Space Industry Bill [Lords]

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

It is an honour and a pleasure to speak from the Back Benches for the first time not quite in a lifetime but in very many years. It is a particular pleasure to speak in a debate on a Bill that I helped to shape, as the Minister generously acknowledged. I am grateful both for his words and for the words of the shadow Secretary of State. It has been a pleasure to work on this subject, and indeed on transport more widely, with colleagues on both sides of the House.

Reflecting during this sojourn on the Back Benches, I thought that parliamentary and political life constantly gives the impression, perhaps the illusion, of permanence, but in practice it offers the reality of impermanence; all things we do here are ephemeral. Knowing that guides and shapes how we behave; nothing lasts long. However, it is vital that Governments do things that are long lasting, far sighted and strategic, and not simply piecemeal or reactive. Of course Governments must deal with the day-to-day events, the week-to-week affairs of the nation, but they must also set their sights on a more distant horizon, what Kennedy called a “new frontier” and what popular culture called “the final frontier”—of course no frontiers are entirely final for me, as you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, but none the less it is important that Governments do just that.

Governments in democratic polities struggle to do that, partly because of those daily and weekly imperatives; partly because no one wants to take responsibility for big decisions that might go wrong and so it is easier to deal with small things that can be corrected quickly; and partly because the five-year electoral cycle means that they get no credit for planning and thinking through things that might bear fruit 10 years or more later. Governments in democratic polities have a history of not doing those long-term things, so I am pleased to see that this Bill is an exception to that general thesis.

The Bill sets out a way forward for the space industry that is far sighted and strategic. It is vital that we should do so, but there is another challenge for Government in this respect: creating a legislative framework that is sufficient to allow and, indeed, encourage further investment, but not going so far as to attempt to predict an unpredictable future. This is a highly dynamic sector and the technology we are debating this evening will be unrecognisable by the time this Bill bears fruit those five or 10 years down the line, as it grows, alters and metamorphoses. Someone mentioned Reaction Engines earlier, and I was pleased and proud to go there as a Minister to see precisely what it is doing, and to witness and begin to understand—I say no more than that—the technological changes it envisages in propulsion. It is developing a whole new method of propulsion, which will change assumptions about the speed with which we travel and therefore open up all kinds of new chances to do so.

The speed and pace of technological change requires Governments to know when to be modest, as well as when to be bold. This Bill attempts to square that circle; to walk that tightrope, and it does so reasonably well. I acknowledge what the shadow Secretary of State said: when we do that, we risk—perhaps that is too strong and I should say open the possibility of—a great deal of secondary legislation. This Bill is, in essence, a framework, which will require further measures to bring it to life as we are clearer about what is required. That secondary legislation deserves proper scrutiny and should come to this House for consideration in exactly the same agreeable, convivial, co-operative and collaborative spirit that has engendered during the course of our considerations of these matters thus far. None the less, we need to have proper scrutiny, of a non-partisan kind, as we enjoyed in another area we have been debating recently—electric and autonomous vehicles. My legacy is so wide and deep that I hesitate to go further, because we could speak about so many things. I am a man of the future with an eye to the past.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Hayes]

Now I see the past coming back to haunt me.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I wish to echo my right hon. Friend’s tribute to himself, as he was indeed a visionary on electric vehicles and there will in due course be a Hayes electric vehicle launched in this country.

[Mr Hayes]

My right hon. Friend and I enjoyed many happy moments—it seemed much longer than that—on the Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill Committee recently. His contribution to that Committee, may I say with absolute seriousness, was very important. It helped to shape and hone the legislation in a way that, had he not been there would not have happened. I could say the same about colleagues on the other side of the Chamber, too. Proper scrutiny in this House does improve legislation and we should never assume that we are merely going through the motions—that is not what this House is about. At its best, it is the very apex of good democratic polities.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 16th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)]

The shadow Minister once again does credit to the Committee by insisting that these matters should be carefully considered not just now but as they develop. He is right that this is a developing technology, and the whole Committee recognises the Government’s attempt to do sufficient, but not too much—that is to say, sufficient to create the certainty that will allow the development of the insurance framework, but not so much that we constrain those developments. It is right, of course, that we continue to bring these matters to the attention of the House, which is essentially what the new clause would do. He argues rightly that we need to ensure that the purpose of the legislation is being fulfilled. It is as simple as that.

I risk repeating myself—I know that many rather enjoy the repetition of my arguments; I am not one of them—but I drew the Committee’s attention to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015, which specifically makes provision to review secondary legislation in which the requisite provisions are made. It confers that duty on Ministers. There is some advantage to be gained from that. None the less, I have made it clear during the course of our consideration that I am not in any way ill disposed to other means by which we can continue to consider these matters. It is important that we recognise that, in a rapidly changing field, further consideration may be efficacious. On that basis, I hope the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East will withdraw his new clause.

Talking of sufficiency, I do not feel that that is quite sufficient an argument. I want to talk a little bit about how we envisage the system working, which might offer further reassurance to the hon. Gentleman and other Committee members. The international standards by which these vehicles will be approved for safe sale and use are still being considered, as I said previously, by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, in which the UK plays a leading role. Those standards will form the basis of the type approval process. That means that nothing will be sold or used on our roads that does not meet those standards, and it is vital that standards are agreed internationally, for obvious reasons: the nature of the automotive industry and of the vehicles’ use means that it must be done in that way.

The Government take the view that it is not appropriate at this early stage to set criteria that are too precise or to constrain the identification process until we know what those standards are. We certainly need to maintain sufficient flexibility to ensure that all vehicles relevant to the clause can quickly be identified and included on the list that the Secretary of State is missioned to draw up in clause 1.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

rose—

[Mr Hayes]

I see my right hon. Friend indicating that he wants to intervene. I know that whatever he says will add value to our consideration, so I happily give way.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Can my right hon. Friend confirm that, as he says in the first of the three letters he has helpfully written to the Committee, it will be high on the Government’s agenda that the type approval process will be used as the means for ensuring the cyber-security of the vehicles, in addition to their safety? Can he also confirm that he is confident that the international negotiations will result in a type approval system that covers security as well as safety?

[Mr Hayes]

Yes. That was debated at some length when we last met. My right hon. Friend is right that because of the character of the software we use to make these vehicles work, data and cyber-security become ever more significant. My letter addresses this, as he helpfully reminded the Committee, but I can confirm that the discussions we are having have at their heart all the considerations to which he has drawn the Committee’s attention.

We will continue to engage with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency and other stakeholders to ensure that the system works effectively once in place. In addition, we have produced a detailed impact assessment that looks at potential direct economic impacts on the insurance industry. Hon. Members will remember that we rehearsed the effect that this will have on insurance premiums and the industry as a whole in oral evidence. The industry is already preparing for those effects, because it knows that the shape and character of the insurance industry will alter as a result of all this. Indeed, one of the UK’s major insurers has stated that it expects insurance premiums to become cheaper because automated vehicles will be safer. That view was echoed by the Bank of England, which reported in March this year that the safety benefits from automated vehicles could see insurance premiums become more than 20% cheaper by 2040.

As part of this regulatory programme, we will continue to work with the industry to ensure that, as the new insurance framework is implemented, we still meet our intended policy objectives. I therefore hope I have made it clear that we entirely agree with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East that these matters need to be considered now and in the future, and I have no doubt that there will be a need for the House to be involved in that process. With those assurances, I hope the hon. Gentleman might see fit to withdraw the new clause.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Hayes]

That is the central and salient point. I think this is where the misunderstanding took place between us in the earlier sitting. That there is a single insurer, as my right hon. Friend now acknowledges, is one of the points covered in my letter, along with a couple of others, on which he will no doubt speak. He is right that that changes the assumption about the transition, as he describes it.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am delighted to hear the Minister confirm that and that I have eventually managed to understand this. If it is a single insurer, those problems disappear, which is very good news.

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[Sir Oliver Letwin]

In that case, my answer is yes. As I understand it now, I think, the insurer who has insured the person who is sitting in the driving seat will pay the third party who has been damaged in the accident, regardless of whether the person sitting in the driving seat is driving the car or the car is driving itself. That is also regardless of whether the person sitting in the driving seat is the owner of the car, insured as the owner to drive that car, or is not the owner but is insured under some other policy to drive that car. In any of those cases—whether automated or not; whether the policy covers other cars or that car—the insurer of the person sitting in the driving seat at all times is liable to third parties, and then the insurer claims from whoever it wants to claim from, and is able to claim from in court, after the fact.

[Mr Hayes]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his helpful dialogue because it also relates the issues raised by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East. The short answer to the question posed to my right hon. Friend is yes. The complicated factor that my right hon. Friend is now dealing with is that there are policies—I do not have one myself and I do not suppose many here do—where fully comprehensive insurance cover allows other people to drive. That is not the named drivers policy that most of us will probably have, but a more permissive kind of policy, and that is exactly what my right hon. Friend is alluding to.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am grateful again to the Minister. Yes, exactly: I had been worried about two cases, one in which the person sitting in the driving seat was the owner, and the other in which the person sitting in the driving seat was not the owner but was covered by a policy covering the driving of other cars. In both instances, I think it is clear.

The reason I am labouring these points and asking the Minister to confirm them is that I do not think that any ordinary human being reading the Bill would have the slightest clue that this is what it is trying to do. I think its architecture has been forced on it by the desire to piggyback on the Road Traffic Act; and I suspect that lawyers will understand, because they will be familiar with the Road Traffic Act and how its principles operate. Therefore, I am satisfied that probably this is the right way to structure the Bill. In any case, it is certainly structured in a way that, when everything is read together in the right way, does not create the gap that I was worried about, as the car moves between automated and non-automated mode. That was the critical issue.

[Graham P. Jones]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I seek clarity from the Minister—I know he has been reasonably descriptive up to a point—on the types of vehicles that will and will not be insured. It will probably be connected and automated vehicles, automation level 4 and 5; however, I am concerned about the size and shape of the vehicles and how the legislation will fit them in the future.

There has been an issue about insuring automated vehicles, not just on public but on private land. However, even on public land, are there situations where we might see a size of vehicle—my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East drives a very small electric vehicle, and there might be even smaller ones—on parts of the road network that had become accessible to new types of electric vehicle, and where we might suddenly need to reflect on the type of insurance? They may get down to the size of a bicycle, for example—I do not know—so are there circumstances or situations where the shape and size of the vehicle would have some effect? I suppose that relates to the definition of level 3 and 4 automation. I know that the Minister will produce a list in future guidance, but I would welcome a clarification from him on shape and size, how the Government see that changing and whether they will be responsive to that.

Going back to insurance on private land, this causes an enormous problem, quite apart from my earlier point about mapping. The legislation says that vehicles must be insured on public and private land—although there are some discrepancies around private land. How will this work with automated vehicles? If we multiply that by the fact that the shape and form of automated vehicles may change—they may be able to go down narrow footpaths, for example—where are the Government on the insurance system? How it will work with automated vehicles accessing private land? I am asking for clarity on this point. I do not know the answer; I am probing the Minister to see if he does. There seems to be a complex minefield of issues when it comes to insuring an automated vehicle—of whatever shape, form or function—that can wander off on to private land. There does not seem to be much clarity in the Bill on that. It seems to be hanging on the old legislation for traditional motor vehicles as we know them and how they are insured on the current road network.

Turning to automated vehicles, in particular on private land, and their shape and form, this will clearly be a challenge, so will the Minister clarify how the Government will respond? Again, I come back to the mapping issue. There will surely need to be tighter definitions of where automated vehicles go and what they are allowed to do. There seems to be no reference to that in the guidance or anywhere else. Will the Minister provide some clarity? People want to know. It is not just about the public highways, motorways, A roads and B roads. It is far bigger than that and the insurance system has to cope with insurance off-road, on private land.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I will make the point more emphatically; I was perhaps being a bit too understated. Understatement is a problem I constantly struggle with, as my right hon. and hon. Friends know.

The simple fact of the matter is that if the autonomous vehicle is “responsible” for the accident, and its software is at fault, whether that fault be caused by malevolence or some failure, the consumer’s interest will be unaltered. In the Bill, the consumer is protected in the way I have described, regardless of why the vehicle was at fault. That will then be a matter to determine during the course of the events, but it will not affect the person or persons affected by the accident.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

rose—

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[Karl Turner]

I want to speak briefly to new clause 18. Before doing so, I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister’s officials for the work they have done with my office. They have been extremely helpful.

New clause 18 covers the issue of cyber-security and the hacking of automated vehicles. It would require the Secretary of State to consult with such persons as he considers appropriate within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. I am not planning to push the new clause to a vote; its purpose is mainly to probe a little deeper to ensure that the Government properly and widely consult in this area. I would be grateful if the Minister indicated how that has already been done. I know that a great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes; will he assist the Committee by setting out who the Department has consulted with thus far?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I actually do not think that this matter can be dealt with in the Bill, but I agree with the shadow Minister that we should seek an assurance from the Government that they will spend the time that needs to be spent, once the Bill is out of this House, trying to deal with what is a very, very big problem.

