you will hear from others in evidence about why that is so critically important to particular power stations and projects. Enabling there to be a position where you are covered by the Euratom nuclear co-operation agreement while a bilateral nuclear co-operation agreement is finalised, agreed and put in place is exactly the kind of transitional arrangement or contingency or parallel working—whichever choice of words you want to use for broadly the same thing—is something that the industry has said is very desirable. You have also heard from the ONR that this will help them in the work they will be tasked to do as a result of the provisions of this Bill.
Jonathan Leech: May I add a thought on the concept of associate membership and the extent to which we can rely on that? Of course, the nuclear co-operation agreements we are talking about are agreements with Euratom for the benefit of Euratom members, who are fully subscribed to all the obligations and commitments that entails, including acceptance of all Euratom regulation, including acceptance of European Court of Justice jurisdiction. When we come to look at the transitional phase, we should certainly not assume that all counterparts of those co-operation agreements with Euratom would accept that they should somehow continue to apply to the UK if the UK is something other than a fully subscribed Euratom member. So when we talk about associate membership or a third state of some sort and other examples around, that we can see where others have relationships with Euratom, that in itself would not solve the immediate need to ensure that we have the co-operation agreements in place that we need.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Secondly, we might move down the line of a transitional arrangement, in order to get to the position—not at a more leisurely pace, but at a rather more possible pace —of possible complete rupture with Euratom, but in circumstances in which we might have got NCAs in place in a reasonably orderly way. What, in your view, are the realistic prospects of going down one or other of those routes in the sort of time that we have in front of us?
The Chair
Again, we need a brief answer, because we are drifting slightly wide of the terms of the Bill. We have plenty of time, but even so.
Rupert Cowan: Let me bring it within the terms of the Bill, to make you feel happy, Mr Gray. Obviously the Bill enables those discussions, as has been described, but the chances of being able to follow either of those routes successfully before March 2018 are zero. The possibility of associate membership is not zero but that possibility, having been fulfilled if counterparties are willing to allow it, would not allow us either the opportunity or the time to negotiate the necessary co-operation agreements with the important counterparty jurisdictions that we need.
The second alternative that you suggest is of maintaining full membership for a period, so maybe it could be extended by two years with a sudden cut-off being agreed, and being able during that two-year extension to renegotiate NCAs. That is probably the most practical and preferable solution, but whether or not members of Euratom would be prepared to allow the UK to do that is a very different question.
Unfortunately, it is inevitable that we will be faced with discussions about renegotiating our NCAs with key counterparties who are neither motivated to agree quickly nor able to, because of their own international obligations of recognising the adequacy of our safeguarding arrangements, and there will be a point at which they cease to apply under Euratom, with consequences that remain to be seen.
I mean, I cannot imagine the United States immediately withdrawing its expertise from the various sites, but it may choose to. Similarly, Korea is a very important counterparty. Once the agreement comes to an end, the opportunity of persuading Korea to invest in Moorside goes away from us.
Mary Robinson
Q
Rupert Cowan: In terms of research, which is a separate issue, it is fundamental. All the joint research—the Joint European Torus and so forth—is predicated on membership of Euratom, and the funding arrangements are a subset of the arrangements of the Euratom members. At the moment, it will stop, and unless central Government funding is made available people will return home.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Rupert Cowan: Well, it is the article 50 notice. [Interruption.] Did I say 2018? I meant 2019—apologies.
Dr Whitehead
Okay. Assuming we did mean 2019, if we are not in a position—even if we are reasonably close to a position—where we have done all the secondary legislation arrangements for nuclear safeguarding, but we have not made too much progress in a number of other areas relating to transposing Euratom responsibilities to the UK, and/or a number of those NCAs are in a difficult position as far as their conclusion is concerned, what would be the effect on the nuclear industry at that point?
Rupert Cowan: It is very difficult to project, but it does mean that, unlike other industries, trade has to stop—trade in materials, in intellectual property and in people, as in intellectual property. For example, you can imagine that the French, if they were in a bad mood, might choose to drag their feet, because in consequence they would be able to take a monopoly of fuel retreatment from Japan, which currently sends some to the UK and some to France. Who is to know that that will not happen? The European Union will not see us as friends and will not seek to bend over backwards to find accommodation for a nuclear co-operation agreement. It is probably going to be a very slow and difficult arrangement.
One thing that needs to be in place to achieve any progress is a safeguards arrangement that is at least as good as Euratom’s. Currently, the Bill as drafted insinuates that there is a window for it to be less than Euratom, because it goes to IAEA rather than Euratom guidance. Hence the words that we are offering for someone to propose as an amendment, so that in those negotiations you can say, hand on heart, that there will be no dilution, and therefore no commercial advantage to the UK, as a result of our having a domestic safeguards arrangement rather than a Euratom safeguards arrangement.
Tom Greatrex: Let me add that if, as has been stated, the Government’s intention is to replicate the Euratom standards and arrangements, you will have heard from the ONR earlier that it will not be possible to implement that at the end of March 2019. That is the crux of the industry’s concern about there being sufficient time to enable the new UK regime to be in place. The Bill does just the very first part of enabling that to start to happen. It does not solve the issue; there are a whole range of things that have to happen as a consequence of the Bill and other remits that need to be struck, which is why people are concerned about a very real-time pressure.
Jonathan Leech: The very first step would be to make absolutely certain that the Bill gives the power to create the regulatory regime that is equivalent to Euratom. The second step, which needs to follow that very closely, is to ensure, by whatever means necessary, that ONR is given the resource to do what needs to be done, so that we do not face any hiatus, if indeed that is possible.
Rupert Cowan: In the safeguards regime.
Jonathan Leech: Yes, in the safeguards regime.
Rupert Cowan: Which then allows the discussions to go forward from a position of fairness and honesty; that we are not trying to dilute or change the obligations we have under Euratom, which is what others might suspect.
Jonathan Leech: When you have both of those things, you can go and speak to counterparties to the co-operation agreements you need and say, “This is what we are doing. We can lay it out on the table for you. This is the investment we are making and these are the regulations we will have in place.” If we cannot do that, they simply will not take us seriously.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Jonathan Leech: As a matter of general political process, yes, there needs to be scrutiny so that these regulations are developed now—not over the next two years, but over the next month—so that we are then in a position to take the steps that follow. In terms of the broader position, if what we are seeking to do is to replicate and preserve what is, at the moment, effectively EU regulation, then that is but one of many areas where a similar approach may be taken. It is a little more complex here because you have to untangle it from the resource of Euratom and the enforcement processes and the ECJ jurisdiction. Nevertheless, if the statement is that it is to replicate, then the objective should be just that.
