Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Baroness Randerson Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 55C in my name in this group and apologise to the noble Baroness who moved the initial amendment. I was just sitting down when she started to speak, so I apologise for not being fully in my seat. I declare my technology interest as adviser to Boston Ltd.

What we are talking about here with autonomous vehicles is really mobility enabled through technology. My Amendment 55C seeks to take some of the themes that have already been spoken to, not least by my noble friend Lord Lucas: the sense of how technologies are able to interact and communicate with one another—what we call interoperability. Interoperability should be a golden thread running through many sections, because it is critical to the success of these technologies.

There are extraordinary economic, environmental, decongestion and safety benefits to potentially be gained through the mass deployment of automated autonomous vehicles, but they will be gained only if the systems are interoperable with one other, so all the vehicles can speak to one another and to the transport control centres and emergency services control centres. Only through having that key golden thread of inter- operability will we enable the economic, environmental, social, safety and accessibility benefits. That is what my Amendment 55C is all about, and I look forward to my noble friend the Minister responding in due course.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to take part in this debate, first to support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Bowles. I will also speak to Amendments 22 and 43 in my name.

My noble friend has raised some important issues about the adequacy of simulation as a way of establishing the safety of automated vehicles. Cycling UK, in its briefing to some of us, has raised similar issues in the context of the more vulnerable road users. Experience in the USA—very definite real-life experience, especially in San Francisco—has revealed that there is no substitute for real-life testing and that permission to operate on real roads can be given too easily.

We all know that how we drive is based on the skills we have learned and the experience we have developed as human beings. I have no doubt that a vehicle driving itself will in some ways be a lot less vulnerable than we are to feeling sleepy, losing concentration and so on. But it is a very complex thing to simulate and build something that, for example, notices that the gentleman ahead, who has a white stick, will therefore be blind or very poorly sighted. It is difficult for a simulation to tell the difference between the hesitation by the side of the road of an elderly person who is looking anxiously around and that of someone who is hesitating because they are reading their phone at the same time, or to notice that someone who has just stepped off the pavement is a teenager who was having a joke with his mates 10 seconds before and may not be concentrating. These are all things that we notice every day and make a judgment on; we see potential issues that we may have to take into account.

I am sure that simulating all that can be done, but it is the real-life, real-road experience that needs to be taken into account—the subtle messages. It is difficult to imagine a road system much more complex than that in the UK, with its bendy roads that are heavily trafficked and a high number of pedestrians. I was recently in the USA, where I was immediately struck, as I looked down from the air, by the regularity of the grid system. When I got into towns and cities, I was struck by the very low number of pedestrians in the streets compared with Britain. We have a much more complex and unpredictable set of circumstances.

My Amendment 22 refers to the checks and permissions that will be required before foreign vehicles are allowed on UK roads. Foreign vehicles drive on our roads all the time, but it will be much more complex in future. At the moment, we rely on the fact that foreign vehicles have had permission in their own country and are deemed to be satisfactory for their own country, and that the driver, if they have come from abroad, will be adapting—some much better than others, obviously. We rely on that awareness and adaptation. The cars, vehicles, vans and HGVs concerned will have to download a whole new lot of software, because every perception of the vehicle—all the distance, width and so on—will have to be done from a different point of view. They will have to download the map of the whole UK that these vehicles will operate on. Some of our road signs are different from those in other countries, so awareness of them will be a more complex issue.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I dare say the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, will be pleased to know that I have amendments later that relate to the need to improve things such as the quality of road surfaces for all this to work smoothly.

As several contributors have emphasised, this group points to the limitations in the narrowness of the Bill’s scope. My noble friend Lady Bowles’s amendments address the limitation to public roads and highways, rather than to the marginal areas. The problems of this limitation have been addressed by organisations representing cyclists, for example, and other more vulnerable road users, as well as organisations already engaged in the automated delivery sector. If you think about it, when you have a product delivered to your home by a drone, in most cases that drone is required at the last point to leave the highway or pavement and go on to private land.

This is important. As a nation we are very concerned about road safety and prize it very highly. Although there have not been many improvements to road safety in the past 10 or 15 years, we have previously been very proud of an improving record on safety, and public expectations remain there. If you think about the process of accidents and injuries on the roads, many injuries, and much physical damage to buildings, are caused by accidents that take place off the highway, when a swerving vehicle hits a boundary fence or a house, for example. Those who have spoken, including the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, have referred to the high number of injuries to children. This will be at the forefront of public concern in judging automated vehicles.

My noble friend also referred to the coexistence of traditional vehicles and automated vehicles. For possibly two decades we will have a hybrid system, so any expectations have to take that into account.

I turn now to the amendments to which I added my name, which are amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Liddle. The Law Commission reports emphasised that the public have high expectations of road safety. They used the point that there is strong support among the public for criminalising those who do not drive safely, and they transferred that concept into the situation in relation to support for automated vehicles. The experience in San Francisco illustrates the dramatic impact of accidents involving automated vehicles on support for them and trust in them. There is support for the progress of these vehicles, and the concept of them, across the Chamber. Therefore, it is so important that the Bill gets the approach right.

I support several amendments in this group, all of which are aimed at raising safety standards. The definition of safety must be more ambitious than that set out in this Bill. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents gave evidence to the Transport Committee in the other place and made it absolutely clear that the expectation has to be much better than just improving on average. It must be more ambitious. It must be an improvement in safety across the board, not just an “on average” approach to it.

I am well aware that there are international definitions of safety in this context, and I am sure the Minister will explain where the Government’s definition sits within those international expectations. To my mind, an acceptable standard is just not adequate, because you could have a situation in which the average safety has improved but, when you look at the detail, all the improvement lies in the reduction in motorway accidents, and to offset that there is an increase in accidents involving cyclists, pedestrians, older people or disabled people. It could be the more vulnerable road users who are badly impacted, so I am interested in the Government’s concepts in relation to this, and how they intend to approach this issue in detail.

[Lord Davies of Gower (Con)]

My Lords, as has already been mentioned, this group relates to the standard of safety to which we will hold self-driving vehicles. Clause 1 establishes the concept of the self-driving test: the basic principle that a vehicle must be capable of travelling safely and legally to be authorised as self-driving. With Clause 2, we then establish that the application of the self-driving test is to be informed by a statement of safety principles. The Government will be obliged to develop those principles in consultation with relevant stakeholders and to lay the statement before Parliament before any self-driving vehicles can be authorised. Noble Lords will recall that this approach—in which the safety standard is established in statutory guidance—was recommended by the Law Commission. I also recognise the desire to see a standard articulated in the Bill. That is the rationale behind the safety backstop in Clause 2(2), which states that the safety principles

“must be framed with a view to securing that road safety in Great Britain will be better”

due to the use of self-driving vehicles.