Lower Thames Crossing Development Consent Order

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 22nd July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I would hope that it will be, but the noble Lord will know that the deadline was delayed because of the general election, and the new Secretary of State in the other House will need time to correctly assess the large and complex nature of the arguments for and against it. This is one of the largest planning applications that the department has ever dealt with. It is important that the Government plan projects properly and are open about the challenges and natural uncertainty of delivering a project of this size. But that is why the new Government have committed to speed up the delivery of vital projects and announced new legislation that will seek a streamlined and proportionate process to update national policy statements, which are the cornerstones of the planning system for major infrastructure.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Does the Minister of the new Government fully appreciate the problems of His Majesty’s exporters, particularly from the east Midlands and the surrounding areas? There are major congestion and delays en route to Dover for our vital exports. Against that background, can His Majesty’s Government do everything within their power to ensure that this second crossing, so vital to the future success of our country, actually happens?

[Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)]

I can fully understand the national issues regarding congestion at the Dartford Tunnel and the M25, but it is important that the arguments both for and against such a large project are properly examined and that a decision about the project is properly made. We of course hope that we will be able to answer this within the extended timescale given.

Lower Thames Crossing: Development Consent

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

That is a wonderful history lesson; I am most grateful to the noble Lord. The majority of decisions made by my department and applications for development consent orders have been issued within the three-month statutory deadline that starts from receipt of the recommendation report. That will hopefully be the case with this.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Surely my noble friend recognises that this crossing, which complements the Dartford Crossing, is vital to our exports. After Question Time today, will he find out exactly when that decision will be made and publicise it for the nation’s exporters, if for nobody else?

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

Several references have been made to the Dartford Crossing. Approach roads from the west and the east are already heavily congested, so traffic would not be able to reach a new crossing provided at Dartford. The approach roads and the M25 are in a heavily built-up area; increasing their capacity would be massively expensive and require the demolition of many houses and other buildings. All options at Dartford require rebuilding junctions and widening the A282 and the M25, which would be very disruptive over a long construction period.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Naseby Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I will make a short speech, conditioned by my being a former pilot with experience of Boeing, probably the most sophisticated company in the world on unmanned aircraft. The net result so far has been that 346 people died recently, although, thankfully, nobody died in the Alaska experience. Given that situation, although this Bill is supposedly about safety on the roads, we need to take great care; I recognise that we need a framework here, but I hope my noble friend will listen to what the noble Lord suggested earlier in the debate and have the Office of Rail and Road help oversee this Bill as it is implemented in relation to vehicles on the road.

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

I briefly congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing this useful, modest and largely technical Bill to its completion. The Government have expressed optimism that the arrival of automated vehicles in large numbers on our roads is going to have no effect whatever on how the rest of the road system and other road users operate. It is the principle on which the Bill is based but, to me, it seems to be credible only in the somewhat artificial reality of your Lordships’ House.

My noble friend the Minister and his department still need to address a worry many of us have. He has stated that nothing will change—that facilities for pedestrians, for example, will not be affected—with the arrival of these vehicles, but it is clear that is not wholly credible. The people who have invested in automated vehicles will find that pedestrians and other road users are obstacles to the rollout of their plans, and they will then turn up at the ministry and say, “We have spent all this money, so now you have to do something to make it work for us”. At that point, officials will roll over, Ministers will wave their hands and the money will decide what the policy is. All of this will happen without a parliamentary debate considering the effect of the vehicles and what they mean for road users, especially in urban environments. I hope my noble friend the Minister will find an opportunity to allow us, and the public, a debate about what the vision of our cities is when automated vehicles are operating in large numbers as the Bill makes provision for.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 6th February 2024 Lords Chamber

I am not going speak in any great detail to all the other amendments in this group—although they are linked to it—except to say that we, somehow, need to get some independence into this. It is not consultants; it is something that has a statutory function. It is on that basis that I beg to move Amendment 9A and, again, apologise for being very late with it.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I only spoke at Second Reading and was unable to take part in Committee. I think the House knows that I come from the world of aviation and, in terms of aviation, there is some similarity in the context that the noble Lord has covered this afternoon.