It is easy to imagine that this is just science fiction, but it is not. It is more than imaginable that, as part of the convergence of networks and as the transport system becomes automated, the single biggest security vulnerability of the UK—and, while we are at it, of any other advanced economy—will be the ability of state or non-state actors to intervene in a whole series of its convergent networks. Obviously, there may also be threats from exogenous things such as space weather, which may affect convergent networks, including electricity, transport, communications and so on, but state actors and some non-state actors are employing serious and highly developed methods to intervene in our cyber-security, as the Government are well aware.

The capacity to do damage to the UK by bringing the transport system to a grinding halt, amidst thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of simultaneous crashes, is a delicious prospect. I absolutely guarantee the Minister, although I am sure that he does not need my guarantee to believe it, that someone sitting somewhere—if not several people sitting in several places—is planning that kind of offensive cyber-activity at this very moment. Many of those people have access to many of the people who will be involved in developing the software that will be used in the very machines that we want to be used on our roads.

That is an irony of the globalised world. This is not like the 18th century, when people sat behind huge national barricades and we did not use their technologies but they tried to use them against us. We are now in a position where the people who may use our technologies against us supply some of those technologies to us. That creates a degree of risk out of all proportion to anything we have witnessed before. I am a believer in automated vehicles—I do not think that we can resist this trend—but we need to ensure that an immensely higher level of cyber-security is built in from the start than we might think necessary under other circumstances.

I want to make one further point. This is one of those cases where externalities will not be internalised. It is not in the interests of particular manufacturers to worry very much about this issue. If I am a specific manufacturer of a specific automated vehicle, my interest is in producing something that is good to drive, cheap and normally safe, because that is the way I will sell the maximum quantity of it. If somebody tells me that I could make it safer from hacking, which is unlikely to occur, in the sense that there is a one-in-1,000 or one-in-10,000 or whatever chance of it being hacked, by making it significantly more expensive, my natural and commercial response will be not to add that protection, because it would make me less competitive. I am not particularly worried that Britain may be brought to a halt, because I am not Britain; I am a manufacturer, and I am answerable to my shareholders, not to the electors of the UK.

There is a clear area of intrinsic market failure here, where, however pure a free marketeer one is, Adam Smith principles apply and it is for the state to ensure that the externalities are internalised by legislating or regulating, or by reaching agreement with manufacturers. As I say, I do not believe that the Bill can be the vehicle for creating a whole new structure of invigilation of the cyber-security standards of automated vehicles, but the Minister, in conjunction with Ministers in parallel positions in other jurisdictions, needs to get to work on that rapidly. If that is not done, the Bill will be useless, because it will provide a framework for something that no rational Government will ever allow to occur.

We cannot allow the UK’s transport system to be put in peril by being easily accessible to hackers in a way that could cause hundreds of thousands of accidents simultaneously. It is a necessary concomitant to the Bill that there should be a serious attempt to create that degree of universal cyber-security for level 4 and level 5 vehicles. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that he is at this very moment getting the plane tickets to go and talk to all the other relevant Ministers and set up the international systems required to do something similar to the protocols that govern the GSM standard, which make it not unhackable, but much less hackable than previous mobile systems.

[Mr Hayes]

Perhaps I should say a word now about my personal and professional relationship with my right hon. Friend, in as much as it relates to what he has just said. When we worked together in Downing Street, we discussed these kinds of issues many times. I was the Minister responsible for cyber-security at the Home Office, and I take what he and the shadow Minister said very seriously indeed. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that cyber-security is a pressing, present and immensely great threat. It is vital that the work on this technology, like all the work we do across the House and across Departments, takes account of the scale and nature of that threat and that it does all we can to counter it. My right hon. Friend was involved in that at the Cabinet Office.

On a more personal note, I am not surprised that my right hon. Friend raised the issue. I am rather more surprised that he—with an absolute, but none the less surprising, frankness—emphasised the limits of the market and the constraints on commerce, because he has always been more inclined to a liberal perspective than I am. But then again, who is not? I know he is a great admirer of the power of the markets to shape our futures, so I am delighted—perhaps it is my influence or that of his dear late mother, who, I think it is fair to say, was more on my wavelength on these subjects—that he has been encouraged to take the view, which he has articulated so forcefully and persuasively today, that the industry will not do this alone. It is right that we should work in partnership with the industry. The Government must take their place and have their influence in that respect, and that brings me to new clause 18.

If anything, I regard new clause 18 as an understatement of how significant the issue is. If it were accepted—although I am grateful that the shadow Minister has said he will not press it to a vote—it would impose a requirement to consult on security risk. I do not regard that as a requirement; I regard it is as an obligation. It is absolutely essential that we do that. The work that we are already doing, which he asked me to briefly summarise, is advanced but ongoing. We are working with UK security agencies, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure and the new National Cyber Security Centre—which was set up while I was the Minister responsible, by the way. This issue is a real challenge for Government and for Parliament. It stretches well beyond any particular Government or political party, as has been made clear by what has been said. We will need to engage directly with industry and raise awareness.

We are already discussing the issue with industry. As part of that, we have consulted, developed and published a document, “The key principles of vehicle cyber security for connected and automated vehicles”. It is a guidance document for the automotive industry on good cyber-security and the connected and automated vehicle ecosystem. I do not know whether the Committee has access to that, but I will happily make it available in hard copy form. It is available electronically, if Members wish to take a look. We have also set up the automotive information exchange to promote the sharing of intelligence and best practice for effective cyber-security across the industry.

This issue has been identified as a top priority by the new National Cyber Security Centre. The work will continue and our understanding of how we can counter the risks will grow; but more than that, I would say—as a result of the contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East—that we should consider seeking additional powers over time. I do not think that this Committee is the right place to debate that, or indeed that the Bill is the right vehicle to bring those powers forward, but a commitment to considering additional powers, should they become necessary, is an important one to make. Furthermore, I think my right hon. Friend is right: we need to ensure good cross-governmental work on this. I will take that away, because a further dialogue across Government is necessary. It is happening, but we can always do more, and when it happens at ministerial level, as he will know from the meetings we have had over time, a great deal can be achieved rather more quickly.

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[Mr Hayes]

I charged my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset earlier with being the hon. Gentleman’s spokesman and interpreter, but now the hon. Gentleman has put the boot on the other foot. He added further sophistication to my right hon. Friend’s argument in his last contribution. He is right that the Bill begins to address this issue; the point I was making is that, given the ongoing work I described through the agencies I mentioned, it would not be right to set that out in further detail in the Bill. I am arguing against an addition to the Bill, rather than what is in the Bill already.

There is another aspect to this that I want to add. It is very important that we work internationally. Of course, many of the manufacturers are, by their nature, multinational organisations that therefore work across national boundaries. We talked earlier about the development of standards, and how that is happening at UN level and as a result of international dialogue. There is an international dialogue as well on cyber-security, and it is important that we marry our conversations on vehicle standards with our conversations on cyber-security, to ensure a synergous approach to the two.

With those commitments, that absolute assurance of the Government’s understanding of the significance of this matter and my heartfelt support for the strength of the argument made by the shadow Minister and my right hon. Friend, I am delighted that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East will not push his amendment to a vote. We will report back further as time goes on. I will commission the work across Government and, as I have said, I will make available to the Committee some of the documents we have already published.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Before my right hon. Friend sits down, and at some risk of adding to the antiphonal relationship with the hon. Member for Eltham, I wonder whether he will also consider clause 1(1)(b). At the moment, it gives the Secretary of State the power to list vehicles capable of “safely driving themselves”. It might be appropriate to consider changing that to “safely and securely driving themselves”, or making some such other amendment, to ensure that he has the power already in the Bill when making the list to include on the list those vehicles that conform with whatever set of standards for cyber-security he eventually develops as a result of the work he is talking about.

[Mr Hayes]

Every member of the Committee should cherish the moment they are about to enjoy, because I accept that proposal and I will consult with my officials on making a minor and technical amendment to that effect, barring any absolute reason why it cannot be done. If we are advised by parliamentary draftsmen that it cannot be done for any reason, we will not, but barring that exception, I will do exactly what my right hon. Friend has described.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman, with great courtesy, gave me notice as part of the civilised conversation we had at lunchtime that he would raise that very point. When he mentioned it to me informally, I said that it was an interesting thought. It is not incompatible with the zonal approach we have taken to air quality. As he knows, we have developed an approach that focuses on areas that are particularly severely affected by poor air quality. I cannot give a definitive commitment to do exactly what he says, but I am certainly prepared to think about it. It would not be out of tune with the Government’s approach; as well as raising the quality of air for everyone, we have done extra work in parts of our country—typically urban places—that are particularly badly affected. I think he can take that as a small win, in that he has made his point, which I have acknowledged and committed to going away to think about more.

My right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset made a point about existing powers. He will be aware of the powers granted by the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulations 2017, which I think he referred to. They have just been introduced in the UK and will go part of the way to solving the problem. Those regulations require that all charge points offer ad-hoc access without requiring people to have membership, as some existing systems do. They are about creating the greater consistency that he seeks.

In a former life I was the Energy Minister, and I remember dealing with Ofgem and others, as my right hon. Friend will have done in the roles that he has had. I hear what he says about the practical business of ensuring that the appropriate powers are employed in the way that we seek, and I will think more closely about that, too. It might be necessary to do that in primary legislation in the way that he described, but there may be other ways of achieving that end, and I want to give it further consideration.

It is certainly essential, if we are going to make this multiplicity of charge points as widely available as possible, to address the issue of off-street charge points. As my right hon. Friend and others will know, some local authorities have already made progress in that regard. I am delighted to be able to tell the Committee that just this weekend, London boroughs took the lead. Wandsworth approved a plan to convert all lampposts so that they have charge points, which is notable and important, and Kensington and Chelsea announced the conversion of 50 lampposts as a first step to converting all its lamp posts. So, there is some progress in London.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

It is indeed encouraging that those things have been done, but does my right hon. Friend agree that the scale of the ambition is wholly different? Fifty charge points is fine, but I am talking about something like 10 million. I think that I am right in saying that there are about 20 million cars in this country, so about 10 million will be owned by people in places where there is off-street car parking. I do not think that local authorities, Ofgem or utilities companies have got the idea at all that we need to build the infrastructure far in advance of the cars if we are ever going to have the cars. That is why I beg him to consider primary legislation that puts it beyond doubt that Ministers could, if necessary, just make this happen wholesale. That way, they will probably avoid ever having to use those powers.

[Mr Hayes]

Well—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

Yes. It is possible, as the hon. Gentleman says, that there could be contradictory needs, and incentives and disincentives such as those which he describes. We need to be careful about how we put in place those additional requests and requirements. That is about the conversation we will have with the Department for Communities and Local Government. I am writing to the Secretary of State as a direct result of my conversation with him about this yesterday evening. I knew the Committee would want to know about it and I made sure I had it before we met today. I anticipated that the Committee would want reassurance, which I am now ready to offer, that I intend to take this as far as we need to go. This would be done not only by taking these pretty extensive powers, which allow us to make regulations to ensure the easy accessibility of charge points to a common access method as a minimum, but also through the work of other Government Departments. I include BIS, where I used to be a Minister—now called BEIS—and DCLG.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

This exchange across the Committee is important. We need collectively to adjust our view of what we are trying to achieve. Hitherto, we have been talking about putting in—if I can put it in these terms—a few charge points here and there in the hope of getting some useful experimentation with electric vehicles, which has all been good. We now have to move into an entirely different world, in which we, by no means exclusively reserve places for electric vehicles, nor do we have a few of them. We have to build out the infrastructure, just as with mobile telephony we have to build out the masts and therefore the capacity to deliver long before people will buy the machines to use it. We have to build out charge points everywhere, right across the country. Every parking place must be a place where you can park an electric vehicle and charge it, because that is the only way we will move quickly as a country from next-to-zero to millions and millions of electric vehicles.

We have a choice as a country. We could be a laggard; we could pass nice Bills, preen ourselves that we are interested in these matters and watch the countries that are going fast go fast. We have done that with some technologies and it is always catastrophic to our competitive status, but we could do it. I do not think that is what the Minister wants, I do not think it is what the Government wants, I do not think it is what the clean growth strategy demands and I do not think it is what the Committee wants. If we do not, we have to envisage regulatory powers that will force the build-out right the way across the street so every on-street car parking place is an on-street car charging place.

[The Chair]

Order. Interventions are becoming longer and longer and more and more discursive. So, interventions should be short—anybody in these Committees can speak whenever they like—and to the point.

