Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Woodley (Lab)]

First, I apologise again for my premature interjection earlier. I was given the wrong running order. I should have checked it; I was stupid. I am going to speak to Amendments 7, 17, 18, 19, and 20, which are in my name, and talk about the potential effects on working men and women who run this fantastic service that we all rely on so much.

Although existing legislation extends service notice periods, they are much shorter than the time required to roll out franchising. There is no doubt about that. I believe that procurement of services takes around nine months, followed by a further nine months for mobilisation. Amendment 7 addresses the risk that unsuccessful or unscrupulous operators could run down services prior to new franchises, affecting service continuity and potentially putting members’ jobs at risk. Therefore, will the Minister commit to assessing whether further regulation is needed to ensure service continuity where local transport authorities pursue franchising?

Feedback from those involved in the rollout of franchising in Manchester, the only area outside London yet to implement franchising, is that early and meaningful engagement with trade unions is vital to its success. The Department for Transport has said that it would “expect” all local authorities to engage with trade unions. However, expectations are not enough. Amendment 17 seeks to learn from the experiences of Manchester and ensure that all local authorities take a consultative approach with the unions and have a joint staff forum in place as recommended. This ensures consistency across the country and best possible outcomes for franchising. Will the Minister commit to publishing a code of practice or guidance for local transport authorities to follow as part of the franchise process?

Finally, my Amendments 18, 19 and 20 would strengthen staff protection in areas where local authorities implement franchising. As the Bill reverses the ban on new local authority bus companies, Amendment 18 seeks to ensure that provisions around the transfer of staff apply. There is a risk that bus operators under franchise contracts will seek to drive down pay and conditions in a race to the bottom or employ new starters on inferior pay and conditions.

Amendment 19 proposes that workers’ terms and conditions will be maintained for the duration of the franchise to prevent the creation of a two-tier workforce by ensuring that new staff are not employed on inferior terms. Although TUPE will apply when services transfer to new operators, these regulations need strengthening so that staff are protected not just at the point of transfer but throughout the franchising process.

Amendment 20 would establish that as soon as a local authority launches its franchising consultation, the full coverage of TUPE will apply. Will the Minister commit to bringing forward the regulations or statutory guidance around protections for staff that Amendments 18, 19 and 20 seek to address?

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 61. I was very pleased to hear the Minister say that the Bill is about safety. All my amendments are about safety, but this is the briefest. It is very simple and builds on Amendment 6 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to make sure that those who make these decisions are qualified to do so. My amendment would simply ensure that franchising authorities responsible for the design have the appropriate IOSH and NEBOSH certificates so that they can judge what is and is not safe.

[Baroness Pidgeon (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak first to Amendment 6, which seeks clarification following the debate on changing an “auditor” to an “approved person” in assessing bus franchise schemes. It would ensure that within three months of the Bill becoming an Act, the Government will publish the qualifications required for an approved person under the Act and would also lay a regulation with that information in it prior to the commencement of the clause. This is because Clause 9 amends Section 123D of the Transport Act 2000 to remove “auditor”, a term synonymous with an appropriate level of qualification, registration and probity, with the more generic term “approved person”. An auditor, by contrast, must be a member of the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.

The Minister said in response to my noble friend Lady Brinton’s question at Second Reading:

“The intention is not to deregulate approved persons but to widen the range of them. I completely agree with her that they should have some qualifications. An unqualified person should not be able to make a judgment about whether a franchising scheme is right”.—[Official Report, 8/1/25; col. 790.]


The powers and responsibilities of the approved person are significant. Clause 9(2)(1) states:

“A franchising authority, or two or more franchising authorities acting jointly, may not proceed with a proposed franchising scheme unless they have obtained a report from an independent approved person on the assessment of the proposed scheme (see section 123B)”.


I understand why the Government would like to broaden the scope of those able to provide assurance that an approved person will have, at the very least, a CIPFA qualification or its equivalent. However, one of the problems of loosening very specific language in previous legislation is that without sight of exactly what the new qualifications are some organisations will take advantage of the new scheme. From these Benches, we would want any new franchise proposal to have been assessed and reported on by a qualified person because this is about significant public money and assurance. On that point, I hope that the Minister can clarify today what qualifications the Government would expect for such a person in order to reassure these Benches.