This is frontier technology. It happens to be on the ground, but those of us who have flown for Her Majesty’s Forces or flown privately can still take a great interest, in particular, in aviation. There is a need for those who are knowledgeable and not biased and are able to take time. One of the great problems in our society at the moment is time. When I look at what the Department for Trade and the Department for Transport are having to do, there may well be an argument for another body that is knowledgeable about what has been happening in the past and where things are going.

I thank the noble Lord opposite, and I hope my noble friend on the Front Bench will recognise that we are not having a Division on this—I assume—but that there ought to be further discussions on whether this is something we should look at more closely.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 10, which relates to the ORR, because there are too many loose ends in the Bill in terms of the powers being granted to the Secretary of State and it is not specified where it goes after that.

We are dealing with some issues that are very closely aligned with those in Amendment 28: how the Government exercise the considerable power that they will have in relation to the development of this market.

To be totally frank, we do not need Department for Transport micromanagement. What we need is an independent body, with dedicated expertise, that will operate with safety considerations actually at the fore, because the development of this market will be badly compromised if there are huge safety issues that arise. It is important—really essential—that the development of this technology is rolled out with safety at its heart. As the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, stated, the CAA is an excellent example. It can be replicated by expanding the role of the ORR to take this under its wing and by looking closely at what the ORR does at the moment. It has the foundations that we need for something that can be developed pretty rapidly. I say to the Minister that I hope that the Government take this seriously and give it consideration. If it is not possible to give precision by Third Reading, hopefully it might be possible to do so by the time the Bill reaches the other place.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Naseby Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I am sure that I speak for all colleagues in the Chamber when I say that this debate has been enhanced by the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lord Holmes. The area that they have covered is so important.

I want to record in Hansard that today is an auspicious day for British transport, because today a jet took off from London airport using synthetic fuel to fly to the States. That is a huge achievement of the United Kingdom, and our development, our work and our taxpayers’ money has brought that about. I would like to record that in the context of this particular Bill.

Some 60 years ago-plus, I was a fast jet pilot. In those days, safety was absolutely paramount. If you were at the controls on your own, flying at anything up to 40,000 feet at a speed of up to 0.82 mach, you had to know what was happening; there was only one person who made the decision, with plenty of instruments reflecting the actions you were taking.

When I was preparing for the Bill, I was reminded of three fatal crashes that have occurred thanks to automation. I am sure that colleagues will remember them. There was the Boeing 737 MAX 8, in October 2018, when 189 people were killed, with the two pilots totally unable to do anything to stop the automation and the stall that followed. In March 2019, on the same aircraft—not the same one, but the same model—157 people were killed. What went wrong? It was failure of software. We fight with software all the time, but failure of software when you have passengers has been proven to be very difficult.

I had a look at the French one in the Caribbean, because I knew it was different from the Boeing example. The situation there was a weather condition. The flight was on 1 June 2019, as the plane headed towards a thunderstorm. The pitot head froze—the instrument on the front of the aircraft that measures the speed and height of the aircraft. The net result was that the instrument recorded inaccurately what the status of the aircraft was, the aircraft stalled and all the passengers were killed. So that is where I am coming from in relation to this Bill, where safety is stated to be at its core.

Let us leave the airline world and go on to the implications for drivers. The lessons learned from those aircraft crashes are, first, that drivers must be trained. It is quite a challenge—and we know that there is a whole variety of abilities of those driving on the road today. I do not know the answer to that question, other than that it is a question that has to be asked.

Then there are what they call “uncommanded activations”: software that suddenly says something to you when you have not put it into a programme, or you did not think you had, and you have to decide what to do. That is the partial one that is a challenge. Then there are the potential alerts: if you are half in control, or not in control, are those alerts recognised? Fourthly, as I have already indicated, there are weather conditions, which change dramatically in our country. There was heavy frost in Bedfordshire the day before yesterday, and all the instruments on the car had to be cleaned. On the car that I drove here today, I had to clean the camera for reversing. So weather conditions do affect things.