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[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I think it is an academic point, but my right hon. Friend is completely right. I have always regarded the regulation of motorway service stations in Britain as an abomination. In terms of both quality and price, they do not compare with their properly regulated counterparts in many European countries. However, I am not sure we ought to detain Parliament by legislating for the past when we can now legislate for the future. I think this will be much quicker than many people think. My guess is that about 20 years from now, we will not have very many petrol vehicles on our roads. I would much prefer to persuade the Minister to regulate for electric charging points, but if he is minded to pay attention to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire and fold in a power to regulate for petrol too, I do not mind.

The last thing I want to say about clause 10 is that I think there is a missing entity, as well as missing powers. Interposed between the service station provider and the motorist lies the bizarre phenomenon of the national monopolist who provides the power points at service stations. That is a very odd feature of the scene. I do not understand why it has grown up this way, but we need to make absolutely sure that the powers in clause 10 can apply to anybody who holds any kind of market power over the provision of the charging points in the service stations, and not just over the service station operators. Parliament often legislates and thinks it has legislation that will have the effect that it intended, then discovers that it is not there. This could be such a case unless the lawyers have thought about all that. If they have and it is drafted appropriately, no one will be more delighted than me.

[Mr Hayes]

I will deal with the last point first: yes, it does apply in the way my right hon. Friend said.

Let me now deal with the issue of motorway service areas, about which I have very strong views. I am the Minister responsible for motorway service areas, so I am in regular dialogue with them. I visit them with alarming regularity—from their point of view, not mine. I am determined that we can do more and better, and so are they, by the way. They are committed to building on the progress that has been made in motorway service areas over a considerable time, but we can do more. I want more particularity, more local source of supply and better design. I want them to be places that people choose to go to rather than have to go to. I want the quality of motorway service stations and their connection to the localities to be a thing of style and grace, and that includes the provision of electric charge points.

The reason we have spoken about major retailers is very much as a start. This is not a reason that limits what we might do later. In fact, we will need to do more later. It is an attempt to make an important start in providing more charge points. Highways England has already committed £15 million to ensure there is a rapid charge point every 40 miles on the strategic road network in England. That picks up the point about battery life, of course, because this is about the regularity of provision. People need to know that, on a major route, they are never more than 40 miles away from a charge point. Highways England is running a procurement exercise as we speak to fill the gaps to achieve that end and it expects to deliver on that commitment as soon as possible. That was part of the road investment strategy, which I launched when I was a Minister in the Department on a previous occasion. I have been a Minister in the Department on many occasions, and when I launched the road investment strategy, that was part of it and one of the commitments we made then.

I know that the good point that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset made about the link to Ofgem is a particular concern of his, as he expressed it in an earlier part of our debate. It is important that we facilitate the kind of work with the providers of power that he describes. I am determined they should not be a barrier to growth in the number of charge points. As I said earlier, and I do not want to become tediously repetitive—repetitive while it is exciting, but not tediously so—we will make sure that those discussions are exaggerated helpfully as a result of this short debate.

We have spoken already about our determination to grow the number significantly. My right hon. Friend poses an interesting challenge: that we should lead the field internationally and be ahead of our principal competitors. That is a perfectly reasonable challenge and one I am happy to meet. I am determined that Britain should be a leader in this field. We have often led in the field of technology and we can again. As I said, it is a challenge I welcome and which I am determined to meet.

With regard to the amendment, which the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East spoke to, I am going to abbreviate my remarks a little. I have quite a long speaking note, but I want to come to the core elements that address the arguments the shadow Minister advanced. The shadow Minister drew attention to our debate in the Vehicle Technology and Aviation Public Bill Committee, on which some members of this Committee sat. They will remember the helpful debates we had then and how we have moved on in a sense, although we set out our ambitions in that Bill. I committed to be more precise about the regulations and the shape they might take by publishing a draft. To be helpful today, I ought to say what that draft is likely to contain in respect of the specific circumstances that any regulations would need to take account of in mitigating the effects of the obligations that we are creating in the Bill to make charging points available.

Certainly, where the commercial viability of fuel retailers, their forecourts and service areas and the effect that mandatory electric vehicle infrastructure would have upon that are concerned, we would need to be mindful of the interests of retailers. We are not in the business of creating such a burden that people, first, will not do it and, secondly, will be compromised by it.

Secondly, there is the issue raised by the hon. Gentleman about places where there is not space available and the total land take makes provision impossible. Thirdly, there is the point about the impact on the local electricity grid. Fourthly, there is the proximity of other charging points, which relates to the consideration we enjoyed earlier about concentration. We do not want a cluster of charging points in a small area and yet no charging points for a long stretch. The proximity of the electric vehicle infrastructure and of other fuel retailers and service areas also seems to be salient.

The hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East was right in moving the amendment to say that we need to be mindful of the practical effect of the obligation we are creating. It must not be crude in its effect; it must be measured, and the regulations will ensure that. They will certainly contain the elements that I have set out. The hon. Gentleman is also right that clause 15(3) specifically commits the Secretary of State to consult with appropriate persons before making regulations under this part of the Bill. Given that the effect of the Bill is to make the provision of charging points mandatory, it is right that we should consult.

Equally, we should be bold and ambitious. I think it was Ezra Pound who said that when faced with two options, choose the boldest. That is very much the recommendation of my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East. We do need to be bold and ambitious, but we need to be measured. We must not create an obligation that is heavy handed in its effect. I want to achieve what the Committee has recommended to me, which is to lead the field. The best way to do that is to put in place regulations that can be effected quickly, efficiently and effectively.

We will consult. The consultation needs to be wide ranging and thorough, and we would like to commence much earlier, so that the regulations come into force after proper reflection—probably earlier than the six months proposed by amendment 5, but not so early that I do not have time to consider the results of the consultation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

When my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset spoke of the past, he may have been doing so mildly pejoratively. I take the view that we are the past: all we are is what we remember; now is an illusion, as it becomes then in an instant, and the future—as we have said repeatedly in our considerations on this Bill—is an uncertainty. So when my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire speaks of those vehicles, vintage and classic, that he holds so dear, I can say with certainty that the future of Jaguar XK120s, 140s and 150s, Bentley Continentals, Humber Snipes, Singer Gazelles, Ford Anglias, Morris Minor Travellers, and Jensen Interceptors, among many others, is secure in my hands.

The substantial point that my right hon. Friend makes is about clarity when it comes to price. He is right that petrol stations show the price of the goods they sell—petrol, diesel, et cetera—and it is right that we should be clear about that. I believe we can ensure that that happens in the way that he sets out, as it seems to me perfectly fair and reasonable.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am, as ever, grateful for my right hon. Friend’s mellifluous misinterpretations of philosophy, but to return to the matter in hand, while I very much welcome what my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire has said about transparency of pricing, I hope he will agree that, at least in the interim, that is not going to be enough. The reason it works for petrol is that the petrol engine and the fuel tanks that go with it now have range capacities, which mean that people can almost always choose where they want to fill up. At least for the short term—that is, the crucial moment in which we either will or will not achieve a transition to a vast scale of electric vehicles in this country—electric vehicles do not have a range that enables people to make that choice under all circumstances. Therefore, having people know that they are going to be ripped off when they get to the relevant service station, which is the only one they can charge at, is adding insult to injury, because they are told in advance that they are going to be ripped off, but they are still ripped off because they have no choice. Therefore, at least in the interim, we do need price-capping powers—which, alas, my right hon. Friend the Minister did not mention in his response to the last clause, but which I hope he has taken on board.

However, the point I want to make in relation to information is different. Clause 11 begins very well, by saying in subsection (1):

“Regulations may require operators of public charging points to make available prescribed information relating to such points.”

Unfortunately, subsection (2), if I have understood the way it is articulated correctly, limits that power by saying that what can

“be prescribed under subsection (1) in relation to a public charging point is such information as the Secretary of State considers likely to be useful to users or potential users of the point”,

which is followed by a perfectly sensible list. That is a very valuable power to have, because, for the reasons that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire advanced, and other reasons, it is good that there should be transparency for users and potential users. I very much agree with a point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling made about open data sources and apps, but there is an information flow that is even more important than the information flow to the users.

We need to look ahead to the time when there are 20 million of these electric vehicles in the UK, or even to when we are a quarter or half of the way to that total. At that point the dynamics of the electricity supply industry will—as my right hon. Friend the Minister knows from his time in Energy—fundamentally change. We will have the capacity to deal with intermittent provision of energy to the grid by a flexible demand response engendered by electric vehicles, in their millions, either ceasing to charge or ultimately delivering electricity to the grid at points when the intermittent supplies from, shall we say, solar energy are not available and when the load curve would otherwise create additional demand that could not be met.

That is a huge gain to our country, and it could eliminate very expensive investment in fixed storage or additional capacity from fossil fuel or nuclear stations. In order for that gain to be realised, there needs to be a flow of data back from every kind of charging point all over the country into National Grid, so that the National Grid planners can plan ahead in the knowledge of the patterns that are being established, dynamically, as there are more and more electric cars and the interactions of those with the smart charging points and the smart grid change.

This is really a very important flow of information indeed. At the moment it does not exist, and there is nothing in the Bill that gives the Secretary of State the power to mandate that it should exist. It would be a simple matter to do so; we would need only to enlarge the scope of the power in clause 11(1) and (2) by changing the drafting so that it is possible to mandate information useful not only to users or potential users, but to operators of infrastructure relevant to charging: the grid, for example. I am not trying to draft on the hoof—it is obviously easy for the Minister to commission the appropriate drafting—but I hope that the intent is clear. It would make a significant difference.

I am told by National Grid that at the moment it has considerable difficulty accumulating any serious information about patterns. Car manufacturers do not want to give it, because they regard it as commercially sensitive information, and the commercial operators of the current charge points do not want to give it, for the same reason. Therefore, the Minister will need powers that compel a range of people providing various different kinds of charging points to provide that information back to the grid if the grid is to have a reliable supply of data to enable it to plan in an appropriate way.

The grid—and the DNOs, to the extent that we are talking about distributed power—has good information at the moment on the generating side, and it will get pretty good information from people’s homes through centralised computing after the smart meter roll-out. However, that brings me to my last point. As I understand it—I do not know how it happened; the Minister might have been responsible, or me, or one of our colleagues at the relevant time—unfortunately, by oversight, we have not so far required the information that electricity suppliers get through the central computing system attached to smart meters to be transmitted to the DNOs and the NGC. Therefore, to the extent that cars are being charged off-street, at people’s homes, they are unable to get that data flow. That goes back to a decision by our right hon. Friend Lord Maude to allow the continuation of the use of suppliers rather than DNOs to supply smart meters in people’s homes.

Be that as it may, it is now also urgently necessary that the data flow be mandated back from the smart meters in people’s homes to NGC, so that as electric cars are charged overnight off-street at people’s homes, that can also be built into NGC’s planning horizons. If we can do those two things—mandate data flows from all public charging points and all smart meters installed in private residences back to NGC—the Minister will be able to contribute significantly to the much more economically efficient development of our electricity supply industry, as part of the roll-out of electric vehicles, which is part of the aim that the Government have always had.

[Mr Hayes]

I will deal briefly with the two points made by my right hon. Friend; I think that he is wrong about both. In respect of the powers, I am advised that work is under way with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on that. He will understand that, as he said earlier, that needs to be a cross-governmental piece of work. That work is designed to consider what we can do to catalyse the deployment of technology, including potential funding for innovation.

The key point is that the powers proposed in the Bill are sufficiently broad to allow for regulations to include requirements for information relating to vehicle-to-grid charging. That would include information between the vehicle and the grid. Obviously, that would have to be defined in regulation, but I understand that powers can be introduced to fill the gap that he describes in providing information back to the grid about demand and supply.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I would be delighted if the Minister is right, but can he explain how the phrase

“likely to be useful to users or potential users”

in subsection (2) allows the mandation of the information to be provided to the grid, which is neither a user nor a potential user of the charging point?

[Mr Hayes]

I will return to that when I have dealt with what my right hon. Friend got wrong in his first point. On the relationship between subsections (1) and (2), he is right that, in his words, subsection (2) limits subsection (1)—I would say explains it, but that is a matter of interpretation and semantics. Subsection (2) sets out a series of pieces of information that, for example, the Secretary of State might deem appropriate. It is not an exclusive list, although it is pretty comprehensive:

“(a) the location of the point and its operating hours,

(b) available charging or refuelling options,

(c) the cost of obtaining access to the use of the point,

(d) the method of payment…

(e) means of connection…

(f) whether the point is in working order, and

(g) whether the point is in use.”