My noble friend Lord Goddard clearly set out Amendments 2 and 12, which aim to ensure that we learn from the Manchester franchising experience and that best practice is shared more widely, making franchising more dynamic and responsive. Clarity is absolutely needed on whether there is a minimum period from which services or changes to services proposed by a franchising authority may be enacted. I hope the Minister can answer this point and provide much-needed clarity today.

Amendment 61 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, regarding the qualifications needed for officials working in franchising authorities who will be responsible for designing, negotiating and enforcing any franchising schemes, is welcome, given that it is important that staff have a clear understanding of health and safety issues. The noble Lord, Lord Woodley, raised a number of points linked to employment rights, and I look forward to hearing a response to his specific concerns.

The amendments in this group from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, are a mixed bag, with many seeming, quite frankly, to be trying to put more obstacles in the way of any local transport authority that wishes to introduce franchising. They feel like an ideological response rather than genuine concern about bus service provision across the country. The noble Lord suddenly does not seem to believe in localism. I am not sure that he would have had the same opinion in his previous life as a local councillor and a deputy mayor of London.

If all local transport authorities want to move towards franchising, so be it. This is about devolution and local authorities deciding what suits their local communities. It is highly unlikely that everywhere will move towards franchising, but they should have that option. To want potential intervention from the Secretary of State feels an unnecessary and bureaucratic top-down approach, whereas this is supposed to be a bottom-up approach to bus services. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response to the points raised.

Bus Services (No. 2) Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lady Finlay of Llandaff sent me a paragraph from an email from a member of staff in memory of Baroness Randerson, which I will read:

“Baroness Jenny Randerson was a dear friend since I started at the Millbank House Cafeteria in October 2011. I met her sister, husband and grandchildren from Brussels. She supported me when I had my hand surgery. She checked up on me by email. We joked and laughed and she was always positive. I did also send her emails to complain about the number 3 bus”.


So it is to buses we turn, with Baroness Randerson very much in our minds.

I must declare an interest: I love bus travel. The majority of my daily travel to your Lordships’ House is by bus and, as such, I welcome the Bill. I thank all those who sent me briefings: Tom Kearney, of LondonBusWatch; Kevin Mustafa, of the London Bus Drivers’ Bill of Rights campaign; and, as ever, the excellent House of Lords Library. I also thank the Minister and his team for the excellent collaborative briefing of yesterday, which was incredibly useful all round.

I always tell a visitor to London that the best place to see London is from the top of a bus. The 76 route is difficult to beat, particularly the view from the top deck when travelling over Waterloo Bridge at night. The Minister must take a lot of credit for the improvement in bus services in London. When I first came to London in the late 1980s, I used to wait a long time for a number 1 bus, then five would arrive at the same time. This is now unusual. We can look at bus times on dot matrix at bus stops or on our phone. London buses are iconic and work very well, but we need to take care before we send that model around the country.

As the Explanatory Notes say, and as the Minister repeated:

“The passenger should be at the heart of any process”—


but what about pedestrians and other road users? In the Bill, safety is about only crime on buses, and our thoughts are obviously with the family of the teenager killed on a bus in Woolwich yesterday. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, has alluded to already, according to TfL’s own figures, in London, an average of three people a day are hospitalised after a bus safety incident, at least one of which is a collision. About every five to six weeks, someone is killed in a bus safety incident—again, mostly from collisions. We know this because TfL is the only bus authority that publishes its safety figures. As we talked about in the briefing yesterday, the Bill mentions data usage but does not mention types of data. I urge the Government to put a necessity to publish quarterly bus safety performance data, as TfL has done since 2014, into the Bill. If we are to learn from accidents, we need to know where and how these incidents happened.

We also know how important drivers are to the services. The Bill mentions staff in relation to training, but not driver safety and well-being. What about drivers who are under increasing pressure to keep on time, handling radio and text messages while on the move, especially in the new 20mph zones? Should driver welfare not be enshrined in the Bill? As someone who knows better than anyone how to drive a bus, perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

I quote the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, in Oral Questions:

“Bus companies sharing their data has been an enormous problem—anyone in the north of England knows that that helped prevent us bringing in an Oyster-style ticketing service across the north. It is crucial that we get this right and that all companies are obliged to share the information”.—[Official Report, 7/10/24; col. 1824.]


