Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Swire Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this Bill, as the automotive sector is an important part of my constituency. It is home to the Vauxhall Motors plant, and last week, we heard the sad news of 400 redundancies. The site has built Vauxhall vehicles for more than 50 years and there is once again real concern about the future of the plant—I will return to that later in my remarks. In addition to Vauxhall, we have hundreds of dependent jobs in the supply chain, and many of my constituents are employed by nearby manufacturers, such as Toyota and Jaguar Land Rover. I shall focus on the impact on jobs—not only the immediate challenges for the automotive sector, but the Bill’s long-term employment implications, which I fear we are not going to address until it is too late.

It is right that we begin to address the legal impediments to automated vehicles and help them to become part of the transport network. As with all technological developments, we need to ensure that the legislative framework is in place, not only to keep our citizens safe and protected, but to send out the signal that this country encourages innovation. We need a simple and timely method to determine liability in the event of an accident, and the Bill will achieve that aim. The likelihood is that over time the number of accidents will reduce substantially as the opportunity for driver error is significantly reduced, but I am not quite as persuaded as some Members that that will lead to any dramatic reduction in insurance premiums.

I imagine The Highway Code will have to be reviewed in due course, and although we are addressing civil liability in this debate, we may in due course have to consider changes to criminal law. At what point does the occupant—I use that term rather than “driver-operator”—cease to be personally liable for any breaches of criminal law? Will we need new offences to take account of the consequences of deliberate hacking?

I have read the lengthy discussions about software updates from the debates on the Bill’s previous incarnation, and I must say that I am not at all clear about where responsibility would lie if a vehicle did not have the required software updates. Should that be looked into in the context of MOT certificates? We are used to regular updates for consumer products such as phones—in fact, that is part of the manufacturers’ business model, to encourage us to buy new phones every few years—but a car is a rather different proposition. A balance needs to be struck between public safety and consumer rights. I do not want to see a £30,000 vehicle becoming unuseable because the owner refuses to pay what they consider to be an extortionate cost for a software update.

We need to consider the broader issue of value judgments. In all the films about artificial intelligence—in which, of course, most of the time things go wrong—machines usually have some sort of in-built fail-safe that prevents them from doing harm to humans. One can see how that idea could be transferred to an autonomous vehicle’s operating system, but it is inevitable that there will be occasions on which evasive action might prevent harm from being done to the passenger but could cause injury or worse to a pedestrian. Earlier in the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) gave an example of how such circumstances might arise.

We in the House of Commons need to have a view on what happens if a car swerves off the road to avoid hitting another vehicle but, in doing so, hits a pedestrian on the pavement. I am not comfortable subcontracting that kind of value judgment to a software developer, and I am even less comfortable subcontracting it to some kind of machine that learns through trial and error which decisions to take. Of course, we humans will not have clear sight of how such machines make those decisions, and we might not be able to understand anyway. I was less than reassured by the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham. I suspect it would not be straightforward to put something of that nature into the Bill, and it is probably a few years before that kind of dilemma becomes relevant, but we do need to consider now how Parliament can ensure transparency and accountability for what could potentially be life and death decisions.

I have given some general observations on the kind of moral and legal questions we need to consider in the context of the Bill, but the main issue I wish to address is the Bill’s effects on employment, both good and bad. I know that the Government are looking to make the country a world leader in both automated and battery vehicle technology with initiatives such as the Faraday challenge, but I am concerned that although we will be a market leader in developing the technologies, our economy will not feel the full benefit of them because the mass manufacture of new vehicles will take place elsewhere. Dyson is a good example: it currently employs hundreds of people in this country to develop its own electric vehicle, which is of course a positive development, but so far it has not made any commitment to manufacture that product, when it is finalised, on these shores. Of course, Dyson has form in this area.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that this country manufactures more automobiles than the whole of Italy. Does he not think that that manufacturing can go on when we change from the combustion engine to the electric vehicle?

[Justin Madders]

I shall develop that point, because we need to address some challenges relating to investment in manufacturing. The move to the manufacture of electric vehicles is going to require huge investment in plant machinery if we are to maintain our manufacturing base. The majority of engine plants in this country are still building combustion engines, so we need to think about what assistance we are going to give to those companies so that they can make the change to manufacturing electric engines. The Bill is pretty comprehensive on the infrastructure for consumers, but I am not sure there is the same level of commitment to the idea of the country as a producer of these vehicles.