The Secretary of State may prescribe other matters as he sees fit, but those are offered “for example”, as the subsection states. I think that my right hon. Friend is wrong about that, or perhaps he will tell me why he is not.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I do not doubt that the list is a very good one, or that it is a list of examples; as the Minister says, the subsection states “for example”. My problem is with the governing phrase above that:

“likely to be useful to users or potential users of the point”.

The National Grid Company is not a user or potential user of the point. Therefore, I do not think that the Minister has the powers under subsection (2) to prescribe that the information flows to it. As he has already said, subsection (2) explains or interprets or restricts (1), so I do not think he has those powers under that subsection either. I am not trying to be a parliamentary jobsworth and I would be delighted to be proved wrong.

[Mr Hayes]

We come to the nub of the difference between us, over which I think we can reach an Hegelian synthesis in the few short words I will offer my right hon. Friend. I understand that he accepts that subsections (1) and (2) are about providing information for people who might seek to charge their vehicle. He freely acknowledges that the list is not exclusive, although it is extensive. What concerns him is that the subsection does not stipulate any link back to the providers of power—it provides information to the users of power but not to the providers of power. That is because the powers to which I am referring are contained not in this part of the Bill, but in clause 12. I do not want to debate that clause now, because you will not let me, Sir Edward, but I highlight the fact that clause 12(2) speaks of the ability

“(a) to receive and process information provided by a prescribed person,

(b) to react to information of a kind mentioned in paragraph (a) (for example, by adjusting the rate of charging or discharging)”

and so on. We believe that there is sufficient power in clause 12 to get to the destination that my right hon. Friend seeks. If that is not the case by the time we come to debate clause 12, I will explain why not and put that right. I hope that for the time being at least I might have satisfied him.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Of course I will wait until we get to clause 12. I do not read it the way the Minister does, but we will come to that.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 11 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 12

Smart charge points

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

In this useful dialogue we have got to the point of agreeing that it is necessary to have the information flow back to NGC, and that clause 11 does not provide for that to be mandated. The Minister ended his remarks on clause 11 by saying that clause 12 does allow the Secretary of State to mandate the provision of that information by charge points to the National Grid Company.

I said that I did not read clause 12 the way the Minister does, and that is because I suffer from this problem of reading the thing as if it were in English and I were a speaker of English. Let me illustrate to the Minister why a normal reader of English would not take clause 12(1) and (2), as currently constructed, to have the effect he is describing. If he can then explain to me why a lawyer reading it in some other language believes that it will have that effect, I will gracefully and happily give way, because I have no desire to engage in unnecessary redrafting.

In English then, clause 12(1) states:

“Regulations may provide that a person must not sell or install a charge point unless it complies with prescribed requirements.”

That is entirely about the design of the charge points; it says nothing about the provision of information. It is perfectly true that clause 12(2), again in English, states in the governing phrase:

“The requirements that may be imposed under subsection (1) include requirements relating to the technical specifications—”.

It then gives some examples—I take the point that this is not an exhaustive list—which do include, in clause 12(2)(g), the capability of the machine in question to be “accessed remotely” and, in clause 12(2)(a),

“to receive and process information provided by a prescribed person”

and even more appositely, in clause 12(2)(c),

“to transmit information…to a prescribed person”.

I accept that clause 12 is drafted in such a way that, when read in English, it would enable the Minister to pass a regulation stating that the charge point in question must be designed to have the capacity to transmit information to the prescribed person—namely, the NGC, if the Minister prescribed that. I accept all that, but having a machine with the capacity to transmit certain information does not entail the person who has the machine in their possession actually transmitting or allowing the transmission of the data in question.

There is nothing here in English that gives the Minister the power to mandate that the person who owns or supplies the relevant charge point has to allow the transmission of those data. I know of no obvious principle of jurisprudence that would mean that having a machine of a certain capacity means that it has to be used in a way that lives up to that capacity. It would indeed be strange if there were such a thing, because there are many instances in which people have things with capacities that are lawful, or even mandated, without having the obligation to use them in that way.

If the Minister can explain why enforcing a rule that the charge point has the capacity to deliver the relevant information to the NGC will automatically entail the machines all doing that, I will be delighted and I shall stop inquiring about it. If he cannot, this clearly needs some adjustment so that he has the further power to mandate the flow of data and not just the capacity of the relevant equipment to transmit such data.

[Mr Hayes]

Let me deal first with the shadow Minister’s comments about cyber security. I am grateful for his brevity, because we dealt with this at length in your absence this morning, Sir Edward. The Government take cyber security very seriously, and the shadow Minister is right that we need to be mindful of the risks associated with malevolent activity, including, as he described it, the hacking of software and other matters. It is important that in the Bill the Government take account of the requirements relating to security, and I simply say to him that they do. If he looks at clause 12(2)(e), we specifically speak of complying with “requirements relating to security”. It is right that information should be shared with those persons who are prescribed in regulations. That would include security measures and, by the way, might also include the National Grid. We are taking powers in the Bill to ensure that information will be made available in the interests of ensuring security.

I turn to the remarks made by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset about whether clause 12 is sufficient to provide the mechanism that I described earlier and the information that he sought in his speech—this is about creating greater clarity over electricity supply and demand, as he described it, and I will not repeat what he said for the sake of time. I am advised that that is the case, but I am inclined to reflect and write to the Committee. It may be, as with our earlier considerations, that in doing so I am able to satisfy him. When we were debating clause 1, he made the point that the wording of the Bill was not sufficient to make clear its full extent, and I think my supplementary letter helped to clarify that. I suggest that I might do that again, which will allow us to make more rapid progress. I know that will please the whole Committee, and not least you, Sir Edward.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (First sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Hayes]

That is the central and salient point. I think this is where the misunderstanding took place between us in the earlier sitting. That there is a single insurer, as my right hon. Friend now acknowledges, is one of the points covered in my letter, along with a couple of others, on which he will no doubt speak. He is right that that changes the assumption about the transition, as he describes it.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am delighted to hear the Minister confirm that and that I have eventually managed to understand this. If it is a single insurer, those problems disappear, which is very good news.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

In that case, my answer is yes. As I understand it now, I think, the insurer who has insured the person who is sitting in the driving seat will pay the third party who has been damaged in the accident, regardless of whether the person sitting in the driving seat is driving the car or the car is driving itself. That is also regardless of whether the person sitting in the driving seat is the owner of the car, insured as the owner to drive that car, or is not the owner but is insured under some other policy to drive that car. In any of those cases—whether automated or not; whether the policy covers other cars or that car—the insurer of the person sitting in the driving seat at all times is liable to third parties, and then the insurer claims from whoever it wants to claim from, and is able to claim from in court, after the fact.

[Mr Hayes]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his helpful dialogue because it also relates the issues raised by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East. The short answer to the question posed to my right hon. Friend is yes. The complicated factor that my right hon. Friend is now dealing with is that there are policies—I do not have one myself and I do not suppose many here do—where fully comprehensive insurance cover allows other people to drive. That is not the named drivers policy that most of us will probably have, but a more permissive kind of policy, and that is exactly what my right hon. Friend is alluding to.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am grateful again to the Minister. Yes, exactly: I had been worried about two cases, one in which the person sitting in the driving seat was the owner, and the other in which the person sitting in the driving seat was not the owner but was covered by a policy covering the driving of other cars. In both instances, I think it is clear.

The reason I am labouring these points and asking the Minister to confirm them is that I do not think that any ordinary human being reading the Bill would have the slightest clue that this is what it is trying to do. I think its architecture has been forced on it by the desire to piggyback on the Road Traffic Act; and I suspect that lawyers will understand, because they will be familiar with the Road Traffic Act and how its principles operate. Therefore, I am satisfied that probably this is the right way to structure the Bill. In any case, it is certainly structured in a way that, when everything is read together in the right way, does not create the gap that I was worried about, as the car moves between automated and non-automated mode. That was the critical issue.

[Graham P. Jones]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I seek clarity from the Minister—I know he has been reasonably descriptive up to a point—on the types of vehicles that will and will not be insured. It will probably be connected and automated vehicles, automation level 4 and 5; however, I am concerned about the size and shape of the vehicles and how the legislation will fit them in the future.

There has been an issue about insuring automated vehicles, not just on public but on private land. However, even on public land, are there situations where we might see a size of vehicle—my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East drives a very small electric vehicle, and there might be even smaller ones—on parts of the road network that had become accessible to new types of electric vehicle, and where we might suddenly need to reflect on the type of insurance? They may get down to the size of a bicycle, for example—I do not know—so are there circumstances or situations where the shape and size of the vehicle would have some effect? I suppose that relates to the definition of level 3 and 4 automation. I know that the Minister will produce a list in future guidance, but I would welcome a clarification from him on shape and size, how the Government see that changing and whether they will be responsive to that.

Going back to insurance on private land, this causes an enormous problem, quite apart from my earlier point about mapping. The legislation says that vehicles must be insured on public and private land—although there are some discrepancies around private land. How will this work with automated vehicles? If we multiply that by the fact that the shape and form of automated vehicles may change—they may be able to go down narrow footpaths, for example—where are the Government on the insurance system? How it will work with automated vehicles accessing private land? I am asking for clarity on this point. I do not know the answer; I am probing the Minister to see if he does. There seems to be a complex minefield of issues when it comes to insuring an automated vehicle—of whatever shape, form or function—that can wander off on to private land. There does not seem to be much clarity in the Bill on that. It seems to be hanging on the old legislation for traditional motor vehicles as we know them and how they are insured on the current road network.

Turning to automated vehicles, in particular on private land, and their shape and form, this will clearly be a challenge, so will the Minister clarify how the Government will respond? Again, I come back to the mapping issue. There will surely need to be tighter definitions of where automated vehicles go and what they are allowed to do. There seems to be no reference to that in the guidance or anywhere else. Will the Minister provide some clarity? People want to know. It is not just about the public highways, motorways, A roads and B roads. It is far bigger than that and the insurance system has to cope with insurance off-road, on private land.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I will make the point more emphatically; I was perhaps being a bit too understated. Understatement is a problem I constantly struggle with, as my right hon. and hon. Friends know.

The simple fact of the matter is that if the autonomous vehicle is “responsible” for the accident, and its software is at fault, whether that fault be caused by malevolence or some failure, the consumer’s interest will be unaltered. In the Bill, the consumer is protected in the way I have described, regardless of why the vehicle was at fault. That will then be a matter to determine during the course of the events, but it will not affect the person or persons affected by the accident.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Karl Turner]

I want to speak briefly to new clause 18. Before doing so, I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister’s officials for the work they have done with my office. They have been extremely helpful.

New clause 18 covers the issue of cyber-security and the hacking of automated vehicles. It would require the Secretary of State to consult with such persons as he considers appropriate within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. I am not planning to push the new clause to a vote; its purpose is mainly to probe a little deeper to ensure that the Government properly and widely consult in this area. I would be grateful if the Minister indicated how that has already been done. I know that a great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes; will he assist the Committee by setting out who the Department has consulted with thus far?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I actually do not think that this matter can be dealt with in the Bill, but I agree with the shadow Minister that we should seek an assurance from the Government that they will spend the time that needs to be spent, once the Bill is out of this House, trying to deal with what is a very, very big problem.

It is easy to imagine that this is just science fiction, but it is not. It is more than imaginable that, as part of the convergence of networks and as the transport system becomes automated, the single biggest security vulnerability of the UK—and, while we are at it, of any other advanced economy—will be the ability of state or non-state actors to intervene in a whole series of its convergent networks. Obviously, there may also be threats from exogenous things such as space weather, which may affect convergent networks, including electricity, transport, communications and so on, but state actors and some non-state actors are employing serious and highly developed methods to intervene in our cyber-security, as the Government are well aware.

The capacity to do damage to the UK by bringing the transport system to a grinding halt, amidst thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of simultaneous crashes, is a delicious prospect. I absolutely guarantee the Minister, although I am sure that he does not need my guarantee to believe it, that someone sitting somewhere—if not several people sitting in several places—is planning that kind of offensive cyber-activity at this very moment. Many of those people have access to many of the people who will be involved in developing the software that will be used in the very machines that we want to be used on our roads.

That is an irony of the globalised world. This is not like the 18th century, when people sat behind huge national barricades and we did not use their technologies but they tried to use them against us. We are now in a position where the people who may use our technologies against us supply some of those technologies to us. That creates a degree of risk out of all proportion to anything we have witnessed before. I am a believer in automated vehicles—I do not think that we can resist this trend—but we need to ensure that an immensely higher level of cyber-security is built in from the start than we might think necessary under other circumstances.