In terms of the fine detail of the regulation, it is an intensely technical thing, and some sort of secondary legislation is probably the right place for it. My biggest concern would be around scrutiny of the timetable to ensure that it is not delayed in any way that will jeopardise our position at the end of the two-year process.
Tom Greatrex: I would have thought that, as Members of Parliament, you would want to be satisfied and confident that everything is in place in the timeframe in which it needs to be in place. It is obviously open to you to seek to amend the Bill in order to put that to the test.
A subsequent related point is that the industry also thinks that it is important that the Bill could be amended to ensure that the nuclear sector is consulted on the detail of that new regulation. You have to bear in mind that there will be people who will need to make sure that they can comply with that regulation, so understanding its content is vital. Getting that right—given the timeframe and the time pressures we face—is going to be critical. So there is another route to pursue to ensure not only that Parliament is satisfied, but that the industry has an opportunity to be consulted on the detail of that new regulation so that it is right first time.
Jonathan Leech: In a sense what is needed is the highest degree of openness and the widest consultation possible in the development of that regulation.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Rupert Cowan: Completely seriously. The reason for that is that each of the counterparties with whom we trade in fissile material, components, or anything else listed as sensitive and nuclear, have their own international treaty obligations. One of those obligations is that they should not trade with people who do not have safeguard arrangements in place that are at least equal to the IAEA safeguards. Unless that is complete and in place, we will not trade, and so they will not be able to continue business with us—full stop. If any members will be participating tomorrow in the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee on the economic implications for the industry, that is what will be said to you.
Richard Harrington
Q
Rupert Cowan: We support the Bill completely. We suggest the amendments for the reasons described.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Tom Greatrex: As the ONR said earlier this morning, it will not be possible to replicate the safeguarding regime on day one. If the Government have said that they intend to replicate the standards that we currently have as a member of Euratom, there is obviously a concern that we will not be in the position where we will be meeting the same standards at the point at which we leave Euratom. That is the crucial point about the need for a transitional arrangement or parallel working—there are different ways of describing what is broadly the same thing—which is to avoid that gap.
If you do not have the correct arrangements in place, as you have heard from others on the panel, the series of other arrangements that are effectively contingent on the safeguarding regime will not be able to be in place. That is why it affects absolutely everything to do with the functioning of the industry as it currently functions and has functioned for the past 40 years or more.
We can take a practical example. Because of the international nature of the nuclear industry, the Sizewell reactor currently generating power in Suffolk is based on Westinghouse technology. That technology is therefore US technology. Because of the legal requirement to have a nuclear co-operation agreement in place, there are very real—these are not scare stories—and legitimate concerns that even the ability to exchange information between the operators of the site, EDF and where the technology originates from will potentially be illegal at the point when we come out of Euratom, if we do not have successor arrangements in place or a period of time to enable the transition to be finalised and for the new regime to be put in the place.
It is not about being against the Bill. The Bill does the first step, but there are many more subsequent steps that have to be taken. The ability to do that in a very limited timeframe is the cause of the majority of the concern.
The Chair
We will discuss that in this room when we are considering subsequent Bills, no doubt.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Tom Greatrex: The question is probably better addressed to the ONR, but I think the skillsets that would give the ability to move between those different things may be limited to some extent. However, as you heard earlier, it is not unusual for domestic regulators to have responsibilities for safeguarding inspection. That happens in a number of different countries already, but Euratom effectively does that on our behalf. I do not think that in itself is particularly an issue. It is about the process of being able to move from the current situation to the new one.
In the fullness of time, if we get all these arrangements in place and there is not an interruption, and all those concerns are addressed, I do not think there is anything to suggest that the ONR would not be fully capable of doing this alongside the other things it is currently required to do. I am not sure to what extent there would be the economies of scale benefits that you suggest, because the skills involved in safeguarding inspections are quite different from assessing new reactor designs or the routine safety inspections that happen at sites around the country, such as Sellafield and others.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Rupert Cowan: They rub their hands with glee and say, “You keep it; your problem.”
Trudy Harrison
But it already is our problem.
Rupert Cowan: No, because it goes back to Japan when it has been re-cleaned. They will just say it is our problem, and that they cannot take it because they are not allowed to. You should not get the impression from what we are saying that we are in any way opposed to the Bill. It is probably correct that, ultimately, ONR being responsible for safeguarding is a positive outcome. It is the disruption that frightens us. That disruption is not a scare story, it is a very real possibility in terms of electricity generation and the ownership, safeguarding and storage of spent fuels, which would be going back to their home base—or not, depending on the particular arrangement; it is all going to stop if we do not get this organised. That is the danger.
I am not saying that we will not have resolved it in 10 years’ time, but the next two or three years look pretty bleak. That is the worry.
Jonathan Leech: We have to keep in mind that international nuclear trade depends upon international acceptability; it is very much a compliance-driven culture. It is not the case that there is a fall-back that might involve a higher tariff or whatever; it would simply be unlawful, so it would simply stop until such time as we have resolved the impasse.
The Chair
We are testing the edges of the Bill. Maybe because I want to say “sir”, I call Sir Robert Syms.
Sir Robert Syms
Q
Jonathan Leech: Correct. We should see those published as soon as possible and consulted on as widely and as soon as possible. That should happen alongside the development of the resource to deliver them.
The Chair
I am being fairly relaxed, but I want to bring it back to what is in the Bill, rather than what is not. With that in mind, I call Dr Whitehead.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Jonathan Leech: You are right into the detail of the technical regulation there. The first thing is that you need to expand the scope of those powers within the legislation, and the Bill seeks to do that. Then you need the regulation to set out exactly what is to be done, how and where, and take into account the point, which we have not really gone into, about the outcomes-based approach that the rest of our domestic nuclear regulation is based on. That will present a challenge in transcribing the regulations for use in UK law. We are probably straying from the Bill there. However, provided that we set out in the Bill an expansion of those enforcement powers, which will be an essential component of the expansion of ONR’s role, we are starting to put in place what we need to have. We need the regulation to go with it.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Jonathan Leech: In terms of how it is presented, I suggest that it is preferable to have our law on this matter collected together in one place and so to proceed by amendment, rather than by replication. If we create a whole new regime in the Bill, then we introduce the possibility of discrepancies between two similar but possibly slightly different regimes, that is generally unhelpful. To proceed by amendment to and expansion of the Energy Act 2013 is probably the right way to go.