We also know, from the very good briefing from the Library, the history from California at this point in time. We need to recognise that the States are way ahead of us: they have been doing it that much longer. They have had these vehicles going around San Francisco, but in one paragraph the head of firefighting services says that

“driverless cars had interfered with emergency services 40 times since … 2020”.

Then there is another paragraph about San Francisco, which is very relevant—any of us who have been to San Francisco will know that it is all up hill and down dale. There are examples of where

“the cars have run red lights, crashed into a bus, blocked pedestrian crossings and cycle lanes and caused traffic jams”,

et cetera. I give a final quote:

“The California Department of Motor Vehicles states that as of 10 November 2023 it had received 673 autonomous vehicle collision reports”.


Well, if safety is primary to this legislation, that is not a very good start, is it?

Now I turn to the Bill itself. I will not go through the varying stages that have been discussed already, but seven years have gone by—quite a long time—before we get around to this Bill. Here we are after seven years, and the fact of the matter is that we as a country have fallen behind. We were in the vanguard seven years ago; we are not in the vanguard any more but in the guard’s van, almost, in terms of technical development, et cetera. We ought to make sure that we know what other people have done so far before we start spending a lot of government money just mirroring tests that others have done. I believe that is a very important point. I would like to know from my noble friend, not necessarily this evening but in writing, how much the taxpayer has already spent on this project.

What about the context for authorised automated vehicles? Who ensures that those vehicles actually stick to the restrictions that some of them have apparently been given? If the restriction is the motorway, who will ensure that it sticks to the motorway? I do not know the answer. What is the estimated cost of updating the digital information across the whole road network in GB? We talk about that and it was in my noble friend’s opening statement that this all applies to GB, but we certainly do not have that digital information at this point in time.

What work is being done on the current driving test? I have a granddaughter who is studying the Highway Code and everything else, having driving lessons. At what point will that age group, those young people, be brought in, so that at least the Highway Code is brought up to date? For me, Clause 2 at the moment is really pie in the sky. It says:

“The principles must be framed with a view to securing that road safety in Great Britain will be better as a result of the use of authorised automated vehicles on roads”.


Well, what did I see on the way down this morning? I do not know exactly how many cars there are on the road, but it cannot be far short of 1 million. Then there are hundreds of lorries and possibly millions of cyclists, few of whom know what the Highway Code is. One has only to see what happens out the front here. They do not stop at that pedestrian crossing with the red light; they just cycle right through it. Then there are the delivery bikes with very creative motorcyclists who weave in and out. Then there are the scooters. Believe it or not, in Bedfordshire, the week before last, the driver who is taking me back tonight said to me, “You won’t believe this, Michael, but a motorised skateboard overtook me the other day in a 20 mph zone”. I said, “God, I don’t believe it”, and Barry said, “Not just that: further up, he picks up a passenger and comes back the other way”. These are not even licensed, but they are very dangerous. I do not know where all this fits in.

Finally, there is the question of potholes, as even the Prime Minister admits. I do not know whether AI can work out whether there is a pothole underneath a big puddle, but it is a problem. Weather conditions and potholes affect driveability and, as we know, driving skills vary. In my judgment, for once, we should learn from others. My repeated request to His Majesty’s Government is that, before we spend too much money on it, we find out what Germany, Sweden and particularly the United States have been doing, and pull that together—then we might have the basis of a Bill.

This is a 100-clause Bill—I note this to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley—and we have to get the framework there but, just for once, we should be strong-minded. I was in business for years. We should stick to the jobs that we are good at: synthetic fuels for aviation, hydrogen and electric vehicles, as mentioned. We have plenty of work to do there. I am sceptical about the need for the Bill at this time. We are not in the vanguard. If safety really is the core, we should proceed very measuredly.