It is not clear from the Bill what information is to be reported. I have already talked about safety, and, as we discussed in the briefing, the difficulties of introducing Oyster-style ticketing—or the Oyster-style ticketing of the noble Lord, Lord Whitty—in other regions. I urge the Government to encourage this, as it has been revolutionary in terms of travel in London. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild England’s bus network based on the excellent London model. Let us just make sure that that model is as good as it can be.

Bus Funding

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The funding provided by what is effectively a £1 billion settlement will allow local transport authorities in all areas to spend this money in the best possible way. I am very sympathetic to rural areas, where services have disappeared in the past, and I have explained some of the reasons why recently that might be the case. There is capital funding in this settlement for zero-emission vehicles, as there should be. It is for one year, but the spending review in the spring will no doubt give direction for future years. The equitable distribution of this through this serviceable formula is much more likely to result in service patterns across both rural and urban areas, which will be sustainable into the future.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, on 5 November, London bus drivers marched on Westminster to complain about their working conditions, including that most routes now have toilet facilities only at one end, meaning that drivers have three hours between toilet breaks, that the headway driving system sometimes requires drivers to break the speed limit, and that conditions within cabs can become unbearably hot or cold. In all this talk about funding, could the Minister assure us that drivers will not be forgotten?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The noble Lord might know that, for some years I was responsible for the London bus service. I am not any longer; the Mayor of London is. I would question some of the things the noble Lord has asserted, simply because I know through prior knowledge that we spent an awful lot of time and money providing far more toilet facilities for bus drivers in London than anybody had done before. I would question whether any responsible operator licensed by the traffic commissioners would commission schedules which expected buses to exceed the speed limit.

What I would say to the noble Lord is that it is very important that bus drivers are paid properly and looked after properly, and that their scheduled and actual hours comply with the law. To that end, the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency will inspect those operations, whether in London or elsewhere. The traffic commissioners will take action against operators that do not comply with the legislation in respect of the operation of urban bus services.

Pedal Cycles

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe, for initiating this important debate. I am a cyclist in London, my children cycle to school and my wife cycles to work. We all agree on the benefits, and obviously more people should be encouraged to take up cycling.

Life has got better for us cyclists. Low-traffic zones; new cycle paths and superhighways; we can buy our bikes tax-free on the bike to work scheme. E-bike hire has given us another option for one-way trips. But there is a problem. There is anarchy in London—and other cities, I suspect—as my noble friend Lord Birt so graphically described. We have got to a stage where, on a cycle journey, it is more unusual to see someone stopping at a light than jumping it. Red lights have become optional. People go the wrong way, as we have heard, down one-way systems, regularly riding on the pavement. Untidily parked rental e-bikes and scooters are causing problems for those with visual impairments and mobility problems.

The author Douglas Adams described one of his characters as stepping off the pavement and being shouted at

“from a moral high ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit”,

and this attitude seems to pervade all cyclists, whether on Lime or in Lycra. There seems to be an attitude that cyclists are above the law, and there seems to be no way of enforcing it, as my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe so powerfully showed.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson of Abinger, pointed out, Cycling UK says that if you introduce measures, cycling rates could drop by 36%. How do we balance the rule of law with encouraging people to use a bike?

Over the past 10 years in London, about two cyclists were killed or seriously injured in bus crashes every month. In London, in 2022, TfL buses accounted for less than 1% of road traffic, but 40% of cyclists’ deaths were caused by them. We still do not know enough about the causes. I join my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe in his plea for better data. Can the Minister comment on that? Cycle deaths in rural areas are also a real problem—I wonder whether this is more to do with the heady cocktail of V8 engines and an ageing population. The good news is that, in the UK, there was a 23% drop in cyclist fatalities between 2013 and 2023, but I wonder whether this trend will be reversed.

It is hard to argue for better education for motorists if cyclists are not going to behave better. What is the solution? As ever, it is education—but I would say that because I am a teacher. Bike helmets are a really good idea, and we need to campaign for them to be worn regularly. We need to persuade cyclists to ride defensively to minimise risk. We need more cycle lanes, more cycle zones at lights and more cycle traffic lights, which give cyclists a head start—sometimes it is safer to jump the lights than do a Formula 1 start at junctions. We need to separate motor traffic from cycles as much as possible, especially in rural areas, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and my noble friend Lord Burns said. Can the Minister update us on the progress of cycle lanes?

