Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a really excellent debate. I start by making clear that I welcome the Bill, especially since, as the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, pointed out, other countries have been getting ahead of us on this issue. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, expressed concern that Northern Ireland would obey the same rules as the Republic of Ireland because they were EU rules but, actually, the international context is heaps bigger than that. This is all in a massive international context.

So the Bill is welcome. It is based, of course, on the work of the Law Commissions, which have provided firm legal foundations. As others have said, there is huge economic significance in the successful rollout of automated vehicles. For that to happen, and be successful, we need high levels of public trust and confidence in safety. Hopefully, once we have in due course persuaded the Minister to accept some of our amendments, we will have a robust legal and safety framework that clarifies responsibility for self-driving vehicles, establishes new safety requirements and an inspection and reporting system, and provides confidence in data ownership and security. Those issues have been raised time and again in this debate.

If this works properly, AVs should greatly increase the safety on our roads, but there are plenty of issues along the way in the transitional phases, many of which have been raised here today. The experience in San Francisco, California is very relevant in this respect because it points out that, even in a city with much wider, straighter roads that are basically in a heaps better state than British roads, there can be considerable, and unforeseen, obstacles.

In Britain we have very crowded, mainly poorly maintained roads. That will intensify the issues. There will be many decades when AVs share the road with traditional human drivers. There have been problems in San Francisco with that. Emergency services have been impeded because AVs do not yet have human sensitivity. If we hear a siren or see a blue light somewhere, a long way away, we can all anticipate that it will be something we have to deal with; we will have to get out of the way. It seems clear that AVs in San Francisco have not yet quite got to that point.

Much of the Bill is taken up with issues of legal responsibility—for example, at what I call the handover point between the automated driving and the human driver. The Bill is complex and technical. It introduces a whole new lexicon, which is hardly consumer friendly. It might be designed to provide legal certainty but it does not enhance driver understanding. The Government need to consider what needs to be done to ensure that, in due course, drivers understand the legal points involved, especially in relation to insurance.

There are implications in all this for us during the long transition period, leading up to that point in the future when all vehicles will be automated. I want to point out two aspects: there will be some AVs driving among human drivers from the near future onwards; there will also be vehicles that are partially automated, as many are already. The noble Earl, Lord Lytton, recounted some stories that had a resonance with me as the owner of a car that I regard as more complex than the one I had before, because it tries to do things for me that I think I can do okay on my own. I sometimes think that nowadays you need a driver and a co-driver to handle the technology. The serious point about it is that this halfway house in many cars now exists and we are dealing with it on a day-to-day basis.

For the revolution to happen we need, first, a giant database of all the road signs and regulations in every part of the UK. This in itself is a massive task, because the Government have been moving away from absolute direction to local authorities on road signs. I will give the House one example: in 2016, the specifications for the signs for a ford were removed, so that any old sign will do for telling a driver that there is a ford coming up. I happen to know about this. I put a proposal to reinstate the regulations on fords into a Private Member’s Bill ballot, but I did not get anywhere with it. The point is that, for safety reasons, there are good arguments for having proper, regulated sizes for those signs.

The Government have also recently removed some of the pressure on local authorities to introduce regulations to make it safer for walking and cycling. This “We are the driver’s friend” rhetoric means that there will be fewer regulations that encourage walking and cycling, so the Government are going to have to turn their rhetoric on its head to encourage local authorities to take part in this giant gathering of data. It will of course involve a cost to local authorities, and I notice that there is no financial impact on them included in this.

I referred to a giant database, but it is not just about local authorities. All AVs and the cars that already exist with some self-driving features, such as those that park themselves, are all of course collecting data on us every time we drive them. This in itself has privacy implications, personal safety implications and national security implications. It poses questions on anonymisation of data, on the rights of individuals in respect of personal data, on the retention of data and the disclosure of personal data to insurers. I am sure there are some other things as well that I have not thought of.

My noble friend Lady Bowles concentrated on the implications of data control in the industry and the danger of dominance by big companies. She alerted us to the complex issues in the insurance industry and those associated with access to commercially useful data. My noble friend Lady Brinton also raised concerns about the protection of personal data and the issue of sale of data. Both the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and my noble friend Lady Brinton raised potential problems for disabled people and the need to build disability access into regulations from the start. These issues are not apparently tackled in the Bill, along with issues associated with human behaviour—for example, the difference between the fastest among us to respond to a call to hand over from automatic driving to human driving and the slowest. Those slowest may have been paying full attention but just respond slightly more slowly.

We need to think about another issue: if you regularly use a car that fully drives itself, you will get out of the habit of driving. Will there be a requirement for drivers to have refresher courses on driving if they have not done it for the last month or year because their car has done it for them? I think this will crop up.

We will in due course want to press the Minister on the rather confusing division of responsibilities between various government agencies, as listed in the Government’s proposals.

Finally, I want to deal with the Minister’s introduction, which referred to trial schemes. There is a giant leap from those very limited trial schemes to the transition period. Make no mistake, we are in the foothills of a massive revolution; we are in the foothills of a change in which we will lose many types of jobs that involve driving. There will be a complete revolution, I believe, in public transport and in ownership of vehicles. For public confidence to be maintained during this revolution, we need the Government to invest in the new skills that will be needed—there will be lots of new skills needed —and the training for them.

We have had a division between the enthusiasts, the realists and the doubters. I look forward to our debate on amendments.