Rupert Cowan: I see the people who are negotiating the nuclear co-operation agreements. They want to be able to refer to a clear set of guidelines, which is clearly at least as effective in safeguarding, and therefore allowing the counterparty to fulfil its international obligation, as the existing Euratom system. It needs to be easily referable to, so that you can sell it and get your deal as quickly as possible, without them taking points about the way your safeguards are drafted or presented. That should be very much in the minds of the draftsmen—that there is a commercial and pressing need to get this agreed with seven or eight foreign jurisdictions as quickly as possible, some of whom will be willing, and some of whom will be less willing, to agree your safeguards regime as adequate to fulfil their obligations. It needs to be clear, clean and saleable. That is the secondary legislation that follows from the Bill, which is why we have suggested only one amendment. The objective of the amendment is to do that, so you can go and talk to somebody in Korea or the United States and say, “This works,” and they cannot see a reason quickly why it should not. You are resourced, the regulations are clear, they apply and you can have your discussion over in months, rather than years.
The Chair
My instinct is that the Committee has found your evidence extremely useful. Unless there are any further questions, I thank you all for your extremely helpful, useful, well-informed and wide-ranging evidence. We are most grateful to you.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Rebecca Harris.)
Nuclear Safeguards Bill (Second sitting)
Tuesday 31st October 2017
(7 years ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Nuclear Safeguards Act 2018 View all Nuclear Safeguards Act 2018 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: Public Bill Committee Amendments as at 31 October 2017 - (31 Oct 2017)
The Chair
I welcome our witness for the first session this afternoon, which can last for half an hour. Angela Hepworth is the corporate policy and regulation director at EDF. Perhaps, for the record, you would be kind enough to introduce yourself. If you want to say anything about the Bill by way of introductory remarks, please do so.
Angela Hepworth: I am Angela Hepworth. I am the corporate policy and regulation director for EDF Energy. I look after our interaction with Government and with regulators in the UK, and I am also managing the company’s work on Brexit, and in particular Euratom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Richard Harrington)
Q
Angela Hepworth: I do agree. Maybe I can say something about our industrial perspective and what it means to us in the UK.
As I am sure you know, we own and operate the eight existing nuclear power stations in the UK, which provide 20% of the UK’s electricity-generating capacity. We also have plans to build a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C and then follow-on nuclear power stations. As part of that, it is vital for the existing nuclear fleet and for our new build projects that we are able to import fuel, components, services and information for the nuclear power stations. That is absolutely essential. We have a supply chain that depends on having access to those things from Europe and further afield.
In order to do that, it is essential that there is a functioning safeguards regime in place that is approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency. At the moment, as you know, that is provided by Euratom. When Euratom is no longer providing that, it is essential that we have a domestic regime that will support our ability to import those things. We see it as essential to have a safeguarding regime and therefore essential to have the Bill, to give the necessary powers to put that regime in place.
Alex Norris (Nottingham North) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
Angela Hepworth: In terms of our UK operations, we will be operating within a UK safeguarding regime. We understand that the Government’s intention is to keep the arrangements from an industry perspective quite similar to the existing arrangements that apply with Euratom. The Bill provides powers to put that regime in place. We have not seen the detail of how those arrangements will operate, but we are very keen to. We are happy, in principle, working under a domestic safeguards regime in the UK, as we have been happy working under a Euratom safeguards regime.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
Q
Angela Hepworth: On the safeguards regime first, our concern is about the amount that has to be done to have the safeguarding regime in place in time. As I say, in principle we are very happy with the idea that a domestic regime should be established, rather than the Euratom safeguards regime, but we are conscious that there is a lot to do in the time available to get that regime in place. It is not the principle of it; it is the timing and the implementation.
Likewise, we are conscious that the other key components that we need to have in place include a replacement agreement with Euratom, which would cover issues relating to the ownership of nuclear material, and our future trading relations with Europe for nuclear materials. Obviously, that is subject to the negotiations that are going on in Brussels at the moment. I have regular contact with the officials who are leading those negotiations, and we are fully aligned with the objectives they are perusing. Again, it is subject to the success of those negotiations.
There are other key things that have to be put in place. We will need nuclear co-operation agreements with key third countries. I have been told that the negotiations are under way and are progressing well. Again, our concern is the timing and how it fits with the timing of putting a safeguards regime in place. Those agreements cannot be finalised until there is certainty about the domestic safeguards regime, so it is about the timing of getting all of that done.
The other key issue for us is the movement of people. We are an international business, and the nuclear industry is an international industry. We rely on having access to experts from Europe and further afield. The roles in the company that most draw on skills from overseas are engineering roles—we are reliant on being able to draw in engineers. Building Hinkley Point will require a workforce of 25,000 people. We are doing an awful lot to try to build up skills in the UK, but we expect that, to deliver Hinkley, we will need to be able to draw on workers from overseas. I would not expect that to be solved within the Euratom arena, but that is a key issue for us as a nuclear operator.
We also have to ensure that we have got an export control regime in place and support for nuclear R and D. Those are the key issues for us relating to Euratom.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
May I ask you about the Euratom costs relating to safeguarding, which may not go to Euratom but to the Office for Nuclear Regulation as a result of the transfer of responsibility for safeguarding from Euratom to ONR? I understand that EDF Energy already pays into ONR as a contribution to its general costs, but does not pay anything to Euratom for safeguarding. Is that right?
