Autonomous Vehicles

Earl of Erroll Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll (CB)]

My Lords, I rise in the gap because I very much support what the debate is about. I want to say a few words, particularly in view of what I discovered that the noble Viscount, Lord Younger of Leckie, was going to say. This is all part of the internet of things—the IoT, as it is often abbreviated to—in which I am very involved. In fact, I must declare an interest: I chair the HyperCat consortium, which the noble Viscount mentioned, which consists of many companies, several very large, several quite small, but all with a very similar vision of what the future might be like.

There are various things that need to be done across all the companies to get this to work. It is really only the Government who can bring that all together effectively, or support the people who will bring it together. Innovate UK, which used to be the Technology Strategy Board, is doing a very good job to spread this around the various areas with the money the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills allocated to it. However, it is not quite sufficient in certain cases. There is quite a fight going on over the coming Autumn Statement; HyperCat has asked for quite a significant amount of funding for this. Rumour has it that it could well get blocked when it gets to the Treasury and other places, because a lot of Ministers do not quite get the internet of things. They do not quite understand what it is about. Some of us are going to try to do something about that, but they need to take it on faith for the moment that this is something that will be the very near future.

HyperCat has managed to spend all its money—things have been so successful so far—which means that its funds cannot be released until April next year, which means it will not see any money until July. The big challenge is to keep the momentum going until then. We are talking about a system for making the internet of things interoperable with security and other things behind it, so that it is very easy to start making and building developments out of all the information that will be sitting out there. I am not going to go into huge detail, but I am reminded that it was a Briton, Tim Berners-Lee, who built the world wide web, which enabled everyone to use the internet—which was mainly a communications system—very efficiently and effectively. He created a huge amount of business out of it.

Britain now has the chance to produce the interoperability layer—the bit behind the internet of things that will enable it to be truly useful and enable people to build and develop applications that will really help humanity. Among these are the autonomous vehicle and the other things that will come around it to do with traffic management, such as people flows, predictions of crowd build-up, showing where there are problems and where the emergency services have to get to and so on. This will all need some method of recognising what the information is very quickly.

I hope that the Autumn Statement figure—I put in a plug for it again—will be recognised and that BIS will get the money, which it can then give over. We can see how much of a leader we are at the moment. A large American company is opening a new IoT laboratory in the UK because we are currently seen as the world leaders in this field. Let us not lose that position.