I want to make one further point. This is one of those cases where externalities will not be internalised. It is not in the interests of particular manufacturers to worry very much about this issue. If I am a specific manufacturer of a specific automated vehicle, my interest is in producing something that is good to drive, cheap and normally safe, because that is the way I will sell the maximum quantity of it. If somebody tells me that I could make it safer from hacking, which is unlikely to occur, in the sense that there is a one-in-1,000 or one-in-10,000 or whatever chance of it being hacked, by making it significantly more expensive, my natural and commercial response will be not to add that protection, because it would make me less competitive. I am not particularly worried that Britain may be brought to a halt, because I am not Britain; I am a manufacturer, and I am answerable to my shareholders, not to the electors of the UK.

There is a clear area of intrinsic market failure here, where, however pure a free marketeer one is, Adam Smith principles apply and it is for the state to ensure that the externalities are internalised by legislating or regulating, or by reaching agreement with manufacturers. As I say, I do not believe that the Bill can be the vehicle for creating a whole new structure of invigilation of the cyber-security standards of automated vehicles, but the Minister, in conjunction with Ministers in parallel positions in other jurisdictions, needs to get to work on that rapidly. If that is not done, the Bill will be useless, because it will provide a framework for something that no rational Government will ever allow to occur.

We cannot allow the UK’s transport system to be put in peril by being easily accessible to hackers in a way that could cause hundreds of thousands of accidents simultaneously. It is a necessary concomitant to the Bill that there should be a serious attempt to create that degree of universal cyber-security for level 4 and level 5 vehicles. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that he is at this very moment getting the plane tickets to go and talk to all the other relevant Ministers and set up the international systems required to do something similar to the protocols that govern the GSM standard, which make it not unhackable, but much less hackable than previous mobile systems.

[Mr Hayes]

Perhaps I should say a word now about my personal and professional relationship with my right hon. Friend, in as much as it relates to what he has just said. When we worked together in Downing Street, we discussed these kinds of issues many times. I was the Minister responsible for cyber-security at the Home Office, and I take what he and the shadow Minister said very seriously indeed. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that cyber-security is a pressing, present and immensely great threat. It is vital that the work on this technology, like all the work we do across the House and across Departments, takes account of the scale and nature of that threat and that it does all we can to counter it. My right hon. Friend was involved in that at the Cabinet Office.

On a more personal note, I am not surprised that my right hon. Friend raised the issue. I am rather more surprised that he—with an absolute, but none the less surprising, frankness—emphasised the limits of the market and the constraints on commerce, because he has always been more inclined to a liberal perspective than I am. But then again, who is not? I know he is a great admirer of the power of the markets to shape our futures, so I am delighted—perhaps it is my influence or that of his dear late mother, who, I think it is fair to say, was more on my wavelength on these subjects—that he has been encouraged to take the view, which he has articulated so forcefully and persuasively today, that the industry will not do this alone. It is right that we should work in partnership with the industry. The Government must take their place and have their influence in that respect, and that brings me to new clause 18.

If anything, I regard new clause 18 as an understatement of how significant the issue is. If it were accepted—although I am grateful that the shadow Minister has said he will not press it to a vote—it would impose a requirement to consult on security risk. I do not regard that as a requirement; I regard it is as an obligation. It is absolutely essential that we do that. The work that we are already doing, which he asked me to briefly summarise, is advanced but ongoing. We are working with UK security agencies, the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure and the new National Cyber Security Centre—which was set up while I was the Minister responsible, by the way. This issue is a real challenge for Government and for Parliament. It stretches well beyond any particular Government or political party, as has been made clear by what has been said. We will need to engage directly with industry and raise awareness.

We are already discussing the issue with industry. As part of that, we have consulted, developed and published a document, “The key principles of vehicle cyber security for connected and automated vehicles”. It is a guidance document for the automotive industry on good cyber-security and the connected and automated vehicle ecosystem. I do not know whether the Committee has access to that, but I will happily make it available in hard copy form. It is available electronically, if Members wish to take a look. We have also set up the automotive information exchange to promote the sharing of intelligence and best practice for effective cyber-security across the industry.

This issue has been identified as a top priority by the new National Cyber Security Centre. The work will continue and our understanding of how we can counter the risks will grow; but more than that, I would say—as a result of the contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East—that we should consider seeking additional powers over time. I do not think that this Committee is the right place to debate that, or indeed that the Bill is the right vehicle to bring those powers forward, but a commitment to considering additional powers, should they become necessary, is an important one to make. Furthermore, I think my right hon. Friend is right: we need to ensure good cross-governmental work on this. I will take that away, because a further dialogue across Government is necessary. It is happening, but we can always do more, and when it happens at ministerial level, as he will know from the meetings we have had over time, a great deal can be achieved rather more quickly.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I charged my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset earlier with being the hon. Gentleman’s spokesman and interpreter, but now the hon. Gentleman has put the boot on the other foot. He added further sophistication to my right hon. Friend’s argument in his last contribution. He is right that the Bill begins to address this issue; the point I was making is that, given the ongoing work I described through the agencies I mentioned, it would not be right to set that out in further detail in the Bill. I am arguing against an addition to the Bill, rather than what is in the Bill already.

There is another aspect to this that I want to add. It is very important that we work internationally. Of course, many of the manufacturers are, by their nature, multinational organisations that therefore work across national boundaries. We talked earlier about the development of standards, and how that is happening at UN level and as a result of international dialogue. There is an international dialogue as well on cyber-security, and it is important that we marry our conversations on vehicle standards with our conversations on cyber-security, to ensure a synergous approach to the two.

With those commitments, that absolute assurance of the Government’s understanding of the significance of this matter and my heartfelt support for the strength of the argument made by the shadow Minister and my right hon. Friend, I am delighted that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East will not push his amendment to a vote. We will report back further as time goes on. I will commission the work across Government and, as I have said, I will make available to the Committee some of the documents we have already published.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Before my right hon. Friend sits down, and at some risk of adding to the antiphonal relationship with the hon. Member for Eltham, I wonder whether he will also consider clause 1(1)(b). At the moment, it gives the Secretary of State the power to list vehicles capable of “safely driving themselves”. It might be appropriate to consider changing that to “safely and securely driving themselves”, or making some such other amendment, to ensure that he has the power already in the Bill when making the list to include on the list those vehicles that conform with whatever set of standards for cyber-security he eventually develops as a result of the work he is talking about.

[Mr Hayes]

Every member of the Committee should cherish the moment they are about to enjoy, because I accept that proposal and I will consult with my officials on making a minor and technical amendment to that effect, barring any absolute reason why it cannot be done. If we are advised by parliamentary draftsmen that it cannot be done for any reason, we will not, but barring that exception, I will do exactly what my right hon. Friend has described.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend the Minister rightly admonished me earlier in our proceedings for not making clear right from the beginning how the remarks I was making related to the structure of the Bill as it is and how it is trying to make progress without trying to solve all the problems.

In responding to the amendment of the hon. Member for Eltham, I want to ensure that I make clear why I am raising the point that I am raising about the Bill as drafted. I take it that the point of clause 2, which is one of the major points of the Bill, is precisely to ensure that the insurance industry has a clear and legally certain basis for proceeding. That is a restricted but very important ambition. The point that the hon. Gentleman raises in his amendment is very material from the point of view of realising the Minister’s ambition.

The way that the Bill is constructed, without the hon. Gentleman’s amendment or something like it, does not provide certainty for the insurance industry. The insurance industry has failed to recognise that the Bill does not provide that certainty. When the industry realises that it does not, it will blame us and the Minister for that and say, “Why on earth did you not give us certainty?” My whole intent is to ensure that the Minister can do what he is trying to do. I hope he will accept what I am saying in that light.

We had an interesting exchange in the course of the moving of the amendment about tier 3 and tier 4. To tell the truth, I do not have any faith in the tiers. They are a figment of a group of manufacturers’ imaginations. They are as good as we are going to get at the moment as a broad description of how things will go, but it is likely that all sorts of different things will be produced that are variously describable as tier 3-plus and tier 4-minus and God knows what else. I think the Minister has already agreed with what I think is certainly a true proposition: there will be at least a period in which people are experimenting with kinds of automation that involve significant opportunities for transition between the machine and the person. For that purpose, it does not matter whether we are talking tiers 3, 3-plus, 4-minus, 4 or, indeed, 4-plus.

There will possibly come a moment when drivers just fall out of the equation and there are not any drivers any more, just machines that take us to where we programme them to go. At that halcyon moment, probably decades from now, clause 2 would work fine, but the problem is that it will not work fine during what is likely to be the very long passage where there is a rather messy scene of vehicles that in varying circumstances are taken over by a driver or handed by the driver to the automation system. We were told in the evidence sessions with great certainty that it would take 10 seconds or less to hand over. We were also told that if a failure in the handover from the machine to the person occurred, all was well because the machine would find a way of stopping itself. I have learned, as I expect many members of the Committee have, always to take with a strong pinch of salt any assertion by assertive technologists that they know exactly how long it will take for something technological to happen in all circumstances. They do not know any such thing; they are speculating. They may prove to be entirely right—they certainly know a lot more about it than me—but it is perfectly possible that they will prove to be completely wrong.

The hon. Member for Eltham raised one circumstance in which the technologists could be very wrong. It may well be that the machines are so designed that they go to great lengths to wake up drivers who have gone to sleep when they have stopped driving and handed over to the machine. There may be rules enforced that say they must not go to sleep, but human beings are human beings, and they might go to sleep and it might take a lot longer than 10 seconds to wake them up. I happen to be married to someone who takes a lot longer than 10 seconds to wake up; I have no reason to suppose that every human being sitting next to the machine is going to be in full functioning order in 10 seconds. There could be quite long periods during which that transition is occurring.

The reason I say all that to my right hon. Friend the Minister is that we are not here talking about angels on pins; we are not talking about milliseconds that are just a figment of legal imagination. It is quite likely that, in real life, there will actually be some accidents that occur during periods of transition between machine and mankind. There is no reason we should be afraid of that; there are plenty of accidents on our roads now, and we are not entering into a new terrain in which there will be thousands more accidents—probably there will be thousands fewer. Nevertheless, some accidents might occur during transition. The Bill currently contains a binary choice. Either, as in clause 2(1),

“an accident is caused by an automated vehicle when driving itself”

or it is not. There is no allowance for the possibility of transition.

If a piece of legislation does not admit of a possibility, and that possibility comes about in real life and there is a court action about it, the court looks at the statute and it says to itself, “Blow me down! Once again, Parliament has been extremely stupid. There is nothing in the statute about this situation.” What does an English court do, thank goodness, under such circumstances? It invents the law. That is what it will do. It is not the case that there is a sort of legal black hole. Where there is statute and statutory construction does not lead to the answer to the case, the judge will invent the answer.

[The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)]

I take it that my right hon. Friend is speaking about fault. In those circumstances, what would be at question is where fault lies and what caused the accident. If that is the case, I direct him, without wishing to engage in a long debate about it, to clause 3(1), which deals with partial responsibility and therefore fault.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

No, I am not raising the question of fault. I am raising the question of legal certainty about the circumstance. Clause 2 says that if the

“accident is caused by an automated vehicle when driving itself”

it is clear that

“the insurer is liable for that damage.”

It is equally clear, therefore, as a binary choice, that if the vehicle is not being driven by the vehicle itself, but by the driver, the driver is liable. Those two positions are perfectly clear. The insurer of the driver, who may or may not be a separate body from the insurer of the vehicle, takes on responsibility when the driver is driving. We are dealing here with the situation in which some combination of driver and vehicle has been the cause of the accident, during a transitional period from one to the other. The question arises, which of the two insurance policies is the relevant one? I do not believe that there is anything in clause 3 that solves that problem. If the Minister can point out something about the wording of clause 3, I hope you will allow him to do so, Mr Bailey, because it is definitely relevant to the point that the hon. Member for Eltham and I are raising.

My own view is that there is nothing in clause 3 that solves the problem, and therefore the courts will invent a solution. There is nothing wrong with that in general—the courts are very wise and may come up with a perfectly good solution—but the Minister’s purpose is not to say, “Let the courts invent a solution”. If that was his purpose, he would not need the Bill in the first place, because we have a common-law system. If there were no Bill, and if automated vehicles were to proceed and things were to go to court, the courts would find a solution. We would not need the Bill in the first place, if we were going to rely on the courts. The reason for having the Bill is to create legal certainty so that we are not simply trying to find out later, ex post, what the courts will make the law be. We are trying to make the law in advance, so that the insurance industry and the automated vehicle industry know how it will work. For that purpose to be realised, we have to be clear that the law covers all the possible circumstances—when there is a driver driving the vehicle, when the vehicle is driving the vehicle, and the circumstances between the two when somebody is handing over to the vehicle or the vehicle is handing over to the driver.