As we talked about this week at Questions, road surfaces need to be much better. My wife was cycling home recently and her front wheel went into a pothole. She went over the handlebars and did quite a lot of damage to her face—it was very lucky that there was not a car behind her. I thought that electronic chips on bikes might be a solution—it works for my cat. I had a conversation with a friend who was involved in the setting up of the congestion zone, and she convinced me that that was expensive and unworkable—although it works for cats.

As the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, we need to use common sense and to encourage more people to cycle, but in a way that promotes safe and legal cycling, so that those of us who enjoy it so much can welcome a new breed with a clear conscience.

Bus Franchising

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I thank the right reverend Prelate for his comments. I particularly note his support for the effects of the initial tranches of franchising in Manchester, which have indeed increased service and produced better reliability. He refers to the very old organisation of public transport in Manchester. Many of those magnificent vehicles are in the Manchester transport museum at Queens Road.

These days, the increasing number of combined authorities are of a good size to take advantage of this Government’s franchising proposition. It is, in effect, bringing together local authorities of sufficient size to be able to take advantage of the benefits of a network. I do not have an answer to whether this will allow individual local authorities to join together, but I am happy to write to the right reverend Prelate about that.

The right reverent Prelate raised the subject of the integration of rail services. We have already made a lot of progress with the Mayor of Greater Manchester, and with the Mayor of the West Midlands, in integrating rail services into the local transport network in information and in ticketing. Although this is not the subject of today’s discussion, I have no doubt that there will be some announcements on that. He is right to aspire to an integrated local network that is modally agnostic and includes rail and, in Manchester’s case, metro and buses.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, if we are going to use TfL and the London bus network as the example for going around the country, the dread problem of safety goes around again. Carrying on from the question I asked the Minister earlier this week, it often seems that in London—where, from memory, someone is killed by a bus every six weeks—the bus companies investigate their own incidents, with the DVSA checking for legalities. Who will be responsibility for safety in these franchises, and will they have teeth?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

One of the benefits of London’s large system of bus franchising is the work that Transport for London has done on the design and safety of bus travel. The noble Lord has to remember that those vehicles are on the road for 18, 20 or 24 hours a day, and they form a major part of the mileage of vehicles in London, even though their numbers are fairly small.

A significant amount of work has been done on the safety of driving and drivers, and on the design of vehicles. I know that has been shared with manufacturers and bus operators across the country, and with organisations such as Transport for Greater Manchester and the Urban Transport Group. I would expect more of that to happen.

The safety of buses is considered by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Authority, which is an executive arm of the Department for Transport and has the power to investigate serious bus accidents, which it does. It has the power to prosecute the drivers and operators of those vehicles. None of these proposals would alter its powers to continue to do so.

Local Bus Sector

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

The programme to reduce emissions from the bus fleet has been carried out by successive Governments over many years. There is no doubt at all that government intervention has created both cleaner diesel buses, which now meet that Euro 6 standard, and an increasing fleet of electric buses, which are the modern equivalent of tram-cars. This Government hope to continue that, subject to funding, because it is clearly a very important contribution to air quality in urban and other areas.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, while we talk about support for buses, I think we ought also to talk about support for bus safety. I quote the BBC website from this morning:

“At present there is no independent investigator and no independent recommendations when it comes to bus collisions. The families want to know why there is one policy for trains and another for buses”.


Perhaps the Minister could comment on that.

Public Bus Collisions

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Hampton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce deaths and injuries of vulnerable road users from public bus collisions in England.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Lord Davies of Gower) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government are determined to make our roads safer for all users. The National Bus Strategy made it clear that local authorities and bus operators should work together to ensure that bus services are safe and perceived to be safe by all. We also introduced changes to the Highway Code in 2022 and have delivered high-quality walking and cycling schemes, which will be vital to ensuring the safety of vulnerable road users.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I thank the Minister for his Answer. Every six weeks, according to Transport for London’s own statistics, on average one person is killed and 100 people hospitalised by preventable bus incidents. This is getting no better, despite the fact that the number of bus journeys has actually reduced. Given that the London business model is being rolled out to the rest of the country, do the Government still think that having bus companies investigating their own incidents is a good idea?