Angela Hepworth: That is right. We have to distinguish what we pay for from the ONR at the moment. As a nuclear operator, we are required to comply with certain safety and security regulations, and we pay for the ONR’s role in inspecting our stations to ensure we comply with our obligations. That is absolutely right, and we expect that to continue. There is a distinction to be drawn between that and compliance with the safeguarding regime, which is the responsibility of a member state. At the moment, the UK Government pays for that to be done via its contributions to the EU budget. As that is a member state responsibility, it is clear to us that it should be the UK Government who meet those costs in the future, rather than look to the industry to cover them.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Angela Hepworth: As I understand it, it is funded via the EU budget contribution. That is how it is funded at the moment.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Angela Hepworth: I think the cost should be met by the UK Government, given that it is discharging a UK Government responsibility.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Angela Hepworth: I think we would welcome the assurance; whether that is provided on the face of the Bill or separately is less of a concern to us.
Rachel Maclean (Redditch) (Con)
Q
Angela Hepworth: It would be first and foremost the responsibility of the ONR to put the safeguarding arrangements in place—if that is the element that you are particularly concerned about. I know that one of the early activities they are undertaking is recruitment of the experts that they need in order to do that. They need to be able to do that and to put in place the processes and systems that they need to be able to discharge those responsibilities. What we would welcome as an operator is a timetable from the Government and the ONR that sets out exactly what steps need to be taken and when, in order to have a regime operational at the point where the UK leaves Euratom.
Drew Hendry (Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey) (SNP)
Q
Angela Hepworth: I think it is really a process of increasing confidence. It is not so much that there is a particular date where you need to have everything signed and sealed, but we need to have a process between now and the exit date where we have confidence about the regime that will be in place at that date. We would very much support having a transitional or implementation phase, with as much continuity in the existing arrangements as possible. If that could be confirmed early, that would be a great benefit to the nuclear industry, to give them the confidence that they will have continuity in the existing arrangements for a period after the exit date.
Drew Hendry
Q
Angela Hepworth: I do not think that is a question I can answer. We would like a period of transition. I think that is probably a question for the Government—what they think is appropriate in the circumstances, given what needs to be done within that timeframe.
Drew Hendry
I am surprised that you do not have an idea of what you might require as part of the industry—that you might not have an idea of how long you might need as a run-in time to adjust to new regulations.
Angela Hepworth: I think it is more a question of understanding the timeline from the Government and the ONR that they need to have these arrangements in place. Speaking from an industry perspective, we welcome certainty and stability. An early signal that there would be a period of continuity after the Euratom exit date where the arrangements for trade would continue to apply would be very reassuring.
Trudy Harrison (Copeland) (Con)
Q
Angela Hepworth: If we are thinking about countries outside the EU, there are a number of countries where it is either illegal or a policy requirement that they have a nuclear co-operation agreement in place if they are going to export nuclear material. The countries that the UK Government have rightly prioritised for negotiating agreements are the US, Canada, Japan and Australia. In each case the UK Government will need to negotiate a nuclear co-operation agreement with that country to enable the trade.
Why does it matter? For example, our Sizewell B power station relies on Westinghouse technology, so we rely on our links with the US in order to be able to operate and maintain that power station. If we wanted to import a part from America, or to draw on expertise and services from America for that power station, there has to be a nuclear co-operation agreement in place between the UK and the US in order to do that. As we understand it, the US will not agree a nuclear co-operation agreement unless the UK has a safeguards regime in place, which is one reason we see the Nuclear Safeguards Bill as a key priority, to put that in place. Each of those countries will have its own internal processes in order to agree nuclear co-operation agreements.
As I understand it, for example, in the US it will have to be agreed by the President and it will have to go through Congress. We have been telling Government we would like to see, as an industry, a timeline that sets out for our benefit the steps that need to be taken in order to put a safeguards regime in place, to get it approved by the IAEA, to conclude the negotiations with third countries, but also the ratification processes for those countries, in order to understand the end-to-end process and how those various components interact, so that we can have the safeguards regime in place and also the nuclear co-operation agreements with those third countries. Then, as I said, we need a future agreement with Euratom: there needs to be an agreement in place, negotiated between the UK and Euratom, which explains the framework for nuclear trade going forward once we have left Euratom.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Angela Hepworth: Yes; there is a nuclear supply chain across the EU and the UK is a great opportunity for those countries. For example, two-thirds of the value of the construction of Hinkley Point will go to companies in the UK but that leaves one-third of the value of the construction going to countries from further afield. Many of those are companies in Europe but, for example, there are companies in the US and Japan which are also involved in the Hinkley Point supply chain. It is in the interests of those companies and countries to have future co-operation agreements which enable them to participate in the supply chain. The UK has great opportunities for international companies: there is supporting the operation of the existing nuclear fleet; there is the nuclear new build programme; there is decommissioning coming up. So there should be real opportunities for other companies to be involved in the UK supply chain if we can get those agreements in place.
Paul Blomfield (Sheffield Central) (Lab)
Q
Angela Hepworth: I am not saying it is not doable; I am saying it is challenging. You heard first-hand from Dr Mina Golshan of the ONR this morning about the practical steps that need to be taken. There is an awful lot that it needs to do in terms of recruitment and having systems and processes set up. We are mindful of the fact that that is a challenge in the time available. That is one reason we support an implementation or transitional phase.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Angela Hepworth: Again, we are looking for assurance and clarity. I am less concerned about whether that is set out in the Bill or not; it is assurance and clarity that the industry is looking for.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Angela Hepworth: In terms of a future relationship, EDF Energy has been clear from the outset that far and away the best outcome for the UK nuclear industry would be to remain in Euratom. That remains, we think, the right answer for the UK nuclear industry. Assuming that that is not possible and that we have to look at a future agreement, the models of association agreements in place now are limited to engagement in research and development programmes. That is valuable, but it does not address the key issue that we are concerned about, which is the movement of nuclear materials. What we are most concerned about in all of this is our ability to move nuclear fuel, nuclear components, information and services. The current framework of association agreements would not meet that need. If that were going to solve the key issues, we would need to think of some different model of association.
Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab/Co-op)
Q
“The UK Safeguards Bill says little about what a new regime will look like.”
You also say that if there were any changes or amendments to regulation,
“Neither EDF nor the wider UK nuclear industry are…included as statutory consultees”.
Do you think that the current consultees include the wider sector, or are they quite limited?
Angela Hepworth: As I understand it, the Bill says that the ONR and such other people as are deemed appropriate must be consulted. We would welcome consultation with the broader nuclear industry.
The Chair
Unless there are any other questions from colleagues, I will say thank you very much indeed for your time. You have been extremely helpful and clear, and have added a lot to our deliberations over the next couple of weeks.