We have heard that the Government intend to cease the sale of all petrol and diesel cars by 2040. The temptation might be to think that that is a couple of decades off so we do not need to worry about it now. However, if we are serious about it, the major manufacturers will begin to shift production to the new model types within the next one or two production cycles, particularly if consumer trends accelerate that. People will begin to look at the resale value of their vehicles, and if they see that petrol and diesel vehicles lose their value at a much quicker rate than electric vehicles, they are bound to purchase electric vehicles in much larger numbers. The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) mentioned some studies that suggest that the Government’s predictions on electric vehicle take-up are possibly a little on the conservative side. We need to be ready to intervene swiftly when decisions are made on new-vehicle manufacturing so that we have the best possible conditions for companies to invest in their production lines. For example, Vauxhall tells me that every time it looks to invest in new machinery, that has a negative consequence for its business rates.

Of course, at the moment the real challenge to the automotive industry—to all manufacturing—is the uncertainty created by Brexit. Investment in the automotive sector has halved over the past 12 months. We need to reverse that trend as a matter of urgency; otherwise, the new vehicles that it is hoped the Bill will facilitate will be manufactured elsewhere. A big part of that is reassuring as much of the car-manufacturing supply chain as possible. Too many parts needlessly travel back and forth across the continent. In the long term that makes little economic or environmental sense, and in the short term minimising it will lower the risk of a hard Brexit.

There is an immediate short-term need to proactively support UK car manufacturers, and I hope we will hear some good news in next month’s Budget. There is also the bigger long-term issue of how the Bill might affect employment levels. There are plenty of predictions out there about how many jobs will be lost to automation, and I know that there is always the argument that in the past technological advances have always created more jobs than they have caused to be lost, but this revolution is going to be on a scale and at a pace for which we are still quite unprepared.

It is estimated that 1 million driving jobs could be lost within the next 10 to 15 years. With some studies indicating that up to half of all jobs could be lost to automation and artificial intelligence in the next 20 years, there needs to be a twin strategy for dealing with the economic impact of the proposals in the Bill. To that end, I would have liked to have seen an economic impact assessment on the likely job changes that will occur because of the Bill. Even in the optimistic scenario that lots of new jobs are created following this revolution, what do we know about the sort of jobs that will be created and where they will be based?

A report published last week looked into the impact of automation constituency by constituency. It said that the worst-performing constituencies were set to lose around 40% of their jobs within 15 years. Although there were plenty of constituencies throughout the country at the top end, the pattern was clear: the biggest losers tended to be in the midlands and the north. I would like to see a similar study that shows the pattern of job creation in the new industries, but unfortunately none yet exists. If we did one, I rather fear that it would tell us that the new jobs created are not going to be in the areas that are set to lose the most. I do not want to see a repeat of the 1980s, when industry outside the south-east was subject to catastrophic losses of jobs that simply were not replaced.

Although I have painted some rather gloomy pictures, I am not a Luddite; I am a realist. I realise that the genie is out of the box and that there are tremendous advantages, and several Members have referred to the positives that driverless technology can bring to society, but we should not be blind to the consequences that these changes may bring. We need a fundamental debate about what we are trying to achieve here. The manufacturing infrastructure is just as important as the consumer infrastructure. The impact on existing jobs needs to be considered as much as the tremendous opportunities that this new technology brings. Finally, the new legal framework that we are setting up needs to be considered in the context of the moral framework that underpins it.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

I draw the attention of the House to a potential interest of mine: I am discussing a possible role with the Faraday Institute, which promotes battery development in this country.

I want to make two points about two aspects of the Bill that will need further discussion in Committee. I would have raised them in proceedings on the earlier incarnation of the Bill if it had not become so evident that it was going to disappear from view due to the election.

The first relates to clauses 2 and 6. It is clear that the Bill intends to do what my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime said, which is to make the situation clear for the insurance industry. Unfortunately, it does not quite succeed in that in its current draft. He slipped into pointing out the problem himself when he inadvertently spoke of the driver not handing over control to the automated system, but, as Hansard will show, legitimately handing over control.