My point is that at the moment there is a gap; the Bill does not say what happens during that period. Incidentally, I do not think it matters terribly what the decision is; there just needs to be a decision, so that a case does not revolve around who the relevant insurer is under the circumstances of transition.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Actually, I think the hon. Gentleman understates the problem with clause 3(2), which the Committee will consider in due course. During our consideration of clause 1 this morning, I made the point that unfortunately clause 3(2) contains the word “wholly”. It is therefore completely unclear what happens if an accident is not wholly due to the driver or to the vehicle, but is partly due to each, as it would be during the transition. That is a muddle, and the whole point of the Bill, which I applaud, is to avoid muddle. Muddle encourages courts to base decisions on common sense or common law, because the statutes do not tell them how to handle the circumstances. That is not what we are trying to achieve; we are trying to clarify and make certain.

We therefore need clause 2 to set out clearly the three possible situations. If the driver is driving, the driver’s insurer is liable. If the car is driving, the car’s insurer clearly has strict liability, novel though that concept is. But we need a decision—I do not really care what, so long as it is clear, definite and permanent—about what happens during periods of transition, however long they may be and under whatever circumstances they may arise. We cannot tell in advance how long the transition periods will be, and we should not take any advice from the industry that they will be only for 10 seconds and will always work perfectly—they will not.

[Mr Hayes]

May I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Bailey? Our discussion this morning was lively, but productive and wholesome. I am keen to make progress, as I am sure other Committee members are. The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Eltham relate to issues that we have already addressed, but with further consideration of the transition between autonomous and human driving. Clause 3(2) states:

“The insurer or owner of an automated vehicle is not liable…to the person in charge of the vehicle where the accident that it caused was wholly due to the person’s negligence in allowing the vehicle to begin driving itself when it was not appropriate to do so.”

I am conscious that much of the debate on these amendments relates to clause 3, so I must be careful not to stray into premature consideration of a clause that the Committee has not yet reached. Nevertheless, in resisting the amendments, it is pertinent for me to refer the hon. Gentleman and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset to the Road Traffic Act 1988. If the driver has some role in the accident—if the vehicle is not self-driving, either during or before the transition—the current framework, which is set out in the Act, will apply.

It is also worth saying that if a driver negligently decides to hand over control of the vehicle, clause 3 will apply, which is why I said we would end up debating clause 3 if we were not careful. If it is partly the driver’s fault, subsection (1) will apply; if it is wholly their fault, subsection (2) will apply. For example, if the driver of a vehicle designed only for self-driving on a motorway is injured after putting it into self-driving mode on a rural road, the insurer’s liability will be reduced under the contributory negligence principle. If a court finds the driver to be wholly at fault, the insurer will pay only the third parties involved in the accident. Partial responsibility is therefore addressed in the Bill and the transition, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset paid particular attention, is dealt with in as much as we have an existing framework that of course insurers have built their current products around, which is drawn from the Road Traffic Act 1988 and other national and international regulations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I will be happy to do that when further inspiration reaches me. In the interim, while I wait for that inspiration, I will say that we recognise the need to ensure that the transition controls are safe. It is of value to emphasise that research, including some being carried out in the UK, will help to determine a safe transition process to inform international safety standards of the kind I mentioned earlier. In essence, therefore, the field is a developing one in which those international standards are being built on. Research is taking place here and elsewhere.

The research that we spoke briefly about in the witness sessions is such that it includes the development of software to take account of endless eventualities that might occur while a vehicle is being driven or driving itself. The work being done is to simulate a range of road conditions and circumstances in which any car might find itself at any point in time on any kind of road. That is of course as numerous as might be imagined, but the aim is to have software that is clever enough to deal with all kinds of driving circumstances. The work is not complete but ongoing, and is being done on London roads as we speak—trials on London roads in real time.

I am therefore confident that the further work will lead to an outcome where the software that in the end allows us to see the further development of automated vehicles will be able to replicate circumstances that drivers find themselves in. That, by the way, relates to a debate we had earlier about the judgments that might be made by a human being replicated by the software given all kinds of different challenges.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Will the Minister focus his mind on a specific example? We are in a case in which the car has been driving itself on a motorway. It is programmed to turn off the motorway, but it is not judged by the Secretary of State to be a car of a kind that would be safe to drive off a motorway. It has therefore been programmed to hand over to the driver when it leaves the motorway—this is one of the situations on which the amendment of the hon. Member for Eltham is focused—and the driver is profoundly asleep, having been asleep all the way from London to Bristol on the motorway. The machine tries to hand over to the driver.

I am sure the Minister is right, that the software will be highly developed and it will try to hand over quickly, as far as it can, and that if it does not hand over quickly it will take all sorts of other sensible evasive action to prevent an accident occurring in such circumstances. If we could be absolutely certain that the software was perfect, we could all relax. The Minister would not need the Bill because there is no need to insure things that are absolutely perfect; they never have any accidents so there are no risks and no need for the law.

In introducing the Bill, however, the Minister rightly envisages that the software will not be perfect because things invented by human beings never are, unlike things invented by the Almighty that the Minister believes in. There will be circumstances in which the software goes wrong, such as if it tries to take evasive action having tried to hand over to a driver who was asleep and who it has failed to wake up. We have a prolonged transition period during which this magnificent software is trying and failing to get the driver to wake up and somehow does not do everything perfectly, and then there is an accident. Under clause 2(1)(a), is the vehicle driving itself in those circumstances or not? I do not know and a court will not know. It is trying not to drive itself—it is programmed not to be—but it has failed not to be driving itself. Somehow or other, that circumstance needs to be covered here. If the Minister can explain how the Road Traffic Act, which I looked at when it came up in the oral evidence sessions—

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I do apologise. If the Minister can explain how the Road Traffic Act solves that problem, I am all ears.

[Mr Hayes]

I had forgotten for a moment that it was an intervention. Those who seek perfection on earth are invariably either extreme zealots or delusional, or both. Perfection exists only in heaven, as my right hon. Friend knows. The insurance industry does not claim that there would be no accidents in any circumstances as a result of automated vehicles, but it told us in the oral evidence sessions that it thought there would be fewer. It said that that would have an effect on the insurance marketplace because of the effect on safety—that is the exchange we enjoyed earlier—that comes about because the fallibility of men and women as drivers means that 95% of accidents, or a figure close to that, are caused by human error of one kind or another. We are clear about that.

We can also be clear that the Bill is welcomed by the industry because we were told so by Mr Howarth in the oral evidence sessions. He said:

“I think it is very clear that the legislation and broadly the development of automated driving are something that insurers are genuinely enthusiastic about.”––[Official Report, Automated and Electric Vehicles Public Bill Committee, 31 October 2017; c. 7, Q11.]

The insurance industry thinks that the Bill is an important first step, of the kind I described earlier, in establishing a framework, but it is a framework and further changes will be necessary as technology develops. Those changes will have to be dealt with in a regulation or subsequent measures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I will give way in a moment; I just want to complete this thought. Manufacturers have spoken about creating geofenced vehicles that would operate in defined parts of the city; others have spoken about systems that would operate on motorways and other high-speed roads. It is likely that the relevant global regulations that will be used to type-approve automated vehicles will reflect such limited-use cases. It is also possible that the regulations will contain requirements that the vehicle be able to detect where it is so that the system cannot be used in other situations.

Therefore, it is not clear that we need to make matching regulatory changes in our domestic framework. If necessary, we can use existing powers—this relates to what I said earlier—in the Road Traffic Act 1988 to revise existing or create new road vehicle construction and use regulations to reinforce the global regulations. That is exactly the point that I would make to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset. If that legal power exists, and as long as the Bill does not counter it—it is a useful addition, but it does not negate any of that—it seems to me entirely possible to deal with those technological changes.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Hayes]

My right hon. Friend looks thoroughly unconvinced, so I will happily give way.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I do not think that anybody could possibly be convinced by that, because it does not address the issue. The issue is when the insurer of the vehicle will be liable. It does not matter what regulations are made; they will have no impact on that question if the primary legislation says what it says now and no more. It will remain unclear what will happen in circumstances where it is not clear whether the automated vehicle is driving itself according to the terms of clause 2(1)(a), because it is in transition but failing to transition. That is a problem that the Minister cannot address through regulation; he must address it in the primary legislation if he wants the court to be clear about who is liable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will address the points the shadow Minister has raised in a moment. Before I do, I want to come back to a fundamental point about the drafting of clause 3(2)—if you will allow me to do so now, Mr Bailey, rather than in a stand part debate—because it is relevant to the rest of the question. My concern relates to the word “wholly” in subsection (2). We discussed this point earlier today. My right hon. Friend the Minister said to me and the Committee that clause 3(2) was meant to solve the problem that I am worried about, which is that there are circumstances under which strict liability for the insurer of the machine is inappropriate, because the driver may do something either immediately before or some while before handing over to the machine that means he or she should not have handed over to the machine. Those are the very circumstances that the shadow Minister is also concerned about.

The Minister directed my attention to clause 3(2) as the solution. I pointed out then—I will now expand on the point—that if subsection (2) is intended as a solution, it is in desperate need of redrafting. The word “wholly”, which I assume has been inserted mindfully by parliamentary counsel, has a very definite meaning: it means “wholly”. Courts know perfectly well what to do with that when they come across a statute that very unusually—this is not something that we normally find—says that a contributory agency is not contributory, but absolute, and the person in question is wholly responsible. The court will interpret that very strictly, and rightly so, otherwise what on earth are we doing drafting Bills and Acts of Parliament?

There could be a circumstance under which the driver was wholly the cause of the accident. Incidentally, I cannot quite think what that might be. It is a pretty remote circumstance, and I would be interested to know whether the Minister can think of an example, but I accept the possibility of such a thing. Most of the time, however, it will be jolly tricky to work out who is actually responsible.

Let me go back to my example of leaving the motorway, but this time the driver was awake and flicked a switch that specifically made the machine take over. Let us imagine that the technology allowed that—it might or might not, we heard conflicting evidence on that, but suppose that it did—and the driver thought that the circumstances were such that the machine could take over and the machine thought, and that is probably an appropriate word to use, given that it is artificial intelligence, that it was appropriate for the machine to take over. However, they were both wrong. The machine was not good at handling the circumstance and it crashed. The machine got it wrong because it should not have taken over, and the driver got it wrong because they should not have asked the machine to take over. Who has caused the accident? I do not know. I am absolutely sure that there are people who will make millions and millions of pounds, and they are the QCs who will argue such cases in court, along with the rafts of solicitors and the enormous apparatus that goes with that. They will all be arguing about who is responsible.

If we lose the word “wholly”, we eliminate that argument, which I assume is the point of putting it in, because, as clause 3(2) is drafted, it says, “If there is the slightest doubt about whether the machine was in any scintilla of a way responsible for the crash, the driver is not wholly responsible and therefore the machine is wholly responsible, so there is strict liability for the insurer of the machine.” It may be that that is what the Minister wants to do, but it is a very odd thing to do, because the costs of insuring these machines would go up compared with what they would otherwise be. Under circumstances in which the driver was a heavy contributor to the cause of the accident by handing over inappropriately, the insurer of the machine would nevertheless be strictly liable because the machine made one millionth of the contribution to the cause of the accident. That is the effect of clause 3(2) as drafted, and I do not believe that that can be the Minister’s intention. That needs looking at.

Turning to the point made by the shadow Minister on regulations and clarification, I agree that it should be perfectly possible to handle the question of when it is appropriate or not to hand over through secondary legislation. I suspect that it will not be the kind of secondary legislation that we have been used to in the main hitherto. It will be very complicated legislation, because it may have to specify processes rather than results. I do not believe that the technology is likely to develop in a way that will make it obvious to the driver in advance, by reading some kind of guide, when the driver is meant to hand over and when not. I suspect that will be interactive and dynamic, and I suspect that the Minister’s successors—the Secretaries of State who will do such things in regulation—will have to find some way of compelling the manufacturers to create an apparatus that tells the driver in a dynamic and interactive way, as they are driving along, whether, as a matter of fact, it is safe to hand over to the machine or not.

One way in which that could happen is the way we were presented with in the evidence sessions. The machine invites the driver to take over and then there is a simple double rule: only machines that invite drivers, as opposed to giving them instructions, are allowed on the road—and, while we are at it, only those certified by the Secretary of State as being safe when they offer the chance to take over are allowed—and, moreover, the driver is never allowed to hand over to the machine except when it does offer that. That is a possible configuration. That would be quite a complicated piece of secondary legislation, because it would have to be accompanied by a series of quite complicated technical codes that ensure that it is put into practice and that the cars manufactured fulfil all those requirements.