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, as I have said, road safety is a priority for the Government. The department is determined to make roads safer for everyone, and the delivery of high-quality walking and cycling schemes, coupled with the changes to the Highway Code in 2022, will play an important part in addressing the safety concerns of people wanting to walk, wheel and cycle. Active Travel England is working with local authorities to ensure that walking and cycling infrastructure is of the right quality and in the right places to maximise its value and impact. On the issue of bus companies investigating themselves, as the noble Lord knows from debates on the Automated Vehicles Bill, we have no intention of introducing separate investigation for buses.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 6th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I think this group has two subgroups. There is the subgroup of amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley’s subgroup. I am afraid to tell my noble friend that we will support the Davies subgroup and not the Berkeley subgroup.

There are many reasons for this, ending with a very pragmatic one. First, the proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, are structurally sound as they separate the roles of Clause 1 and Clause 2. Clause 1, as it will stand after these amendments, in essence says, among other things, that there shall be a safety standard. The clause is headed “Basic concepts”. Clause 2 attempts to address what that safety standard shall be.

We believe that government Amendment 3 is right. It is a very sound definition of “safe enough”. It is built around the well-crafted concept of

“careful and competent human drivers”.

It is today’s standard at its best. It is today’s standard after, as is set out in the commissioners’ report, eliminating the distracted, the drowsy, the drunk, the drugged and the disqualified. It is a high standard but not an infinite standard. It recognises that there has to be a limitation, otherwise the whole pursuit of a standard that is not defined becomes impossible.

It passes what I consider to be the death test. One of these vehicles is going to kill somebody. It is inevitable; the sheer volume of events will mean that something will go wrong. It is at that moment that you have to be able to respond to public opinion, have a standard that is easy for people to understand and defend it. I know this because I have been in that position when running a railway. The 1974 Act that applies to railways demands a standard: that the risk is as low as reasonably practical. It is one of the most brilliant pieces of legislation ever passed. Its impact on safety in this country has been enormous. Its impact on construction and railways, and its crossover impact on nuclear, have served this country well. I believe that this standard, which involves being as safe as a careful and competent driver, is the natural equivalent.

I also note that the law commissions produced three answers. Since they took three years or something to come to these three answers, it seems a pretty good idea to pick one of them. They were options A, B and C. Option C is, in my view, clearly rejected by these amendments. That option was to be

“overall, safer than the average human driver”.

The average human driver includes this wonderful list of distracted, drowsy, drunk, drugged and disqualified drivers. The world is a better place for eliminating them. Option B was

“as safe as a human driver who does not cause a fault accident”.

That is so ill defined that even the law commissions gave up on it. Option A is this one:

“as safe as a competent and careful human driver”.

It passes that test in a way that, when the experts set about turning this into regulations, I believe it will be feasible for them to achieve.

We also support government Amendment 7, which is a compromise. It ensures that Parliament—the importance of Parliament is very much brought out in the supporting documentation—has a positive involvement with the initial statement of safety principles. It also assures us that there will be a negative involvement with subsequent revisions. That is a balance, and we can support that.

I am afraid that government Amendments 3 and 7 have a rather unique advantage that we should not ignore: the name on them is the Minister’s, that of the noble Lord, Lord Davies. But, with the greatest respect to him, if you rub out “Lord Davies” and look under that name, you see “His Majesty’s Government”. Their majority in the other place means that these two amendments will become law—a piece of law that will guide this industry well.

I turn to an issue that is not so directly involved but needs to be there to tidy things up: the principles relating to equality and fairness. What does this mean in this environment? This too is set out in the law commissions’ report. In essence it means that an autonomous vehicle does not come at the expense of any particular group of road users. The policy scoping notes say:

“Government is likely to include a safety principle relating to equality and fairness”.


That is not there at the moment, but I am delighted to be advised by the Minister that this will be changed from “likely to include” to “will include”. This emphasis is particularly important for pedestrians, who must not be sacrificed to achieve the introduction of automated vehicles.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendments 1 and 4 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. We dealt with safety a lot in Committee, and it is paramount. This is the most important part of the Bill. I became an enthusiast about automated vehicles because I turned up to a briefing. Most people you talk to are ambivalent at best, and there is a sort of dystopian “Blade Runner” worry about faceless terminator drones.