If one looks at the articulation of clauses 2 and 6, one sees that what determines whether the insurer or the person is liable—apart from the question of whether the vehicle is insured—is whether the vehicle was being run by the machinery rather than by the person. Unfortunately, that is not quite a complete explanation of what we need to have explained in order to make this work in terms of liability. It will not be a complete explanation of what we will need to treat this in the criminal law—clause 6 comes very close to a piece of criminal law. It will be very important that the criminal law does reflect the liability structure in the civil law. The reason why none of these questions is completely answered is that the question arises, “Was it, under these circumstances, appropriate or not appropriate for the person who was or might have been the driver to hand over control to the machine, which had become the driver?”

In case anybody thinks that that is an academic point, let me point out that it is extraordinarily likely that, as the technology develops and as artificial intelligence more and more becomes a part of that technology, we will find that, under these clauses, the Minister has to distinguish between different moments when it is appropriate to hand over control, and moments when it is not. For example, it may be that, for the sake of our motorways running much more efficiently, much more accident-free and much more intensively, it would be appropriate and, at some point, even mandatory for a motorist to hand over control of the vehicle when they are on a motorway in a way that might not be appropriate when they are on a single track road in my constituency on a rainy day. It may take a lot longer for the machinery to be able to handle the single track road in West Dorset than for it to be able to handle steady progress along the M4. As that is a likely situation, the moment of handover is a crucial element of getting the liability structure sorted out. If we do not get that sorted out now at this early stage, the insurance companies, when they come to consider the legislation, will discover that they do not have the framework that they thought they had, and we will not get the benefits that my right hon. Friend rightly seeks from that part of the Bill.

I also welcome part 2 of the Bill. When I was in government, I was involved in considerable efforts to improve the charging structure. It is the right thing to do. Much that needs to be done is dealt with in this part of the Bill. The regulation-making powers enable Ministers to deal with many of the points that have been raised in the preceding parts of this debate. Unfortunately, the regulation-making power in clause 9 and even in clauses 10, 11 and 12 is not only incomplete, but very materially incomplete. It will miss out the single biggest part of what needs to be regulated.

Reference has been made in this debate to off-street charging and to free-phase charging. These are the crucial elements because for that half of car users who do not have off-street parking—typically that is urban dwellers, particularly those who live in flats and terraced houses in urban settings—charging overnight, or at any time when they are not at work, will typically have to take place on urban streets. The people who will deal with urban streets are not local authorities, which was mentioned in the debate, or any of the objects of regulation here, but the public utilities that service our streets with the electric cables that run through them.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Does my right hon. Friend not agree that, during the transition stage when we move to electric autonomous vehicles, there will be a period in which a goodly percentage of the population will retain normal diesel or petrol vehicles? How will we divide up the streets? If every single parking space in an urban area is given over to electric charging, will that prevent those who do not need to have electric charging from parking? Will we have to discriminate against them?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My right hon. Friend raises a good question, which has a very clear answer. For decades, in Saskatchewan and other parts of western Canada where it is extremely cold, every single parking meter—parking meters are common on the streets there—has been equipped with a power point, enabling the driver to plug in the car radiator with the signal advantage that the car can then be started, which it otherwise could not be. It is perfectly possible to mandate that the utilities place charging throughout all urban streets so that every place is a charging point and then the question that he raises disappears, because a driver uses it if they are a conventional internal combustion engine and if they are electric. Gradually, there will be more electric cars and fewer internal combustion engines. The space will be the space and it will always offer charging. If we do that—it will not be expensive if it is done incrementally, starting now under regulations—we will find that the largest part of the problem of charging disappears. Unfortunately, with the way that the regulatory powers have been cast, the Secretary of State does not have the power to make regulations of that kind and therefore a substantial amendment is needed to clause 9. That will also enable the Secretary of State to do the second most important thing, which is to mandate that there be free-phase charging. That is important because the speed of charging for those who have off-street parking is very material to the take-up of electric vehicles. That speed will be materially improved if free-phase charging is available.