There are of course many other models, but it is terribly important to recognise that if the Minister wants to achieve clarity here—as I think he does, and rightly so—as well as getting the drafting of clause 3(2) right, so that it is clear under what circumstances there really is liability for the insurer of the machine when there is a mixture of causation, he needs to recognise that there will need to be either a quite large superstructure of regulation that gives us clarity about the circumstances under which handover is appropriate or, at least, processes that make it unnecessary to have such clarity in a set of rules. I hope that he will recognise in his closing remarks that even if the Bill does not give new powers to do that—because he believes he has somehow got them already—he will consider all those questions anon, as well as looking at the drafting of subsection (2).

[Mr Hayes]

My aim is to do that a lot more quickly than you might imagine, Mr Bailey. I accept entirely that there will be a need for a regulatory framework to ensure both the safe deployment and safe use of automated vehicles. The autonomous insurance measures in the Bill are part of that, but the subsequent regulations that ensue will be part, too. They will be—necessarily—dynamic and, I suspect, quite complex, because this is a complex and evolving field. The reason that it is better done in regulations is obvious: we cannot keep bringing primary legislation to the House in such a highly dynamic set of circumstances. It is therefore absolutely right that it is done in a regulatory framework down the line.

Let me try to deal with the “wholly” issue, because it is important that we do so. If the driver is partly negligent, clause 3(1) applies, and contributory negligence would therefore also apply. Clause 3(2) is there to pick up the limited circumstances in which the driver is wholly at fault—that is, contributory negligence does not apply because it is clear that fault lies with the driver. If we did not include “wholly”, there would be a gap in the scope of the clause, as subsection (1) covers only contributory negligence. That is why the word “wholly” is in the Bill.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am in a slightly odd position because it is the Minister’s Bill, so I would expect him to understand it better than I can, but I have to say that if that is his intent, the plain words of the text do not do the job. In clause 3(1)(b), it is perfectly clear on the face of it that the accident has to be, to some extent,

“caused by the injured party”.

That is not the circumstance we are talking about. We are talking about a circumstance in which the accident is wholly caused by some combination, but unknown, of driver—ex or to be—and machine, not by the injured party, so I do not see how clause 3(1) solves the problem of clause 3(2) having a hole in it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

It might, but it might not.

[Mr Hayes]

Yes, but clause 3(1)(a) says that

“an insurer or vehicle owner is liable under section 2 to a person (‘the injured party’) in respect of an accident”,

so it covers both the driver or another party. That is repeated in paragraph (b). I do not understand what my right hon. Friend’s problem is.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

The Minister is being very patient. Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but I beg the other members of the Committee to read the text:

“Where…an insurer or vehicle owner is liable…to…an injured party…in respect of an accident”.

The injured party is someone who has been injured—that is the reason for the reference to an “injured party”—but if I am the driver and in this case I am not injured, the insurer is not liable to me. I have just handed over control of the vehicle and it has injured somebody else, so I am not an injured party, and the injured party has not contributed to the accident, so clause 3(1)(b)—

“the accident, or the damage resulting from it, was to any extent caused by the injured party”—

does not apply. Clause 3(1) therefore does not apply in such circumstances, so it cannot solve a problem in clause 3(2) because it does not apply to the circumstances that we are talking about under clause 3(2)—or at least not to the circumstances that are worrying the Committee and that we have been talking about more or less all day, which is the question of what happens when I am handing over.

[The Chair]

Order. That was meant to be an intervention.

[Mr Hayes]

I am comfortable with the idea that the driver might be the injured party, and my right hon. Friend comfortable with that too. We are clear on the issue of whether the car was being driven by the driver or was in autonomous mode. Is my right hon. Friend concerned therefore about another party, unrelated to the vehicle, who might be affected by the accident? Is that what he is getting at? I do not understand.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I hope that with your indulgence, Mr Bailey—

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will try to make it as short as I can, but I am trying to advance the cause of understanding between us by answering the Minister’s question. We are envisaging circumstances in which a driver hands over to the vehicle and the vehicle takes over, but it turns out that it was arguably not safe or sensible for the driver to have done that. The driver was not injured and is not the injured party—the insurer is liable not to the driver, but to someone else who got damaged. That is the injured party. Clause 3(1) does not apply. That is the problem and that is the reason why clause 3(1) cannot solve the problem of clause 3(2).

[Mr Hayes]

I will reflect on that. It is clear to me when clause 3(1) and clause 3(2) do apply, but it is a reasonable question to ask where the clause does not apply—as my right hon. Friend has described—and what would apply in those circumstances. I am perfectly prepared to reflect and to come back with a clear answer. I am now certain to what he was referring, and that will help in the process of trying to satisfy him.

I was not able to be as short as I had hoped—I began this brief contribution by saying just how brief it would be. In respect of the shadow Minister, I think I have been clear that it is likely that the first autonomous vehicles will be used, as I said, in particular circumstances —earlier I talked about geofencing. It is likely that the global regulations that will be used to type approve autonomous vehicles will reflect those limited cases. It is therefore not yet clear that we will need to make matching regulatory changes in our domestic framework, as I have also said.

We do have the powers under the Road Traffic Act, as I said in response to an earlier intervention, to revise or create new road vehicle construction and use regulations. In that sense, the amendment would duplicate existing powers so really it is superfluous. Its intention is good, because it intends to do what I have just described, but I am not sure that for this purpose it is the right vehicle— I hesitate to use that term because, as so often in the debate so far, we are speaking about roads, journeys and vehicles. None the less, I am confident that we have enough powers and are taking enough powers, through the application of the regulations that I have said will ensue, to satisfy what the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East intends. On that basis, I hope that he will withdraw the amendment.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Thank you, Sir Edward.

As the Minister knows, two specific issues in the Bill concern me and led me to seek to be part of the Committee. One relates to the question of the strict liability of insurers when the vehicle is operating automatically, which of course relates to the software and its safety—the subject of this group of amendments. I have suggested to the Minister two possible approaches to resolving that problem, which was exposed in our evidence sessions. One of those relates to clause 1(1) and would probably require a somewhat different amendment from those that have been tabled, albeit broadly of the same kind. Let me first explain the problem and then try to suggest the solution.

We established clearly from the insurance industry representatives we questioned that, as the Bill is currently drafted, strict liability will attach to the car rather than to an individual, which is an entirely new phenomenon in insurance law. Let us suppose that there is not a fundamental legal problem with strict liability attaching to the insurer of a car. I make that assumption, although I do not necessarily think that it is a safe one; that may be explored further in the other place by lawyers with much deeper acquaintance with insurance law than I claim to have.

Supposing that that is a feasible arrangement, we then face the question: at what point should that strict liability clock in? That would not be a material question if the machine was never driven by a human being but was driven only by the machine itself. As the hon. Member for Eltham pointed out, that was raised during the evidence session by the rather enterprising group that will create service operations on London’s streets out of what are, in effect, level 5 vehicles way ahead of the schedule that other witnesses suggested would apply. Such vehicles clearly will never have a human being driving them; they will be automated objects that human beings will get into. As it is currently drafted, the Bill will therefore create a strict liability for the insurers. On the happy assumption that that will work legally, insurers will insure those vehicles, they will discover whether that is a very expensive proposition and that will get built into the service price. I am not worried about that from a legislative point of view.

However, I think that the Minister would agree, as all our witnesses seemed to, that it is extremely likely that, in parallel with that rapid roll-out of highly automated level 5 items, for perhaps many millions of motorists there will be a gradual progression—not necessarily strictly demarcated as level 3, level 4 and so on—from vehicles that are largely driven by a driver but somewhat assisted by the machine, to vehicles that are driven by the machine under more and more circumstances but are sometimes driven by the driver.

I certainly do not think that we should legislate on the assumption that we know what the future will look like, but it is highly likely that there will be a stage at which there are vehicles that, for example, are well designed to operate on motorways on an automated basis. The nation may benefit hugely from them operating in that way, because it is safer and allows much shorter distances between vehicles and therefore much more intensive use of motorways, which diminishes capital investment in the motorway system, improves safety and prevents the environmental damage that building more motorways would occasion, so that may well in fact become compulsory at some point. However, those very same vehicles may be ill-designed to deal with country roads, city roads or other kinds of road, so they may well have a function that enables them to be switched back and forth between automated driving and being driven by the driver.

We heard rather different things from witnesses about that switchover. To tell the truth, I think that that is because nobody really knows how it is going to operate. The history of technology is littered with prophecies from experts about how future technologies will operate that have proved to be false, so the Committee would be wise to assume that we do not know, and will not know when legislating, how exactly the switchover between driver and automated vehicle will occur.

Mr Wong suggested in an evidence session that the vehicle itself will offer up to the driver the opportunity to switch over to automation in circumstances in which the vehicle is sufficiently intelligent to know that it is safe for it to take over the driving, and that it will never otherwise offer up that opportunity. It is perfectly sensible that if the vehicle offers itself to the driver to take over operation, and if the driver allows it to take over operation, the vehicle becomes the driver, and the strict liability of the insurer attaches to the vehicle and not any longer to the person. That would be fine.

However, if, as some other witnesses seemed to think was the case, it is the driver who will, at least in some circumstances, make the decision of whether to switch over to automated use, this becomes a highly material question: has the driver made that decision in a reasonable and sensible fashion? The reason is that if the driver has not made the decision in a sensible and reasonable fashion, and if the insurer of the vehicle is nevertheless bound to have strict liability for the vehicle taking over the action, insurers could be faced with enormous bills in circumstances in which what they were actually doing was facing a bad decision by a person whom they had never insured; they had insured the vehicle and not the person. That is the problem we need to address, which brings me to the question of clause 1(1).

[The Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime (Mr John Hayes)]

I am delighted that my right hon. Friend has looked into these matters with typical assiduity. I am also delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I briefly say that, as I have risen for the first time. I know that your sagacity in the Chair will match the warmth of your friendship and the generosity of your home, which you have offered me just this week at a dinner party. Anyway, let us leave that to one side.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I like dancing on the head of pins—I think it is an appealing thing to do—but we must be careful to avoid it in this Committee, because time does not permit it, many hon. Members want to contribute and there is a slight risk from doing so in this case. I will make this argument as quickly as I can. The key issue about an event that took place while the vehicle was in autonomous mode is not the point at which it went into autonomous mode, but the events at the point at which the incident occurred. If we can be very clear that the vehicle was being driven autonomously at the time of an incident or accident, that becomes the salient issue, rather than what might have happened five minutes or half an hour before, when the driver switched it to autonomous mode, because of course the circumstances of its being autonomous will then become absolutely clear, and at that point the liability is not in question.

I take the point that whether the vehicle should have been in autonomous mode may be material and I shall explore that more when I respond to the debate, but I think that it is what happens at the point of the accident that is of greatest concern. I just put that to my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset for further consideration.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I have considered that and I think that is the assumption. My right hon. Friend has well exposed the logic that underlies the current drafting, and it is in error, in my view, because although of course the material moment is the moment of the hypothetical accident, the cause of the accident is the material question from the point of view of the operation of our insurance system, and if the cause of the accident was a bad decision by the person, there is an illogic that will eventually undo all the good we are trying to do if nevertheless the insurer of the vehicle has strict liability. The fact that it may have been five, 20 or 55 minutes before the accident that the person handed over control to the vehicle is irrelevant if the basis on which the person handed over control was wrong and the person made the wrong decision. It seems to me that the question we need to address is this: is it possible that the person should have made such a wrong decision, or have we eliminated that possibility? That is what I want to get on to, because that is where clause 1(1)(b) needs to have a (c).

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

rose—

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will give way, of course, in a moment.

Such a course of action is fine and would solve the problem that I have advanced, because the Minister or Secretary of State, or an expert acting on his or her behalf, would have verified in advance that the machine was capable of taking over and would take over only under safe circumstances. Before I give way to the Minister, I want to point out that that is using the law to limit the technology, and the history of the approach to that in our country’s legislation has been very bad. I will not go into all the history, but I am happy to write the Minister a memorandum about it if he wants. I once wrote an article about this. There is a very long history of Parliament trying to prejudge the technology, legislating on the assumption that it will be only that technology, mandating therefore only that technology, and discovering that there is not any of it and that people elsewhere are manufacturing things that we do not get because they do not fit our legal system. It is not the route I recommend, and I will come back to that when we get to clause 2. It is a possible route, however, and one that the Minister should at least consider.

[Mr Hayes]

I will speak more about my right hon. Friend’s last point when I respond to the debate as a whole, because of course it relates closely to the shadow Minister’s point about how far we define what we do now. The Bill is an attempt to thread a course between creating sufficient certainty to establish a framework to allow further development and, on the other hand, doing exactly what my right hon. Friend has mentioned in trying to predict a future that may not come to pass. He is right to raise that and I will deal with it in greater detail.

On the specifics of his point about liability, I draw his attention to clause 3(2), which we will debate later. You will not let me debate it now for that reason, Sir Edward, but clause 3(2) specifically talks about the subject that my right hon. Friend describes, because it draws attention to the possibility of an accident being

“wholly due to the person’s negligence in allowing the vehicle to begin driving itself when it was not appropriate to do so.”