Safety needs to be beyond reproach when bad things happen. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, bad things will happen—deaths will happen. We need to be able to face people and say that we did the best we possibly could. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said this needs to be easy to understand and define; that is absolutely right, but it needs to be equivalent to, or better than, a driver who does the best in a driving test. That does not sound too high to me.

Amendment 4 mentions “significantly” improving road safety. The noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said that we should expect all autonomous vehicles to be better than human drivers, but what if they are not? We need to hold them to account. This would make the whole thing easier to sell to a sceptical public, as opposed to the government amendment. I am not a lawyer, but I do not see why trying to make things significantly better would deter players from joining the market. The industry will spend money on this only when it sees a momentum shift in public opinion, which is why safety is so important and why these amendments are so important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I might add a word for the very large number of people who are not in wheelchairs but who depend, like I do, on a stick. When pavements are so awful in this country, they need a lot of consideration. They walk around at their peril, often due to the irresponsible use of scooters, which are insufficiently regulated by the department.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 8, 18 to 20, and 27, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to which I have added my name. In Committee, I was struck by the powerful speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, whom we have often heard in your Lordships’ House talking so powerfully about her lived experiences.

This is not a once-in-a-generation nor a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it is a new, unique opportunity for disabled people to be front and centre of the development of a transport system. A great friend of mine is blind and when we first met, he had a clunky old phone with Braille on it. As soon as the iPhone came out, he had a phone with perfect accessibility built in. There was nothing new there. He has the same iPhone as everybody else. It just has the features to work for him, and I think this is what we can do with automated vehicles.

Elderly or disabled people, who have never dreamed of owning a car, can now look to the near future and see that this is a possibility—but only if they are included in all stages. As a design and technology teacher, I am all over inclusive design. This is not a bolt-on. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said he wanted this bolted on to existing stuff, I want this designed from the ground up. It is a unique—and I mean unique—opportunity to give disabled people a level playing field. It must not be squandered. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, while I support the general principle of these comments—indeed, I personally made great changes to the taxi industry to get there—the particular circumstances that enabled me to do that a long time ago were very unusual.

The current situation with autonomous vehicles is that there are many manufacturers that are converting existing vehicles. They cannot change their donor vehicles to make them accessible for disabled people, however desirable that might be. Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Wayve, Oxa and, indeed, Mercedes are all working on autonomous vehicles, but they are not likely or able to change their vehicles to make them accessible because they must be accessible from the original design. Automotive history goes back 120 or even 150 years. We are not able to change existing vehicles, however desirable that is.

What these clauses would do is stop disabled people being helped by autonomous vehicles coming along. I am thinking particularly of people disabled by a severe learning difficulty who would not be able to learn to drive, or safely drive, a normal vehicle who would not be able to drive as a passenger. I am afraid the clauses would prevent these manufacturers from coming into this market. They would rather go to a market where they could use their existing vehicles than make the changes.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

I have one other issue to raise, which I am not going to speak to in detail now—it is in my Amendment 37A —suggesting that all these issues should be considered independently of government by, I suggest, the Office of Rail and Road, because it is doing a very good job on road safety at the moment. It also does a very good job on rail safety. The key for me is that this should be done by an organisation that is independent of government, and of people in Swansea and everyone else. It should be independent of those who quite rightly want to pursue electric vehicles for all the benefit they are going to bring. There has to be some brake and some independent check on what they are doing, to make sure that all the other intentions that the public have a right to achieve and wish for will be provided—and, if they are not, there will be a voice independent of government. We can go on talking about independent voices on post offices, railways and things like that, but it is just as important to have an independent body for this, and I shall speak to that when we get to Amendment 37A.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 3, 5 and 8 in my name. I thank the Minister very much for the very informative meeting we had, and the Society of Motor Manufacturers was very helpful on any questions he could not answer on technicalities. That and a trip round the streets of King’s Cross in an automated vehicle thanks to Wayve—which was actually remarkably boring, which is what they tell me it is supposed to be—have put my technical questions to one side.