My point is very simple. This is an excellent Bill as it does some very necessary things. It is not the whole answer to life, or even to automated electric vehicles, but it was never meant to be. However, there are deficiencies in the way that it is drafted that will need to be cured in Committee if it is to achieve the two main purposes that it sets out to achieve.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Let me elaborate further on the point about charging versus non-charging. On domestic charging, the whole point with an electric car is that a person can feed back some of the electricity into a meter overnight and make some money. What happens if they have parked off-street and plugged their car into a meter? If they want to feed back some of their charge overnight, will there be a way of gaining compensation financially?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

It absolutely needs to be so and clause 12 has actually been correctly drafted in that respect. The provisions for smart charge points precisely allow the Secretary of State to ensure that there is interactive charging, which is evidently exactly what we need on our streets so that the electric cars of Britain become a massive battery resource. That will squish the shape of the load curve, so there will be longer periods during which renewable and nuclear resources will produce unlimited quantities of energy at a zero marginal cost without having to build the large amounts of back-up that would otherwise be required to deal with the peak. That is because one hopes that the peak will increasingly be dealt with by the battery resource of the nation’s cars when they are not being used. We will only get that effect if all the cars that are plugged in are plugged into smart points that can receive, as well as transmit, electricity. Of course, that also requires a design of vehicle that enables the on-board computer to respond to the price signals coming through the grid. It also requires half-hourly settlement of the grid, which is, in fact, already being introduced. We have made a good deal of progress towards the aim that my right hon. Friend rightly advocates. In that respect, the Bill will enable us to press the progress much further, but it will only do so if it relates to on-street car parking made possible through the utilities that can do this on a universal basis, and those measures are urgently needed.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I welcome the Bill. I will concentrate my remarks on the issues surrounding automated vehicles, but I support all the points that have been made about electric vehicles, particularly those regarding compatibility and infrastructure. We do not want people to be inconvenienced by different connectors and things like that. That is an obvious point to make, but one that has been overlooked in the past and that was well made today. Clearly, it is a technology for which the time has come. The batteries have a longer life and the vehicles can now travel further as a consequence. The environmental benefits are obvious and the cost of the vehicles is starting to come down, making them much more accessible, so I very much support that element of the Bill.

One of the impact assessments that accompanies the Bill refers to “connected and automated” vehicles, but the Bill is silent on connected vehicles, and I wonder why. Maybe the Minister will touch on that. Perhaps I am being too much of a conspiracy theorist, but the topic of “connected and automated” vehicles opens up a whole different range of issues from the straightforward automated vehicles as I understand it. The Minister will correct me if that is not the case. The issue that concerns me is that the software has to make a whole load of decisions when it is operating or driving the vehicle. We have heard from the Minister, and it is accepted, that somewhere between 90% to 95% of vehicle accidents occur due to human error. What happens if a vehicle is under the control of the software and has an accident with a vehicle being driven by a human or with a pedestrian, and the technology is then checked and is found to have been in perfect operating order? Is it the case that the human is assumed to be at fault? We need an answer to that question because it will have an enormous impact on how insurance companies approach decisions about who is at fault and who should get a payout.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Clive Efford]

I will not, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind. I am trying to make a little bit of progress, but I may give way in a while.

The Minister said that he has visited the site in Greenwich that is testing automated vehicles. I was not there, but I heard of an incident where somebody threw a chair in front of the automated vehicle and the vehicle smashed into the chair. That raises the question of what would happen if a child ran into the road. Now, the accident with the chair may have happened even if the vehicle had been driven by a human. The chair may have flown out in front of the car far too late for the car physically to be able to stop, whether driven by a machine or by a human being. But let us imagine an incident where there is an automated vehicle on the road that is capable of making a decision about how to evade an accident.

If a child suddenly ran out in front of the vehicle, the software would be trying, in a split second, to make a decision about the safest evasive action, if any, to take in order to avoid running the child over. We are then immediately in the situation where a machine—a piece of computer software—is making a moral judgment. If we are to open ourselves up to the situation whereby connected and automated vehicles have to make such judgments when incidents or accidents are about to happen, we legislators have to be aware that such eventualities will come around. We must try, as much as possible, to be ahead of the technology, because one thing is becoming quite clear in the debate around emerging technologies: the huge companies are getting ahead of the regulators and legislators, and driving the barriers backwards.

