Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, I will start by reflecting on some of the safety issues he raised and pick up in particular a phrase the Minister used in his introductory speech—that the introduction of self-driving cars could mean that the lack of human error saves lives.

Automation does not remove human error. It simply changes the potential site of it from an individual vehicle to a programming system, an algorithm and the control system applied to many vehicles. There is the potential for one error to be multiplied many times, with disastrous impacts. It also allows individual actions, possibly malevolent ones, to produce mass effects. A number of noble Lords referred to what has happened with people running around with traffic cones in San Francisco. We are speaking just a couple of weeks after the National Cyber Security Centre produced its seventh annual review, noting that the UK’s critical infrastructure is at grave risk. By relying on this single system, or multiple systems, we are potentially creating a much higher critical safety risk and a resilience risk.

This morning I was talking about climate adaptation and resilience with the National Trust. We need to look at all this in terms of our systems. If we rely on these systems and keep using them for years, what will happen to the skills of drivers should we suddenly need individual people to take to the road and control vehicles? What happens, as we have seen in San Francisco, if they all suddenly stop working or decide to assemble in one place? What does that do to the functioning of our society?

I was going to start with the Bonn climate talks, COP 23, in 2017. I recall a state of near panic among members of the climate community because it was thought that we could see self-driving HGVs all over the place any day soon. That could have massive climate impacts as they now spend a large amount of their time parked up because their drivers need rest periods and there is limited availability of drivers. If you put self-driving into the equation, you potentially massively increase the climate impacts. That was 2017, and there is actually much less fear now.

I begin my contribution today by making a call for realism and an understanding of what this Bill is actually about and the environment in which it arrives. I have already challenged the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, when she was wearing the Treasury hat. A government spokesperson briefed the Telegraph that this Bill would mean that we could see self-driving vehicles on our roads by 2026,

“if they were proved safe”.

When I challenged her, the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, being the skilled operator that she is, agreed that yes, if they were proved safe, this would be possible. Well, I might run a two-hour marathon if I were 30 years younger and had entirely different genetics, but that is not the world that we live in. I am asking for an acknowledgement of the realism of the situation as we conduct our debate going forward on this Bill.

I start with a potential positive impact if we were to see self-driving vehicles, even operating in small areas in controlled circumstances—which I think is a far more likely possibility. One study I looked at noted that, for self-driving vehicles to operate effectively:

“Roads may need to be kept free of small debris”


and “uneven” surfaces smoothed. A number of noble Lords have already referred to the current state of our roads. Let us imagine that we are going to go ahead with self-driving autonomous vehicles. Just think about what our roads might look like for the rest of us to enjoy. However, I ask for a little realism here. Do we actually have the capacity—the financial, human skills or machinery capacity—to deliver roads entirely free of debris and uneven surfaces? I rather doubt it.

This raises an important point, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, that I want to highlight and which we will come to in the detail of our later debate: we need to think about statistics and data. The road conditions in the US, France and Australia are very different from here. Can we extrapolate figures on safety from there and apply them here? If we cannot, how do we get figures at scale in the UK? That is a terribly important point.

I am not sure that anyone has directly referred to this, but it is worth noting the issue of safety. The Transport Select Committee has looked at this in some detail and I think we are going to have large debates on this at a later stage. Is the careful and competent human driver the right test to be applying? Improved safety is not a given in the real circumstances of our roads. As the RAC Foundation has said:

“When we put our lives in the hands of automated machinery, we expect it to perform to the highest standards of safety”.


That is an expectation that people have. We know that human beings make mistakes, and we know that, as pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, we make allowances for other peoples’ mistakes. However, we are not necessarily going to apply the same criteria to autonomous vehicles.

This debate has moved as we have progressed through. A number of the early speeches were very much focused on the positive opportunities seen in autonomous vehicles. The noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, was one of those people. However, I want to address some policy points about the environmental risks of self-driving or autonomous cars.