My concerns and my amendments, rather like those from the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Tunnicliffe, are all about safety. The Minister said, as I recall, that safety would be the cornerstone of this Bill and, if we lose the confidence of the public—who are very concerned about safety—we are going to run into trouble and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, there are going to be bumps in the road. If we lose confidence, people are going to lose confidence in the whole concept.

In the meeting, the Government said that, if we set safety standards too high, it will deter manufacturers and companies from coming into the market. But, at the moment, if raising these standards is deterring companies, maybe these companies should not be entering the market anyway and should not be involved in the development of automated vehicles.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, I think that cyclists will bear a disproportionate brunt of any casualties. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, they will be the “losers” in this whole equation. I turned to Cycling UK for some amendments, which seem to beef up the safety standards. Amendment 3 says

“leave out ‘an acceptably safe standard’ and insert ‘a high standard of safety’”.

That does not strike me as rocket science. In the same way, Amendment 5 says

“leave out ‘an acceptably’ and insert ‘a very’”

to make

“a very low risk of committing a traffic infraction”.

That is very similar to Amendment 4 from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.

Amendment 8 says that, instead of “better”, the Bill should state that road safety would be

“significantly better for all road users”.

To me, this seems self-explanatory and would mean that safety truly is in the heart of the Bill. This seems like common sense to me and I look forward to the Minister’s answers.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, who has done sterling work in contributing to this Bill. I apologise for the fact that I have not managed until today to fully engage with Committee stage. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, who raised a crucial issue which, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, really does not seem to be covered here.

I want to take a specific example here of the tragic case—which is far too common—of small children, toddlers up to the age of about seven, being killed on domestic driveways by human drivers. A report from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents which was supported by the Department for Transport shows that, since 2001, 34 children have been killed in domestic driveways, nearly always in their own home. There have been 19 deaths since 2008. In 22 of those cases, the child was killed by a reversing vehicle.

Here we have circumstances where—one would assume—usually competent and careful human drivers were not able to make allowance for what was happening around them. If we are going to think about automated vehicles, we need to think very hard about circumstances where we are not on the road but are in situations where vulnerable people, or animals for that matter, are not going to behave in manners that follow some logical kind of algorithm. That is not how the world works and, if we are going to have automated vehicles, we have to allow for circumstances like that.

I will pick up a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and a number of others made. Whether we have this Bill or not, and whether we have automated vehicles or not, we should be aiming to do vastly better than we do now on road safety. In the most recent figures we have, in 2022 there were 1,711 fatalities and nearly 30,000 when you put the “killed” and “seriously injured” figures together. That was five fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled. That sounds like a big number, but the figure is up 2% on the last time we had a year like it, which was 2019, the pre-Covid year. So, on the metric we should be counting, we are heading in the wrong direction.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, I think that, of the amendments we have before us, Amendment 8, which says

“significantly better for all road users”

is probably the best one; we have a number of ranges before us. Again, I am not sure that this would get past the Table Office, but I believe, and the Green Party very strongly believes, that the Government should be adopting a policy known as Vision Zero. It is the idea that we should have the goal of no deaths or serious injuries on our roads. We know that humans will make mistakes, that pedestrians will make mistakes and that there will be children, animals and all sorts of things. We have to design everything to reduce the risk to as close to zero as we can possibly manage. I do not know whether we could write Vision Zero into this Bill. I can foresee the wrestle we might have with the Table Office now, but I think that

“significantly better for all road users”

at least takes us in the right kind of direction.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, I thank Cycling UK for its excellent briefing. We often talk about cyclists as vulnerable road users and this briefing is from Cycling UK, but the most vulnerable road users are pedestrians, particularly young people and, increasingly, older pedestrians who on average tend to move more slowly and are more vulnerable in all sorts of ways. In recent years we have seen a real increase in the dangers to older pedestrians, such as in changes made a few years ago to traffic lights in London that had disastrous, hideous impacts on them. Amendment 8 refers to “all road users”; a lot of the discussion at Second Reading was about interactions between two motorised vehicles, but we have to make sure that we think about all the other interactions as well. We need a great deal more work and thought on this Bill, particularly this element of it.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the very entertaining speech from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and to speak to your Lordships with a real sense of optimism over the Bill. In doing so, I declare an interest: my wife works for Amazon. Neither of us has any privileged information on operations in this sector but I suspect that Amazon, along with many others, will be taking a keen interest in the passage of the Bill.