Examination of Witnesses
Sue Ferns and Kevin Coyne gave evidence.
The Chair
Q
Sue Ferns: I am Sue Ferns. I work for Prospect, a politically independent trade union representing thousands of members across the nuclear industry, from research to generation and decommissioning. We also represent members who work at the Joint European Torus facility in Culham.
We have set out our key concerns about the Bill, one of which is to ensure that the powers of the inspectors are included in the Bill, consistent with the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Energy Act 2013. We would also like to see in the Bill a consultation on what associate membership of Euratom would look like, because we feel that that would be better than exiting Euratom. From the discussion that has just taken place I understand, and agree, that there is no off-the-peg answer to that, and that we would have to write something specifically for the UK’s circumstances. Those are a couple of our key concerns.
The Chair
Q
Kevin Coyne: What a pity. I am Kevin Coyne, national officer for Unite. Unite represents skilled workers in the nuclear industry, from decommissioning and generation to huge swathes of the electricity industry. Our position on the Bill, and I understand that you will be asking supplementary questions about whether we support it, is that we have concerns, principally about the impact on workers in the industry, as you would expect from us. We also have concerns about the timescale, and whether that will be in place and have ramifications for jobs in the future. We have concerns about JET in particular, the jobs based at JET, and the freedom of movement of those jobs throughout Europe and the attention to detail in the Bill about that. Those are our three main concerns.
Richard Harrington
Welcome this afternoon. I accept your point, Kevin, and the Chair has quite rightly ruled about our discussing what is in the Bill, but my door is always open to both you and Sue to discuss other matters on another occasion.
Kevin Coyne: That is very kind of you.
Richard Harrington
Q
I would like to ask you a leading question—something which of course we do. I understand your views on Euratom and what Sue said about associate membership. She is quite right that there is no actual definition of associate membership. However, given that the Government decided to serve the article 50 notice on Euratom and we are leaving subject to negotiations, which is a statement of fact, would you accept that we are doing the right thing in having nuclear safeguards built? I accept that you do not think that the Bill covers everything, but would you still support it?
Kevin Coyne: The important point is that there is a safeguarding mechanism in place by 2019. You have seen my paper, in which we indicate as a union that we wished that Euratom had been left in place for a series of reasons, including the continuity of various bits at a high level. We do not believe that we can hope to progress to that level by 2019, so we believe that the safeguarding mechanisms outlined in the Bill are important to safeguard the industry as it goes into a phase which we do not yet know about.
Sue Ferns: Just to add to that, having read the Second Reading debate, there was a lot of talk about this being a contingency measure. I would agree; it is an essential contingency measure. It is not our first preference, but it needs to be there as a contingency.
Dr Whitehead
Q
I wonder if you might briefly share with us what you think might be possible so that the Bill is not a contingency, and whether you think the timescale that we have in front of us over the next period is sufficient to bring in either associate membership, perhaps, or similar arrangements with Euratom. Alternatively, if the Bill is to be used as a contingency, do you think that the timescale in front of us—bearing in mind all the detail of the secondary legislation that we need to get through as far as the Bill is concerned—will be sufficient to make that happen?
Sue Ferns: I think the answer is that we do not feel confident that the timescale is sufficient. From speaking to members in the ONR who essentially have to deliver the key provisions of the Bill, it is clear that they need to build an IT system to log the data properly. They need to have resources to deliver what is required, bearing in mind that we are a heavy utiliser of Euratom resources in the UK. As the previous witness said, we need to make sure that there are inspectors in place to be able to police the regime.
It is easy to say that; it is much more difficult to deliver it. Nuclear inspectors are thin on the ground at the best of times. Absolutely, ONR is doing its very best to try to ensure that it can expand its inspector resources, but I think even ONR feels that it is a challenge. The question is where will these people come from? The only obvious source is from elsewhere in the industry, because there are not qualified nuclear inspectors who are currently out of the labour market. That is absolutely a major challenge. The honest answer to the question is that I do not know whether the timescale is sufficient, but at this stage we certainly do not feel confident about it.
Kevin Coyne: I would answer that question with two responses. First, as I said, we as a union hoped that we would have remained in Euratom. We do that because we believe there is not a necessity to leave Euratom in effecting Brexit under article 50 and through article 160a. It was possible, I understand, to remain. That is important, because of the uncertainty that we now believe is cast over that.
As I said before, our concern is mainly with our members’ interests and with jobs. Sizewell B, for instance, will be in operation until 2034, and it relies extensively on components from the United States. It is very important that the co-operation agreements that the previous witness talked about are in place by 2019, and there must be serious doubt with the inspectorate in its current state. I believe that the numbers are 160 inspectors, and the ONR has fewer than 10 in place currently. So, there is the training and the programme and—importantly—all of that must cast doubt upon our ability, and if that is the case it will affect the smooth operation of nuclear plants in future, until there is a regime in place that equally matches the plants.
Secondly, I would argue that there is an impact on new nuclear development for the regime. For instance, there is the whole fuel cycle in Britain, which is gearing up to be a serious and important new operator of new nuclear build. We want within that the whole fuel cycle—the whole of the nuclear operation. As you know, in Preston we have a factory—Springfields—that produces fuel, which is wholly dependent on mixed fuels from other nations, co-operation agreements and the operation of Euratom in ensuring that that fuel supply is there and available.
There is a real threat, because of the problems with Westinghouse, that that plant in Preston would suffer as a result of the safeguards not being in place in time. That would result not only in the loss of jobs but in issues for the fuel cycle itself, for Britain’s ability to recreate the whole of the nuclear cycle for the export orders for the industry, and for the jobs that that entails.
Eleanor Smith (Wolverhampton South West) (Lab)
Q
Kevin Coyne: I will defer to my colleague, who is from the union that represents these people.
Sue Ferns: How long to train a nuclear inspector?
Eleanor Smith
Q
Sue Ferns: It takes quite a number of years to train a nuclear inspector. Obviously, if you get people from the industry, they have a level of experience, but not in that context. I believe that ONR is considering whether it can provide additional training to some of its other staff, to enable them to take this role. They are people who inspect, but don’t inspect for safeguarding. However, none of that happens overnight. This is a highly skilled, very specialist area, which is why there is such a premium on this source of labour, so it will take a period of time to be able to do that.