If as a result of such cars we see more vehicles on our roads and more and longer journeys, we could see increased emissions. I think most of us assume that these will be electric vehicles, but about half of the PM2.5—small particulate matter pollution from vehicles —comes from brakes and tyres. Autonomous vehicles still have brakes and tyres. There are the congestion issues; there is also the noise and the sheer disruption caused by vehicles moving around our roads.

There is some real data on this from partially autonomous vehicles. In 2019, a study in California found that the owners of partially autonomous vehicles were taking them on longer journeys, particularly at weekends. That makes sense when you think about it: you can put your feet up, play a computer game, read or have a sleep, and so you decide that you are going to take a long weekend trip to the other end of the UK. If lots of people do that, it has a real and significant environmental and social impact.

There is another risk. Let us imagine the situation with the theatre up the road, when lots of people have an autonomous vehicle. It costs heaps to park in the city but, as you do not need to park an autonomous vehicle, they decide to get their cars to drive them to the theatre and then send them home again. They then call their car when they want to leave in the evening. Can noble Lords think about what Charing Cross Road might look like under those circumstances? What kind of chaos would it cause and what might it do to the buses?

I turn to an issue that no one has raised but which is really important, because we need to look at many areas beyond autonomous vehicles. There is a temptation to think of the cloud and algorithms as being immaterial and that things that happen out there in the cloud have no real-world, physical consequences. Actually, we can thank researchers from MIT—Sudhakar et al, in an article published in the IEEE Micro journal—for calculating, using and processing the data and algorithms to find out what the environmental cost could be. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for putting in some large numbers.

Data centres now produce 0.3% of global climate change emissions; that is the same as Argentina. The MIT study shows that, if the world introduced a billion autonomous vehicles, the demand for energy for those data centres would double. It adds that

“if an autonomous vehicle has 10 deep neural networks processing images from 10 cameras, and … drives for one hour a day, it will make 21.6 million inferences each day. One billion vehicles would make 21.6 quadrillion inferences. To put that into perspective, all of Facebook’s data centers … make a few trillion inferences each day … 1 quadrillion is 1,000 trillion”.

Take the numbers away and that is a huge demand for energy, computing power and all the technology, computers and databases, so where will we find the capacity in the world to deliver that? We still have children in Africa who do not have a lightbulb to do their homework at night and areas of India that need the most basic levels of infrastructure. We need to look at all this in that policy context.

I will bring up two more points. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, made a really disturbing suggestion: we might have to bring in anti-jaywalking laws to allow for autonomous vehicles. What are our economy and society for? Are we here to serve the needs of people or are we here to service the machines? That is a question that the noble Lord’s point raises.

The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, raised an important issue that might be seen as explicitly excluded from the scope of the Bill: delivery vehicles and drones. They are examples of autonomous systems that may not use the roads but that multinational companies see as replacing human beings in delivering goods while using lots of our public spaces, including the air and pavements. Can the Minister tell us now or by letter later—I understand that it might not be in his briefing—what the Government’s thinking is about ensuring the regulation of those?

Finally, that brings me to reinforce the point about the need for this all to be inclusive by design, made by both the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Holmes. We need to think about how our streets, pavements and airspace work for people, not for the benefits of multinational companies and their machines.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, this may be the only contribution I make to this part of the Bill, but I wish to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and other noble Lords because this business of safety in Clause 2 seems to be the most pivotal thing in the entire Bill. As the noble Lord said, the public are looking to us to make sure that it is enshrined here.

One thing the noble Lord did not mention is the claim that these automated vehicles will be materially safer than the human-driven equivalent. It is therefore right that it is not “no worse than” or even “as good as”; it has to be “materially better than”. Otherwise, we simply should not go there. As this Bill paves the way for what will have to come through a lot of secondary legislation, that is vital to get across at this juncture. If we do not agree it today, I hope we will at some other stage on the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, made a really important point about road safety in the debate on the previous group of amendments and elaborated on it in the debate on this group with her Amendment 7. Clause 2(2) 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”.


