Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted and Lord Berkeley

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bowles of Berkhamsted (LD)]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group, which add to the safety principles. Amendment 7 would add “road environs” to Clause 2(2) so it reads that

“The principles must be framed with a view to securing that road”


and road environs

“safety in Great Britain will be better”.

I had two broad points in mind—one that it is relevant what happens next to the road, on pavements, driveways or anywhere else that a vehicle might stray if navigation goes wrong. It would be relevant, for example, if a consequence of some event meant that the vehicle swerved off road instead of stopping. The swerve might be safer for the road, but the vehicle might hit people not on the road, so it would not be safer for the road environs. I accept that the general standard is to stop not swerve, but that was an easy example to give. It is an obvious point, but something relating to the environs needs inclusion and the statistics that are analysed need to take those kinds of things into account.

I happened to come across a paper today—it was actually published yesterday—entitled Unreliable Pedestrian Detection and Driver Alerting in Intelligent Vehicles, by Professor Mary L Cummings, a senior member of the IEEE and a professor of mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering and computer science at George Mason University, and Ben Bauchwitz from Duke University. They have done some testing to try to detect pedestrians and, as the title might indicate, it did not work out all that well. Among the suggestions are that

“intelligent vehicles … detected the pedestrian earlier if there were no established lane lines, suggesting that in well-marked areas, typically the case for established crossings, pedestrians may be at increased risk”

because of the road markings. Obviously, these are all kinds of things that we have to take into account: it just shows that we have to look at what is happening in the whole environment.

There are other things that are going on in, around and among roads that are not part of whatever connected systems are developed, whether it is pedestrians, cyclists, animals that can be ridden or animals in the wild. Of course, we have plenty of such roads, where sheep graze in the Dales and ponies in the New Forest: they are not going to be part of the connected systems, so we need to be sure that the actions of those are taken into account. Less picturesque than those but omnipresent—I flagged them in my reasons—are delivery vehicles. Delivery vehicles already have a big and frequently annoying effect on roads. I doubt that I am the only person who has experienced near misses caused by bad or inconsiderate driving, or an inability to see the road ahead due to dangerous stopping by delivery vehicles, and there is no doubt that the tight scheduling of drivers bears some of the blame for that. Of course, we are hoping that automated driving will be more observant of legalities, but several noble Lords mentioned delivery vehicles at Second Reading. There are papers that explain how little robots are going to be coming up your drive, so what is the situation there? What testing will there be with delivery vehicles that are going to be partly on the road and partly going into private driveways?

An interesting point here is that, when I submitted my amendment, my explanatory statement had to be truncated to remove reference to private driveways because that was out of scope. It seems to me that the Bill is only about public highways, but we cannot get away from the fact that private driveways and private roads are pretty abundant, so what is the legal situation there going to be? Because that is out of scope, is it abandoned? Presumably, regulations cannot be being made, and I cannot help feeling that this is a little bit of a hole. The closest I could get to it was by “road and road environs”, which at least seemed to pass the sniff test in the Bill Office. Thus, in connection with both these amendments, my question to the Minister is: how much will testing and licensing take account of effects that are beyond the highway? What is actually included within the “highway” definition, so far as the Bill is concerned, and what is left out?

I have quite a lot of interaction with the highway, because I live with one going all the way up alongside me, and it is quite remarkable, from time to time, what the local authority thinks is part of the highway but is actually a 130 year-old ancient hedge that they wanted to chop down. Anyway, the corollary to all this is that, if testing and authorisation is done only in the context of highways and what happens there, what is the legal framework for these private and residential roads and driveways? If they are left out, are we going to have something in addition?

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a very interesting and incredibly important group of amendments. My noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe’s introduction was masterful in setting out all the problems. Before I comment on them, however, I would like to comment on a remark by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, just now about which bits of the country, whether they are highways or not, are covered by this legislation. A few years ago, it was nothing personal but I had to investigate whether somebody who was driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol on an unmade road—in other words, a private road—could be guilty of drink-driving offences. The answer was that they would not be guilty of just about anything apart from drink-driving, because of course that comes under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act, which covers a much wider scope in this country than roads. It is worth asking the Minister what would happen if someone in control of these vehicles was actually found to be under the influence. Under what legislation would they be prosecuted, if they were liable?

The question of safety, as noble Lords have said, is fundamental. What worries me is that the Bill defines safety as meaning only

“to an acceptably safe standard”.

Acceptable to whom? What about the risk? Is there an acceptably low risk of committing a traffic infraction? Again, acceptable to whom? I am very concerned about the need, in all this legislation, to achieve a step change in road safety for all people who are affected by vehicles or what happens. At present, the risks of death or injury on our roads are significantly higher than for life in general or, indeed, on other transport networks, such as rail. Pedestrians and people who cycle —we have debated scooters before—bear a disproportionately higher risk of injury. If we add in children, old people and people with disabilities, who are particularly vulnerable, this is something that we do not really seem to take very seriously.

One issue that came up in a debate on the last group of amendments, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, raised, quite rightly, was the question of testing on the road, but it is a question of “Which roads?”. Most people think that the first location for testing these vehicles will be on a motorway, because there are no pedestrians—or there should not be any pedestrians or cyclists there—and that is quite simple, really. But then, when we drill down, apart from motorways or dual carriageways, what other groups of roads would one have to test these vehicles on? It becomes very much more difficult and very subjective. I do not have an answer to this, but I am absolutely certain that the noble Baroness is right to say that it needs doing, and in a comprehensive way across all the different types of roads and tracks, in the countryside as well as in the towns. I am not quite sure where we are going to end up, because the amendments in this group on safety are fundamental. I do not have a detailed preference for which ones, but I am absolutely certain that we need to tighten up the definition of road safety to something that is not just acceptable but very acceptable, to a high standard, safely and legally.