Kevin Coyne: The reputation of the UK nuclear industry and its attendant skills and safety record are things that we, including the trade unions, are very proud of. I would argue that it is important that Euratom inspectors are highly regarded and renowned throughout the world, but that takes time. It is very important to have that reputation, so that people in the rest of the world believe the reports and the regulations that emanate from that.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Sue Ferns: I think that there are a couple of things. First, as the previous witness said, there should be a clearer timetable for various steps. At the moment there is a deadline and then there are two years. How will we get there? The path is unclear.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Sue Ferns: Indeed, and what the risks are at each stage, so that they can be known and are transparent. I am sure that various stakeholders are working on them at the moment, but I do not think that the critical path with the risks at each stage is a transparent timeline at the moment.
Another thing that would build confidence is making it clear that everyone will work to achieve this, but if we do not achieve it, we must have a longer transition period. For the sake of the industry, we absolutely cannot afford to step out of the regime that we have now until it is absolutely clear that there are equivalent standards in place and that they are operating. It is quite difficult to impose an arbitrary timescale on that because, as I said, there are a number of risk factors: specifying, procuring and getting new IT systems up and running—there is not always a great track record on that—and making sure that we have appropriately qualified and skilled inspectors.
Reflecting on the previous question, Kevin is absolutely right: the UK has a first-class reputation. We all know how easily reputations can be lost. They take years to win, but they do not take years to lose. There should be a combination of having the critical path, which is transparent about the risks at each stage, and being clear that if we need a longer transition in this sphere, we should have a longer transition because that is in the interests of the industry.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Sue Ferns: I think that that is a reasonable assumption. The reason I said I was a bit uncertain is that it depends on where you get these people from and what their previous experience is. A reasonable approximation is several years—it is not a matter of months but years for people to be able to do that job. Yes, it is about knowledge and skills—and there are a lot of knowledge and skills in the industry—but there are specific aspects of an inspector’s role. This is a warranted role; this is not just working in the industry. It is not just about knowledge, but experience and commanding the confidence of the companies and the organisations that you deal with, so there are very specific aspects to that role. I think that it is a period of years. Of all the things that worry ONR, this is probably one of the key ones, if not the key one. As I say, I think it is doing the absolute best it can, but this is one of the things that keeps them awake at night.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Sue Ferns: Absolutely. It is a small talent pool, and it is a challenging talent pool even in the best of times. To use what may or may not be an appropriate analogy, it is fishing in a defined and restricted pool, and we are now saying it has to increase its catch from that pool. That is a hard and really difficult thing to do. Also bear in mind that ONR is subject to public sector constraints in its recruitment and payment practices. If it has to compete with the commercial sector, something will have to give in that regard. How can the catch from that limited pool be increased under the constraints it is operating in? The job is getting tougher and bigger, and there are multiple challenges.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Sue Ferns: The concerns are set out in our evidence. If you look at sections 20 to 22 of the Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and schedule 8 to the Energy Act 2013, they set out in some detail what the powers of the inspectors will be. I know there is reference to that in the schedule to the Bill. These concerns come directly from people who will have to do this job. As warranted inspectors, they feel that it is important to have those powers in the Bill. It is important for purposes of parity, to ensure continuity—these things should not be left to the discretion of future Ministers—and also, as we have discussed, for external confidence in the way the job will be done. That is why we believe very strongly that those powers should be specified. I have not heard an argument to say why, if it is good enough for the 1974 Act and the 2013 Act, we should contemplate a change in practice for this piece of legislation.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Sue Ferns: I think achieving that would be an important step forward. However, as we have set out in our evidence, we have identified three other matters, because you would then have to be clear about what safeguarding means in law. The three bullet points in paragraph 5 of our evidence are points where we think that specific clarity is required in relation to what that would mean in a safeguarding regime. Is that clear?
Dr Whitehead
Q
Sue Ferns: I am not an expert on how to draft legislation, but I understand you are asking whether we should take the schedule from the Energy Act 2013 and put it in the Bill, along with any other points that may need to be included. That is certainly our preference, and it is certainly the preference of the members we represent in these roles.
Kevin Coyne: In addition, we would indicate that your knowledge is greater than ours at the moment on the 2013 Act. The importance of the inspectorate is its neutrality and independence. If you are saying that there is an element in there that is currently switched off that can be switched on, that would be an important contribution, but you must ensure that it has that neutrality and independence, because that is what gives status and quality to the current inspectorate through Euratom. I do not go to bed at night reading the 2013 Act, but I cannot remember it addressing the independence issue, which I think would be an important element.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Sue Ferns: My understanding is that the IAEA will require certain standards to have been met before anything else can happen. What I understand, though, is that during the Second Reading debate on the Bill, there was a lot of talk about replicating the Euratom powers. My understanding is that that is not necessarily the IAEA hurdle, because I think the IAEA hurdle is slightly lower than replicating the Euratom powers. Certainly, there will be a requirement to meet IAEA standards.
Trudy Harrison
Q
Kevin Coyne: I think that is an area which is of serious consequence. I think it is generally not well known—the fact that Euratom covers the transportation of materials—or that isotopes that are used in the NHS, for instance, come from Holland and other countries. We do not have the reactors in this country to produce them. I understand what you say about the registration. We highlighted that as a concern because there is a two-day, three-day shelf-life; this comes from us as a union that operates within the NHS at quite an extensive level. In terms of the delivery and transportation of that, there are sometimes delays. So our point is that the change of regimes and the difference in what might occur may cause that to be delayed even further and therefore impact upon the NHS itself. We make no stronger point than that we ought to look at the impact upon isotopes in hospitals.
Richard Harrington
Q
Kevin Coyne: A Euratom point—and you think I am mistaken about that?
Richard Harrington
Well, because I can quite understand the point that they have got to be overnight, or very quickly, and all that kind of thing—would that be affected by a change of law when we Brexit. My advice, though, is very clear; I have asked a lot of people, as you might imagine. It is very much Trudy’s point, which is that, whatever one thinks about Euratom and so on, the medical isotopes are not covered within the fissile definition of Euratom. Do you feel that we are wrong on that, or was your point, “Yes, we’ve got to get them quickly and without paperwork and all that kind of delay”—which may or may not happen afterwards?