That is a low aspiration. In my view, it needs to be considerably better. The noble Baroness said that she wanted to include private drive entrances, but they were declared out of scope by the clerks. I encourage her to persist. In my profession as a chartered surveyor, over many years I have helped people with their property boundaries, and one point that often comes up is where the private property ends and the highway starts. The customary arrangement is that between the blacktop—the adopted surface—and the front of the property boundary there is usually a verge or sometimes a pavement. Over it, the private driveway has what is known in the cant of the trade as a crossover. It is still part of the public highway, although it may be maintainable by the householder. That is an important distinction. The noble Baroness might go back to the clerks and say, “I want something that deals with crossovers”. I obviously do not wish to make a legal pronouncement, and I certainly defer to the views of the clerks, but that has been my understanding over many years of the principle behind the interface between the highway and private property.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 15th January 2024 Lords Chamber

That is why I have asked for Clause 83 not to stand part and laid Amendment 53, which would at least establish a statutory advisory panel with the purpose of designing a national minimum standard for accessibility of self-driving passenger service vehicles, and Amendment 57, which is consequential to it. The key thing about Amendment 53 is the involvement of disabled people. We in the disabled community have a saying: “Nothing about us without us”. Where coproduction works best, we are involved right from the start in the design, so that the voice of the disabled passenger can be heard and understood before it is too late to change it. I thank the Minister for his offer of a meeting and I hope that we can meet before Report. In the meantime, I hope that he can respond more favourably than he did at Second Reading.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and to agree with everything they said. In offering support to all the amendments in this group, I will make a couple of additional points.

First, to follow on from debates on previous groups today, it is obvious that, given the general state of our roads and infrastructure, if we are to see automated vehicles operating in the foreseeable future, that will be in only very limited and controlled circumstances—probably in newly constructed areas—and they are likely to be public transport. A great deal of our debates on this Bill have focused on private individuals having their own cars whizzing around, but public transport systems are most likely to be the first affected. We need to see the provision of access by design included as part of that.

Secondly, it deserves to be noted that, for the past year, the Transport Committee has been holding hearings on the accessibility of what we have now. These have exposed insufficient accessibility right across the transport sector, particularly in the need to update regulations to accommodate modern travel methods and equipment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, said, we are starting from scratch and could get it right from the beginning, so we should absolutely aim to do so. She spoke about relying on the public sector equality duty when it is so clearly failing; we have not heard the final conclusions of the Transport Committee, but a report out last month from the disabled people’s organisation Transport for All titled Are We There Yet?—to spoil the ending, the answer is definitely “No”—surveyed more than 500 disabled people in England on the journeys they had made in 2021 and 2022.

The report found that disabled people make far fewer journeys than non-disabled people—an average of 5.84 a week, which is one-third of the national average across the community. Those disabled people said they would like to make twice as many journeys every week, but lack of accessibility was preventing them doing so and being able to fully participate in our society, in the way that they would like. Finally, the report noted that nearly half of the respondents

“thought that the accessibility of transport and streets”

would worsen in the next 10 years, while only 28% thought it would improve. Your Lordships’ House has a duty and an opportunity to show that it is possible to make things better instead of letting them continue to deteriorate.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest, as I have been involved in accessibility to modern taxis and other public transport over many years. I entirely agree with most of the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and my noble friend Lord Holmes. However, with their amendments, I am not sure that we are heading in the right direction. It is clear from Clause 87 that those clauses intending to make the vehicle more accessible are heading in the right direction, but the noble Baroness believes they do not go far enough.

I am not sure that adding an extra automated vehicle accessibility standards panel, as in Amendment 53, would do anything other than delay everything in practice. By the time that such a panel is formed and educated to the standard of familiarity that we all hold with the Bill—or most of us do—I am not sure that it would do anything but delay the whole Bill, when we are already behind others. Although I very much hope that we could be at the forefront both of the existence of automated vehicles and of accessibility, we are of course two years behind other countries in Europe. We have got to catch up. I hope that we can alter Clause 87 to achieve what the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I would like to see, rather than add a completely new panel on top.