That is very much what my right hon. Friend speaks about, and it is why we put it in the Bill. He makes a separate point—a good one—about technology that kicks in of its own accord because the technology, the software, determines that it is better at that point for the vehicle to be driven autonomously. We will explore that in greater detail as we consider the legislation. I simply draw his attention at this stage to clause 3(2).

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I recognise that I am treading on your indulgence, Sir Edward, but, as the Minister has mentioned clause 3(2), I will briefly point out, although no doubt we will discuss this later, why I do not think that it solves the problem. It is possible that it is susceptible to redrafting so that it will, but it is ill drafted if the intention is to solve the problem I have raised. In the first place, it says, “wholly”, in that it is

“wholly due to the person’s negligence”.

That is an almost impossible thing to establish. As currently drafted, it does almost no heavy lifting at all. I think I know why a parliamentary draftsman has nevertheless inserted the word “wholly”, because, like the Minister, I have had quite a long experience of dealing with parliamentary draftsmen on numerous Bills. I know that they think through carefully the question of what happens if we do not put in a word such as “wholly” under these circumstances.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My right hon. Friend mentions the core requirement of safety. What does he understand “safety” or “safely” to mean in this context, and what advice has he received about whether it can bear the burden of distinguishing between an ethically proper set of choices by artificial intelligence and an ethically improper set of choices?

[Mr Hayes]

That is a very big question indeed. It is the one that, in a sense, was first raised by the hon. Member for Eltham in the evidence session and on Second Reading, when he painted the picture of a scenario where a human being faces an ethical dilemma while driving. I will paraphrase the example for the sake of brevity: a child runs into the road and the driver has the choice of hitting the child or swerving and possibly causing a more catastrophic accident. That is a momentary judgment that any driver makes. In the end, it is a practical and ethical judgment, is it not? We could have a very long debate. My hon. Friend on my right, the Whip, may be my former Parliamentary Private Secretary, but he will not be entirely indulgent of me if I engaged in that very long debate, because of course one could extend it—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

Let me try to answer the hon. Gentleman and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset in two ways. First, I draw attention to something that Mr Wong said in evidence on Tuesday:

“May I point something out? I mentioned autonomous emergency braking. It has been demonstrated that the technology is improving all the time. Previously, autonomous emergency braking worked perfectly at 30 mph, which is urban speed, but it is becoming increasingly sophisticated. AEB can work well even at 50 mph. It would not surprise me if the technology improved in years to come”.––[Official Report, Automated and Electric Vehicles Public Bill Committee, 31 October 2017; c. 44, Q103.]

The technology is improving so rapidly and dramatically that in the scenario painted by the hon. Member for Eltham, an automated vehicle is likely to change lanes and—as in Mr Wong’s example—brake to ensure safety.

The representatives of the insurance industry stated in their evidence that the industry believes there will be fewer accidents, because the judgment of an autonomous vehicle will outpace that of a human being. I use the word “judgment” for technology with caution, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset used the word “ethics” with caution, but the judgment of the software driving the automated vehicle will be more acute and, in the end, safer. These machines are likely to be less prone to error than human beings, so there will be fewer accidents; the vehicles will be safer and therefore easier and cheaper to insure. We heard that point repeatedly in the evidence session. We can be confident that that is the direction of travel—I apologise for using that rather hackneyed phrase in this context—but we cannot be sure how quickly we will get there or exactly what it will look like. I would be a very bold man if I made such a prediction.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I, too, listened to Mr Wong and have re-read the part of his evidence that the Minister quotes from, but it is wholly irrelevant to our point. I thought it was extremely instructive that Mr Wong, who is clearly a very great technical expert, completely failed to understand the issue. The Germans have begun to understand it, but the Bill does not genuinely or seriously address it.

The Bill is drafted as if artificial intelligence were the same kind of thing as speed control. It is not, and that is a very important error underlying the Bill’s drafting. Speed control is a technical matter, and we could go much further with technical development and still be in the technical arena in which safety is the only question, because the ethical judgments are made exclusively by the human drivers. With artificial intelligence, as the hon. Member for Eltham rightly says, we are moving into a terrain in which the machine will make the kind of decisions that Parliaments and human beings make. These are questions not of safety, but of judgment about the right outcome under difficult circumstances.

I ask the Minister to go back to his Department and talk to its lawyers about whether jurisprudence will deliver to him or his successors the ability to refuse approval to a piece of artificial intelligence that, either directly or through its learning processes, will or could have the effect of producing totally dysfunctional anti-utilitarian results by making judgments that are technically perfectly safe but that just happen to take the view that, for example, wiping out a group of three-year-old schoolchildren is better than wiping out a 98-year-old crossing the road. That is a very difficult judgment for a human being to make, but it is the kind of judgment that Parliaments have to make, and I think that at the moment it is very clear in the Bill that it would not permit a Secretary of State to prevent type approval for a machine that was designed in such a way that there could be those very bizarre and undesirable results, and I am sure that that is not what the Department or the Minister wants to achieve.

[Mr Hayes]

Let us not overestimate how far this Bill—I am being very particular about my words—intends to go. This Bill is about ensuring that victims of collisions caused by autonomous vehicles get quick, easy access to insurance compensation in line with conventional processes. What we heard in the evidence and what we debated when the Bill was in its earlier incarnation was that it was important for the insurance industry, and therefore for the further development of this technology, that we were clear about that—there would be no difference, from the perspective of the person who owned the vehicle, in how they went about making a claim.

There is a much bigger debate, which will clearly have to be dealt with in legislation, in regulations, in type approval—in a whole range of other things—about some of the other matters that the hon. Member for Eltham and my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset have raised. If they are both right that we will get to a point at which the machine makes what is in effect an ethical judgment—I am trying to use words very carefully; it is very obviously the machine making ethical judgments, but I do appreciate the strangeness of it—clearly that will have to be taken into account at a future point in the legislative process. I do not think this Bill is the place to do it; I just do not think it can do it, because we do not yet know enough.

We are back to my first point, about the line we are trying to tread between what we can do now with certainty and what we might do in the future in a world in which we can as yet only imagine what might occur. If my right hon. Friend will permit me to say so, perhaps the Hegelian synthesis, where we might meet between what appears to be my thesis and his antithesis, is that this Bill is a starting point—a first step along, as I have said, a long road.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I entirely accept that this Bill is just the starting point, but I think he is missing the point that I am trying to make about what starting with this language—with just the word “safely” and no reference to wider considerations—will do to his successors.

There is no point in having the Secretary of State empowered to make a list unless Secretaries of State are actually going to make lists. There is no point in empowering them to make lists of automated vehicles unless those lists are going to relate to automated vehicles. Those automated vehicles will have artificial intelligence built into them; they cannot be automated otherwise. Therefore, the Secretary of State, who is making the list in the first place, which this Bill provides for—not some other Bill, but this Bill—will be constrained by the terms that the Bill sets for what basis they can use to make the list. That is why the shadow Minister has raised questions about the criteria, and why we are having this debate in the first place. Surely, therefore, we need to empower—I am not suggesting that we in any way oblige—later Secretaries of State to consider, inter alia, whether the machines that they are putting on the list are actually murderously safe or good and safe machines. At the moment, they can decide only whether it is a safe machine. If it happens to be safe in the sense in which Stalin could “safely” eliminate large sections of his population, the poor old Secretary of State would, as I construe it—the Minister has not given us any indication that he has had advice to the contrary—be prevented from—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Hayes]

I am, as ever, guided by you, Sir Edward—having already cited your sagacity, I could hardly be anything other. I am delighted that we managed to get Stalin and Hegel into the same exchange. You will not get that in many Committees, Sir Edward. I am thinking about where we might end up, but I am prepared to live with that. It is important for safety, which in the end is a baseline factor, as I think my right hon. Friend will agree. However, there is a point about ethics. The advice I have received is that no vehicles that are not considered safe and ethical will be allowed on the market and therefore are not for consideration on the list.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Safe and—

[Mr Hayes]

Safe and ethical. I have received advice; I like taking advice and not taking it. Before I make that my definitive position, I want to reflect a bit. If we were to say no to the advice that was not safe and ethical, I want to be absolutely clear what ethical means. We know what safe means. We can draw on existing practice in respect of type approval. We know what measures of safety are about, but when we get to measures of ethics, we are in an altogether more challenging area. That is why I will reflect a bit on the characteristics. This is an incredibly interesting debate, by the way, and very useful.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between John Hayes and Oliver Letwin

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Hayes]

How very interesting.

David Wong: That is an empirical study.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

Q We heard earlier from the insurance industry that they had been led to believe that autonomous vehicles, as they evolved and eventually came to market, would inevitably contain software that would enable the vehicle to reject a transfer from the driver to the autonomous system if it was in a location that made it unsafe for the autonomous system to operate. I am talking about the period during which we do not have cars without any steering wheels but we have ones that are sometimes autonomous and sometimes used by drivers. Do you share their confidence that vehicles will always be manufactured with software that prevents handover to the autonomous system except where it is totally safe?

David Wong: I think it is more likely to be the other way around. That is, it will be a question not of whether the system rejects a request from the driver to hand control over to the vehicle, but of whether the system serves up the offer of automation to the driver, given the right and safe conditions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Q When do you anticipate results from those trials?

Suleman Alli: I believe within the next 12 to 24 months. We are looking abroad as well at other countries to see how we can generate learnings from those trials. Certainly, in the next 24 months we will start to see concrete evidence that we could present.

[Mr Hayes]

Q I wanted to bring up two or three things. The first is that you presumably agree with the changes we made from the first Bill, which was the forerunner of this Bill—the Bill that did not make the cut before the election. You will remember that what we have done this time is clarify the definition of automated vehicles, as a result of previous scrutiny. We have tightened that definition. How important do you think that is in providing confidence to the industry in respect of further developments?

Robert Evans: Automated vehicles are not strictly my area of operation, so I find that that is something that I cannot strictly answer.

Marcus Stewart: In some of the work that we have done when we have projected forward and looked at various energy scenarios, we see automated vehicles as having an impact on total energy usage. More automated vehicles, and clarity around the question, will allow different business models to come forward. Car sharing is more likely as part of that, and that will reduce the overall demand on the energy system, but we believe that it is still quite a long way out—maybe 2030-plus—before we start seeing any significant impact from that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Q It is basically like not being able to get a cab.

Stan Boland: If you like, yes. We think there will in any case be remote supervision so that it would be possible for a control centre to be able to monitor any cars that are stopped and then perhaps carefully move them to some other place. We are expecting a remote control room with perhaps one per 30 cars or something that would be able to take over and carefully manage the car. We are also expecting the cars to have a limp-home system, so if there is a catastrophic failure there would be a limited amount of capability where the vehicles could—at quite a low speed and with warnings—find their way back to a service centre.

[Mr Hayes]

Q I have three questions. First, you made an interesting case in response to questions from my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset and the hon. Member for Eltham about what you see as the likely development in autonomous vehicles. I will put two scenarios to you, and I would ask you to describe the most likely one. There is an instinctive, intuitive view that autonomy will grow gradually, partly because that is more likely to lead to public acceptance. So rather in the way that assisted parking or sat nav or cruise control have become increasingly routine, other aspects of autonomy will be added to that. Autonomous vehicles will sort of creep on us.

There is another view that we may go straight to a kind of autonomous vehicle. Indeed I have looked at some of the R and D on that. As you may know, there is an entirely autonomous vehicle at Greenwich supported by Greenwich council, with some Government funding too. That is a vehicle that travels on a straight run of road that is entirely autonomous. You get into it, and it does what it says on the tin. Which of the two scenarios is the most likely, in your view? Or are they most likely to develop in parallel?

Stan Boland: They are developing in parallel today, so I think that is the state of affairs. The first of those can be characterised as the view of the German car industry, which is that these things will happen, but in 2035 or 2040. In the meantime we can just keep adding these features, keep selling people more features, and keep selling cars that people buy. However, I think the world was really shaken up by the challenges we saw in the 2000s and the emergency of Google cars and so on, as well as the idea that it was within touching distance for science to deliver fully autonomous capability in a relatively meaningful timeframe.

That really is the difference between level 2 and level 3 autonomy and what is really a huge jump to level 4 and level 5. Our entire business is predicated on level 4 and level 5 being the dominant model. We think that that is the dominant model for getting to a situation of safety in an urban environment. Significant amounts of algorithms, computer models, training data and sensors are involved in achieving this, which will considerably increase the cost of the car. We estimate that getting the car to human levels of safety will add a further £30,000 to £40,000 to its cost. That is not a car that people buy. That is definitely a service, and if it is a service then it is fully autonomous.