Take, for instance, the recent situation with Uber in London, where the Mayor of London had to step in and take action. There are other examples of technology driving regulators to distraction and forcing us to catch up, such as Airbnb. In some cities, rents have been driven up because of the sudden availability of businesses and people hiring out their properties. Legislation has consequences and so does this Bill.

Automated planes fly on a daily basis; most of the flights that we all take are fully automated. The part of the flight that is controlled by a pilot only lasts for a few minutes. Many people do not appreciate the fact that most of their flight is now controlled by a computer. We are only a fraction away from technology whereby a plane could be flown without a pilot at all. If there were an incident and the plane had to be taken over by someone who is capable of flying it, that could be done from an air traffic control centre. We do not have to have the pilot on board. That technology exists, but the air industry is not imposing that upon us by removing pilots from aeroplanes because public opinion is so much against the idea of fully automated flights.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

But is not that exactly the same in other areas of the industry, such as driverless trains?

[Clive Efford]

Yes, but driverless trains drive on a dedicated track. My point is that such technology is not being implemented in an area where the possibilities already exist—pilotless planes. Yet we are prepared to roll out that technology on our streets and our roads, where quite a complex range of incidents could occur and where vehicles being driven by software will come into contact with humans. I accept that the technology is here. We will have to accept that there will be demand for these types of vehicles, not least driven by the huge companies such as Uber, which already has driverless cabs on the streets of Pittsburgh. We are seeing technology driven forward by these large companies, but we as legislators have to start looking at some of the issues that arise around the moral questions that may have to be answered by machines.

--- Later in debate ---

[Iain Stewart]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. As I will expand on in my speech, the Bill provides a way for those things to happen. If he will bear with me, I will touch on those points later.

The other advantages, of course, are to do with the environment and making better and more efficient use of the limited resources we have. It is no mistake that the United Nations has as one of its top priorities dealing with the increasing urbanisation of the world, and the human race is going to have to find better ways of moving people and goods around to make that development sustainable.

In that regard, I should mention that my constituency is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation involved in this technology. We were today recognised in the UK Smart Cities Index 2017 as one of the top cities in the country.

Before I move on to the detail of the Bill, I should say that we had mention earlier of the importance of matching skills to this new technology. I very much welcome the Minister’s willingness to have a constructive dialogue in Committee, and more broadly with other Departments, to look at this issue. As a starting point, the Transport Systems Catapult recently published its “Intelligent Mobility Skills Strategy”, which identified that, by 2025, we will have a 750,000-job gap in skills, and there is an urgent need to address that point.

In my Second Reading speech and in Committee on the previous Bill, I raised several concerns, which were addressed to my satisfaction by the Minister. In my comments today, I just wish to get reaffirmation on those points and to raise a few additional concerns.

Clause 1 provides for the Minister to provide a list of vehicles deemed to have autonomous capability. I just ask a simple question: when this list is compiled and then updated, will it include the freight sector and the public transport sector, or are we simply looking at what are deemed motor cars today? It would be helpful to have that clarification.

As regards clause 2, we had extensive debates on the previous Bill about what would, to use an umbrella term, be classified as driver-assistance technology—lane guidance, cruise control and reverse parking guidance—and what constitutes a wholly autonomous vehicle. The Minister was very clear in Committee that driver-assisted technology is not the point of this Bill. When we have these gadgets in cars—there will be ever more as we go forward—they are there to assist the driver. They do not replace the driver, so the driver remains absolutely in control.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Did the Committee look at the issue of the driver passing some kind of driving test? Is it envisaged that the whole Highway Code system will change? Will somebody getting a licence to drive an autonomous or a semi-autonomous vehicle have to sit a completely different test, and if so, when will it be phased in?

[Iain Stewart]

I am afraid that my memory is not as complete as it might be. I cannot recall whether that was discussed; I do not think it was. However, my right hon. Friend raises a very fair point, and I hope that it will be considered in Committee.

As regards the distinction between a wholly autonomous car where there are no driver controls whatsoever and driver-assist, there will be cases in the middle where the car has a dual function, with blurring as to when the technology is applied. I would still like Ministers to provide greater clarification for drivers and the industry on the point at which the transition occurs. We have heard talk about having road trains in future where a car may be driven under control up to a certain point and will then form part of a convoy on the motorway. There needs to be greater clarity, for the public in particular, about the point at which the changeover happens.