I am really excited about the Bill. I have no expert knowledge in the field, but the Bill will profoundly affect us all. We are all passengers and pedestrians, and most of us are drivers, cyclists and users of online shopping websites. As we have heard, the Government have forecast that the automated vehicle sector could capture up to £42 billion by 2035. In this, they might be being cautious. It is also a good news story that as a nation we are so strong in this sector, the UK being a global thought leader on regulating AVs, according to Oxa.

We have already heard that we need to act quickly to avoid falling behind countries that have got off the starting grid quicker than us. We are looking at a landscape where, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, much of the on and off-road logistics and road passenger transport could be automated, particularly in rural areas, with a big impact on agriculture, mining and defence as well. The utopian dream is that the automatic vehicles blend seamlessly with our traffic systems, safely and efficiently working to reduce pollution, road rage and accidents, and allowing skilled workers to be deployed elsewhere. Obviously, the dystopian view is of robot vehicles crashing into each other and causing gridlock and mass unemployment while AI systems take over a post-apocalyptic dying planet. The main difficulty for the Bill is that it is trying to legislate for so much that we do not yet understand. I think that it does a pretty good job of it.

I would like some help from the Minister in clarifying a few questions that I have on the Bill. I am a lay man, so I apologise if my questions seem obvious to everyone else. I am a teacher and I always tell my students never to be afraid to ask a question if you do not understand, because I can guarantee that there are always at least two others in the room who do not know the answer either. I hope that one of them here is not the Minister.

Like many others, my paramount concern about the Bill is safety. Although the Minister said that it is baked in, the suspicion is that cyclists and pedestrians would disproportionately bear the brunt of casualties from the initial trials of the vehicles. In this I share Cycling UK’s concern that the safety bar is too low in that the definition of safety for a vehicle that travels autonomously is “acceptable” rather than “high”, and the definition of it travelling legally is if it travels at a “very low risk” of committing a traffic infraction. Therefore, tightening up the safety element of this is vital. However, I am not sure that the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, to ban jaywalkers quite works. I am an inveterate jaywalker and I will fight him on that one—although I have to say, from my daily observations from the top deck of buses in the City, that my fellow cyclists could help themselves by not running so many red lights.

My other big concern is actually who is in charge of the vehicle. The concept of a user-in-charge seems to be the very worst of all worlds, as mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. Having a driver in the cab who may be called on at any time seems to have all the risks and costs of traditional driving with very little benefit. We are surely aiming at no-user-in-charge, but here things get complicated for the lay man.

What is an authorised self-driving entity, who will be responsible for the way that the vehicle drives and meeting other regulatory obligations? Each authorised automated vehicle must have one. Every ASDE is an entity but it is not made clear, at least to me, what that is. The licensed operator is described as being similar to a bus operator, but the nuts and bolts of who controls what and how are not spelled out. Are fleets of vehicles going to be controlled by one person like a minicab company and, if so, what checks are being made on the person’s or team’s competence, state of mind and health to do such a vital job? Are they going to be more like air traffic controllers, in which case how are they to be trained and examined? Will they be subject to random alcohol and drugs tests? Will they need medicals? Perhaps the Minister can shed some light.

The purpose of a safety inspector is to identify, improve the understanding of, and reduce the risk of automated vehicle incidents through conducting a safety investigation. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch is cited as an example, but I am led to believe that bus operators, certainly in London, investigate their own incidents. Is the plan to get bus operators in line with train and air operators, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, alluded to?

Self-driving vehicles need an accurate and up-to-date understanding of the road and to know the legal parameters of the network. Traffic regulation orders will be provided via a common publication platform. Is this feasible? Will it be available for other services, so that an Uber driver, for instance, can at last navigate the low-traffic neighbourhoods of Hackney to get me to my house?

I realise that with automation comes the fear of unemployment, although the APPG on Self-driving Vehicles claims that AVs will create over 38,000 new green jobs—but that is a subject for another day. I am excited by the future the Bill could lead us to. Overall, it is very logical and well thought-out, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on my various points.