Kevin Coyne: Our information, as I said, was simply that upon the basis of the delays in transportation, due to the change in regime, we thought we ought to have in place a cast-iron security, as we do now, to make sure that those delays do not unnecessarily happen.
Alex Norris
Q
Kevin Coyne: Generally, among staff in the nuclear industry?
Alex Norris
Yes.
Kevin Coyne: If the truth be said, I would imagine that a majority of staff still are not aware of the massive ramifications—certainly among my members. Sue is much closer to the issues in terms of the roles that they take. It is becoming more widely known. That certainly was not an issue, as you recall, within the Brexit discussions, so the general knowledge of it is not that great. What is important is that those organisations that do know—you heard from EDF earlier—are now briefing very widely on the impact that it may have, particularly in terms of the items I listed. For instance, the people at Springfields are acutely aware, because of the impact upon that nuclear new build and on nuclear new build projects for the future. There is concern—it is important to say that—but as for whether it is widespread across all the staff, I do not think I could lead you to that view currently, but clearly it will affect all staff that work within the nuclear industry.
Sue Ferns: Among our members there is quite an awareness of this now. We recently did a survey of all our members in the industry, and well over 80% wanted either to stay in Euratom or in some form of associate membership of Euratom because of the concerns or the uncertainty they had about leaving. I would say that in the research areas, concerns are very high. JET, for example, is already finding it more difficult to recruit because of the uncertainty about the future of the organisation. Of course, the issue there is very much one of the free movement of people. It has a workforce that is 60% EU nationals, so it is a major priority, but across the rest of the industry there are levels of 80% or more expressing a preference for an alternative future.
The Chair
On behalf of the entire Committee, I thank both our witnesses, Kevin Coyne and Sue Ferns, for their extremely interesting and useful evidence, which added to our understanding and will be useful in the debates that lie ahead in the next couple of weeks. The Committee will know that there is to be a vote which has to be by 3 pm. Rather than starting the next session, I think we should stop now and do our best to get back by 3.10 pm.
The Chair
I welcome Professor Juan Matthews, a visiting professor at the Dalton Nuclear Institute. I am told that another Division is due within half an hour, so I would like to conclude our discussions by that time and keep remarks brief. Will you start, Professor, by introducing yourself and giving some brief comments on the Bill?
Professor Matthews: My name is Juan Matthews. I currently work with the Dalton Nuclear Institute of the University of Manchester as a postgraduate teacher of nuclear technology, and I also advise on government and international relations. My previous role was with UK Trade and Investment, which is now the Department for International Trade, where I was a nuclear specialist for a number of years. Prior to that I had a very long career in the nuclear industry, starting as a laboratory assistant in 1962 at the age of 16, working in a fuel development lab, so I have practical experience of coming up against nuclear safeguards.
As far as I am concerned, the Bill is very clear and uncontroversial. The things associated with the Bill are more problematic, as several people who are much better qualified than me have already commented. I would like to point out a couple of things that came up in the recent discussion.
The term “inspector” as it is being used is not clear, in the respect that nuclear inspectors are normally people who look at the safety of facilities; nuclear safeguards are quite different because they require a different set of skills and a different stance. The personnel cannot be interchanged; one cannot just take staff from the Office for Nuclear Regulation and say, “Next week you start doing nuclear safeguards.” It is not as easy as that. There was also a brief mention of isotopes. Of course, that is not at all relevant to the Nuclear Safeguards Bill, but I point out that chapter 9 of the Euratom treaty guarantees the unimpeded transport and tariff-free trade not only of nuclear materials but also of radioactive isotopes used in medicine and industry.
The Chair
As you correctly say, that is beyond the scope of the Bill. I did not interrupt earlier but if it comes up again, I will.
Professor Matthews: I thought I would clarify.
The Chair
It is most kind of you. The Minister may want to clarify the difference between inspectors and safeguarders.
Richard Harrington
I do not feel able fully to clarify the point at this juncture, Mr Gray. Usually the mistake is made—not that Professor Matthews would—between safety and safeguarders, but we are looking at the safeguards regime here, which includes physical inspection, mentioned today by quite a few of the people giving evidence, and, though I do not quite know how to use the expression, remote inspection by cameras and other sets of kit, which at the moment belong to Euratom but I am sure will be part of the new safeguards regime.
Professor Matthews: There are three components in nuclear safeguards. One is nuclear materials accountancy— that is, keeping track of nuclear materials. Then there are two skills that go along with that. One is assaying, determining the amount of nuclear materials—
Richard Harrington
That is laboratory testing the quality and the content.
Professor Matthews: And observing and recording movements of nuclear materials, without both of which you cannot do the accountancy.
Richard Harrington
I would accept that.
Professor Matthews: That is quite different from proving a safety case for the operation of a nuclear installation.
The Chair
Exceeding my role as Chairman, it might be something you would ask your officials to look into for later consideration during the Bill?
Trudy Harrison
Q
Richard Harrington
Why not? I am quite happy to. That function, currently done by Euratom, will be done by the new safeguards regime. It will be responsible for examination and testing and making sure there are suitably qualified inspectors, in the same way that Euratom does now.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Professor Matthews: Clearly, the operation of the Office for Nuclear Regulation requires a range of different roles. I would see no problem with adding an additional role to the range of roles that are already in the organisation. It is just the physical people are different people who do these different things. Indeed, nuclear inspectors themselves have different backgrounds and specialisations, and diverse education as well. I suppose it is extending the range of what the Office for Nuclear Regulation does.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Professor Matthews: I would have to look at the documents and examine them in detail to be able to answer that question fully. It is a different role. I would expect it not to be covered within the current definitions in the documents, but I do not have access to them and cannot check that now. But I would be very surprised if it was covered. It would need something added.
Alex Norris
Q
Professor Matthews: The young people that I am encountering in my current activities are ready to take on responsibility and do things. I am very impressed by them. I am sure there are people who are capable of taking on these roles. The only problem is that there is competition. Those same people are valuable and can be used in all sorts of ways. Whether it is possible to assemble the right people quickly to be able to avoid any hiatus in the operation of our industry is another matter. Certainly, at the moment, the people that we train have no problems finding jobs.
