Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, particularly because it was he who encouraged me to take part in this debate. I acknowledge that self-driving vehicles are an exciting technology, with considerable advantages and implications for distribution, deliveries, and public and personal transport. It is partly the reason why 5G rollout is an object of government policy. To get ahead of that, we obviously need legislation and a framework for the future. I commend the all-party parliamentary group on its work and on setting out a very useful shopping list of criteria. I found that most helpful.

Any policy in this area must consistently apply core principles or it will fail, which is why Part 1 of the Bill is so important. But before the Government get too misty-eyed over the seductive technology and the benefits claimed by protagonists, I just suggest a slight reality check. This is also in the hope that someone will tell me that there are answers to all my reservations.

First, there are some claims made for AVs that I respectfully challenge. One is that AV technology is greener. It transpires on closer examination that this is largely hypothecated on the use of battery electric vehicles, a development that already exists and is not intrinsic to self-driving vehicles. Another is that it might be expected to reduce congestion. On that, too, I am not entirely convinced. Even in a fully digitised, connected and traffic management-ordered world, and even if the numbers of vehicles are reduced, peaks of congestion, unplanned events, inadequate capacity and progressive devotion of urban road space to other priorities are likely to persist. However, the idea of instantly directing approaching vehicles away from traffic incidents would be extremely welcome and, I am sure, benefit emergency services. That said, if the traffic jam-avoiding algorithms of some of the more hyperactive satnav systems are any indication—and I have used a few—significant additional road miles by way of diversions through previously quiet residential streets may be one rather negative outcome.

The AVs that replace conventional vehicles may also be on the road for longer hours, so there are numerous other factors to be considered before some of the claims are entirely credible to me. Safety, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, seems to be at least partly a factor of road design as opposed to the intrinsic error of the human.

Secondly, I believe it is an acknowledged fact that for an extended period of time—possibly several decades —there will be AVs with artificial intelligence and smart sensors, and conventional vehicles driven by fallible mortals, all sharing the same space. This was referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. This requires an artificial intelligence that can cope with the irrational. I am a driver—that is the only interest I need to declare for this purpose—and I can usually tell whether a motorist in front of me or in another lane is distracted, looking for a destination, diffident or nervous, likely to cut in or pull out with little warning, or just plain aggressive. However, if I live long enough to be a driver faced with general AV use, I would like a visual warning of the fact so that I can make due allowance. Maybe a little flashing light could do that job for me.

Thirdly, there is the technology itself, which—leaving the matter of 5G rollout to one side—still has some way to go, in my view. I drive a vehicle that has certain automated assistance functions; noble Lords will be familiar with these. It has an automatic braking system that I cannot disable. A bit like a flighty horse, it is liable to screech to a halt for a plastic bag blowing across the road in front, an uneven roadside kerb or even pedestrian railings on a bend. It is only a matter of time before another driver goes into the back of me because of this. It also warns me fairly frequently that this function has become inoperative due to external conditions. It did not react to a deer that crossed the road immediately in front of me on the A24 the other night, which I hit a glancing blow.

The lane change warning is, however, something I can disable; it takes the form of a rather unnerving wobble in the steering that could, of course, mean other things to an experienced driver. On satnav, I frequently find that the speed limit, road priorities or even roads and junctions themselves have not been updated, despite a recent software download. Sometimes the system does not even know where I am, for admittedly short but potentially critical periods—there is one junction on the M25 that is like that. I predict that it will be some considerable time before the communications network is robust and comprehensive enough and has adequate reserve capacity—emergency capacity in particular —for general AV use. For a while, I suspect that greater differentials will arise between those areas where AVs can be used successfully and those where they cannot. We should not be blind to that.

Of course, there is the issue of suitability, to which Clause 1(3) of the Bill refers in terms of vehicle credentials. It should also take account of the road environment in which these vehicles operate, which is often of very variable quality. AVs may operate successfully somewhere such as Milton Keynes, for instance, on a coherently designed and well-constructed street layout. But get to, say, the rural West Country, an area that I part-time share with the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and it is a rather different matter.

So, even without erased road markings; signage hidden behind vegetation or too dirty to read; the odd failed traffic light; roads with hidden potholes, anything but conventional width and—my noble friend Lord Cameron will understand when I say this—with or without large farm vehicle usage on narrow lanes; and no 5G or indeed any G at all, there are potential limits to where AVs may be safely used, apart from the general competency of the vehicle itself. I do not see this expressed clearly in Part 1.

While on that subject, I note a peculiarity in the definition of a road, which in 2021 was the subject of a legal case on the Isle of Wight and caused me to contemplate private roads where Street View does not penetrate and which may have novel street finishes, furniture, strange demarcation and so on. Two recent road schemes on public roads near my home are clearly defective. One is affected by appalling visibility for traffic approaching from the right, and the other is a new staggered junction of such appalling geometry that you cannot negotiate it without seriously cutting the corner. That does not matter if you are in smart car, but it does if you are in a delivery truck.

I entirely take the point made in an email I received from the cycling lobby that its members, plus, of course, the elderly on scooters, pedestrians, pets, deer, foxes, badgers and preferably hedgehogs, need to be recognisable by this evolving technology.

I have a particular worry, which has been expressed by other noble Lords, about this hybrid driver in control who is none the less able to allow automation to take over, subject to immediate human intervention where necessary. I sense this may become a commonplace halfway house, which is why I mention it when other noble Lords have also done so. I am not a behavioural scientist, but I wonder how quickly human attention returns to effective and possibly emergency reaction if, given conventional distractions inside or outside the vehicle, focus has wandered elsewhere once automation takes over. Avoiding danger is often a matter of intuitive prediction and behavioural clues, not always achieved in the last resort by sensors suddenly deciding they are going to apply the brakes.

Finally, a cautionary tale. In a previous attempt to improve highway capacity and safety, the Government invested in—noble Lords will know this—smart motorways. But, seemingly in an effort to reduce costs, they decided to omit the safety camera system designed to detect vehicles stopped in the slow lane—with tragic consequences. I am no longer happy simply to allow a Government driven by the politics of presentation and the balancing of finances, possibly in priority over safety, a completely free hand in such matters. I want an entity with comprehensive focus, independence, status and determination, equivalent to something like the Health and Safety Executive, to have oversight of how this technology is rolled out. I am not clear that the Bill adequately deals with that.

Therefore, while welcoming AV technology and the necessity of this Bill, I do not see it as addressing all essential aspects; and there are a lot of caveats to this, with critical elements left to subsequent regulation. I simply suggest proceeding with some caution lest we act in haste only to repent at leisure.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Earl of Lytton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[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.