Rail Ticket Offices

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Wednesday 12th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, is my noble friend aware that—

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Sikka (Lab)]

My Lords—

Driving Licences

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 5th June 2023 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Naseby]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what plans they have to introduce a graduated driving licence or other restrictions on newly qualified drivers.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport (Baroness Vere of Norbiton) (Con)]

My Lords, every death or serious injury on our roads is a tragedy, and we continue to work tirelessly to improve road safety for all users. Our broad approach to improving safety for new and novice drivers includes new technology and improving education while reinforcing vital road safety messages through our THINK! campaign. There are not any current plans to introduce driving licence restrictions on newly qualified drivers.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, I am greatly relieved to hear that Answer from my noble friend, because there are numerous rumours going round. I am sure young people will be greatly reassured. Nevertheless, is she aware of the other real problem that young people face today: that it is very difficult to get a test date when you are ready to take it? Is she aware that there are sellers out there using bots to hoover up at least a quarter of all the exam slots and reselling them to learners desperate to take their test? Furthermore, there appear to be dozens of websites offering to find learners earlier booking slots for a fee as high as £300. Can my noble friend look closely at this abuse of the situation and take the appropriate action?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for raising that. When I was Roads Minister until fairly recently, I worked very closely with DVSA to ensure that those bots cannot get access to the booking system. I will take his comments back and ensure that DVSA is doing all it can to make sure that those slots are not being used by other people. At the moment, there are about half a million people already booked into slots, and there are about 44,000 slots available in the next 24 weeks. The key to all this—it loops back into the road safety element of this Question—is that we must ensure that drivers are ready to take their tests. At the moment, fewer than 50% pass, so the number one message for learner drivers must be: be ready and then you will be able to pass your test and drive with confidence.

Global Britain: Traffic

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The Government are investing £8 billion over the next two years in all types of road enhancements and improvements, including £200 million for maintenance and potholes.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Is my noble friend the Minister comfortable that London is now rated the most congested city in the world? Is she equally comfortable that our major retailers in the West End are suffering in relation to trade from people coming into our country? Finally, even the City of London, the centre of finance, is itself complaining that this is affecting the City badly.

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I think there is a slight question of clarification here. The data that my noble friend cites actually misses out several cities in the world. Lagos’s traffic is 10 times worse than London’s, and in Seoul it is twice as bad—so London is not the worst. However, what we have to understand, and what the Government understand, is that one needs a mixed economy for transport. Of course, car usage is important, but particularly in London, where excellent public transport is available, we need to make sure that we use that more. I note that traffic is back to 100% of pre-pandemic levels, but the Tube remains persistently below them. I think that the Mayor of London should be doing more to get people back on the Tube.

Vehicles: Purchase Price and Running Costs

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

It is really important that we understand what happens to batteries throughout their lives. It is the case though that there are 20 million EVs on the world’s roads already and there is no evidence to suggest that their lifespans are any different from those of a petrol or a diesel vehicle. We expect that many EV batteries will have a guarantee of about eight years, or 100,000 miles. As for the end of their lifespan, it is very important that we focus on recycling. Of course, the Government are focused on that, and I will write to the noble Baroness with more information.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

Is now not a good time for His Majesty’s Government to have a whole look? We have the strategy of 2030 ahead of us, when petrol cars are supposed to disappear, but at this point in time we have a situation where electric cars are hugely expensive; they are not available at a competitive price for ordinary families. Ordinary families living in tower blocks in my former constituency cannot recharge those cars, so is it not time that we had a look at the whole strategy openly and took a little time about it to ensure that we have a policy that is workable in the future, taking into consideration the point added by my noble friend on the Bench below?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

The price of electric vehicles has fallen dramatically over recent years, and that was helped by the Government providing quite significant grants in the early years to ensure that the prices were lower. There are now 24 models that cost less than £32,000 new—

Stockton to Darlington Railway Anniversary

Lord Naseby Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for highlighting some of the tremendous things that we can achieve to celebrate this 200-year anniversary. I am also aware that Sir Peter Hendy is out there with his begging bowl and working his magic. I am sure he is doing exactly what we want him to do, which is bringing together all the interested parties to work with government. This is a huge opportunity to not only celebrate the heritage of our railway network but promote the wider, modern system across the country.

[Lord Naseby (Con)]

My Lords, if we are to celebrate the 200th anniversary properly, do we not need ticket offices up and down the country? Although only 12% of tickets may be sold there at the moment, nevertheless, is my noble friend not aware that a ticket office does far more than sell tickets? They give advice, not least to parents who are going on holiday or with children, and are of course very important to the tourism industry.