Alex Norris
Q
Professor Matthews: There are two main programmes I teach on. One is the new generation centre for doctoral training. That is a collaboration between five universities in the north of England and we have a cohort of about 25 a year. That has been going on for the last five years. Almost all of them are British nationals from diverse backgrounds. We have one or two foreign nationals in there, but they are the exception. The other programme I teach on is the nuclear professional development programme, which is a master’s degree for people working part time who are managers in the nuclear industry in the UK. We have had one or two foreign students on that—I even had a commander in the Brazilian navy—but most of the people are British nationals working in our nuclear industry.
Mary Robinson
Q
Professor Matthews: It has been a difficult time for us, because there was such a long delay in the announcement of the final investment decision for Hinkley Point C. That made people relax, so it has proved easier to recruit good engineers to join our nuclear programmes at the university as a result. Certainly, the prospect of building 16 GW of nuclear reactors is stimulating the people moving into the industry. But it is not only that. We have to cope with the problems of legacy, decommissioning and radwaste management. There are nuclear fuel cycle industries, very likely with both fuel manufacture and enrichment. All these things require the nuclear safeguards to be operating, and any interruption in that—we are talking about something like £10 billion a year in UK activity that would be interrupted.
Mary Robinson (Cheadle) (Con)
Q
Professor Matthews: That is related to the operation of nuclear power stations in the fuel cycle industry, which consists of processing and manufacturing nuclear fuels, manufacturing the nuclear fuel elements, and enrichment of uranium. The work still going on at Sellafield on reprocessing will stop shortly, but there is the handling of materials from Sellafield for decommissioning and radwaste management, all of which contain higher actinides and uranium, which are covered by the Nuclear Safeguards Act 2000. We need to know what is going into the waste to ensure that we are not making a plutonium mine or something that someone could tap in the future.
Mary Robinson
Q
Professor Matthews: Yes, but it is not enough, even at the rate that we are going. We have two major doctoral programmes in the UK that we co-operate with—one in the south with Imperial College, Cambridge, and the Open University, and one that we have with five universities in the north. That is only about 50 students a year. We need to bring into the industry hundreds of students a year, which means that we must be able to bring in people from around the world, mainly from Europe, but also from more widely around the world.
There is an opportunity from Germany at the moment—its industry is contracting because it is shutting down plants. It does not seem to be managing the decommissioning problem very well, so people are leaving Germany very rapidly.
Mary Robinson
Q
Professor Matthews: They were, but they are not any more.
Paul Blomfield
Q
Professor Matthews: I heard the recording this morning of the ONR representative. It looks unlikely that it will be fully functioning by March in two years’ time. The question is: how can we bridge the gap until everything is working properly?
Paul Blomfield
Q
Professor Matthews: Springfields, which produces nuclear fuel, will stop working. The Urenco plant at Capenhurst, which is part of three plants in the Netherlands, Germany and the UK, will stop working because it will not be able to move uranium around. We in the UK no longer do conversion, which is changing uranium into uranium hexafluoride, which then goes to the enrichment plant and is converted back to oxide or metal for application. That requires movement, and all of that would stop.
It would be difficult for Sellafield and other decommissioning sites, such as the old research sites at Dounreay, Harwell or Winfrith; some of the work there would grind to a halt as well. Eventually, when the fuel charges were removed from reactors operating in EDF Energy’s plant, those would all stop, which would take something like 9 GW of power out of our network at a time when we are perilously close to blackouts. It would be a very serious measure indeed if there was a hiatus.
Richard Harrington
Thank you for that, Professor Matthews. You are of course using my argument for why we need the Bill; thank you for supporting it. Dr Mina Golshan, whose organisation is responsible for recruiting the 15 people we are talking about, said that recruitment had already started. Once the Bill proceeded beyond Second Reading—I thank everyone, including Opposition Members, for voting for that—it meant that the financial resources needed for the IT and recruitment are provided. We are very well aware of that.
I thank you for your de facto support for the Bill. I have of course noted the points you have made, and I will be very happy to chat about them on another occasion. The purpose of the Bill is precisely to get over some of the obstacles that you are talking about and prevent what you have explained would happen—as we accept would happen—if we did not have a safeguards regime in place.
Dr Whitehead
Q
Secondly, I understand that the Torus fusion project at Culham will be a subject of safeguarding inspection. Will that be financed, subsequent to our leaving Euratom, in a way that is commensurate with its present level of assistance, which largely comes, as you are aware, from EU funding? Do you have any comment on that?
Professor Matthews: There is a difficulty here and I do not know if it is recognised in the Bill; it perhaps needs scrutinising. The only mention in the Bill and in these discussions is of our fissile materials. We are talking about uranium, plutonium and other axinite isotopes, and precursors such as thorium, which can be converted into fissile materials. In the case of Culham and the fusion programme, they use tritium. Tritium is a material that comes under safeguards, which is not a fissile material. It is a material that is a component in hydrogen bombs, and it is controlled. I remember getting into trouble as a young scientist. I was asked to assess the use of lithium-6 as an absorber for a fast reactor project. I phoned up a French supplier of lithium-6, and next thing I had security down on me, because tritium is produced from lithium-6 and is a controlled material. I do not know whether any consideration is being made of the control of tritium with respect to Culham and nuclear safeguards.
Dr Whitehead
Would there be other materials that are not fissile but would also be controlled and inspected under safeguards?
Professor Matthews: We are getting into areas that we cannot really discuss here.
Richard Harrington
That is beyond the scope of the Bill, but perhaps we could discuss it, although not necessarily now, in the evidence session. I am happy to discuss it, but I suspect that your interpretation is correct, Mr Gray, and it is beyond the narrower scope of the Bill. I am happy to discuss it with the Shadow Minister.
Dr Whitehead
One might argue that the scope of the Bill is too narrow for the safeguarding that we need to undertake.
The Chair
It does not matter. The scope of the Bill is the scope of the Bill. Let us not get into a chat among ourselves. The reality is that the Bill is as printed, and it is the Bill as printed that we have to discuss, under the long title and the short title. Of course, within that we can amend it as much as we like. My instinct is that the Committee have done our work for the day. Thank you very much, Professor Matthews, for your very useful evidence, both written and in person. I assure you that it will be taken note of in the discussions that lie ahead, starting on Thursday, when my colleague Mr McCabe will be in the Chair. The Committee will see me again, assuming that we sit—we will no doubt sort that out—next Tuesday.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. —(Rebecca Harris.)