Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Justin Madders Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this Bill, as the automotive sector is an important part of my constituency. It is home to the Vauxhall Motors plant, and last week, we heard the sad news of 400 redundancies. The site has built Vauxhall vehicles for more than 50 years and there is once again real concern about the future of the plant—I will return to that later in my remarks. In addition to Vauxhall, we have hundreds of dependent jobs in the supply chain, and many of my constituents are employed by nearby manufacturers, such as Toyota and Jaguar Land Rover. I shall focus on the impact on jobs—not only the immediate challenges for the automotive sector, but the Bill’s long-term employment implications, which I fear we are not going to address until it is too late.

It is right that we begin to address the legal impediments to automated vehicles and help them to become part of the transport network. As with all technological developments, we need to ensure that the legislative framework is in place, not only to keep our citizens safe and protected, but to send out the signal that this country encourages innovation. We need a simple and timely method to determine liability in the event of an accident, and the Bill will achieve that aim. The likelihood is that over time the number of accidents will reduce substantially as the opportunity for driver error is significantly reduced, but I am not quite as persuaded as some Members that that will lead to any dramatic reduction in insurance premiums.

I imagine The Highway Code will have to be reviewed in due course, and although we are addressing civil liability in this debate, we may in due course have to consider changes to criminal law. At what point does the occupant—I use that term rather than “driver-operator”—cease to be personally liable for any breaches of criminal law? Will we need new offences to take account of the consequences of deliberate hacking?

I have read the lengthy discussions about software updates from the debates on the Bill’s previous incarnation, and I must say that I am not at all clear about where responsibility would lie if a vehicle did not have the required software updates. Should that be looked into in the context of MOT certificates? We are used to regular updates for consumer products such as phones—in fact, that is part of the manufacturers’ business model, to encourage us to buy new phones every few years—but a car is a rather different proposition. A balance needs to be struck between public safety and consumer rights. I do not want to see a £30,000 vehicle becoming unuseable because the owner refuses to pay what they consider to be an extortionate cost for a software update.

We need to consider the broader issue of value judgments. In all the films about artificial intelligence—in which, of course, most of the time things go wrong—machines usually have some sort of in-built fail-safe that prevents them from doing harm to humans. One can see how that idea could be transferred to an autonomous vehicle’s operating system, but it is inevitable that there will be occasions on which evasive action might prevent harm from being done to the passenger but could cause injury or worse to a pedestrian. Earlier in the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) gave an example of how such circumstances might arise.

We in the House of Commons need to have a view on what happens if a car swerves off the road to avoid hitting another vehicle but, in doing so, hits a pedestrian on the pavement. I am not comfortable subcontracting that kind of value judgment to a software developer, and I am even less comfortable subcontracting it to some kind of machine that learns through trial and error which decisions to take. Of course, we humans will not have clear sight of how such machines make those decisions, and we might not be able to understand anyway. I was less than reassured by the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham. I suspect it would not be straightforward to put something of that nature into the Bill, and it is probably a few years before that kind of dilemma becomes relevant, but we do need to consider now how Parliament can ensure transparency and accountability for what could potentially be life and death decisions.

I have given some general observations on the kind of moral and legal questions we need to consider in the context of the Bill, but the main issue I wish to address is the Bill’s effects on employment, both good and bad. I know that the Government are looking to make the country a world leader in both automated and battery vehicle technology with initiatives such as the Faraday challenge, but I am concerned that although we will be a market leader in developing the technologies, our economy will not feel the full benefit of them because the mass manufacture of new vehicles will take place elsewhere. Dyson is a good example: it currently employs hundreds of people in this country to develop its own electric vehicle, which is of course a positive development, but so far it has not made any commitment to manufacture that product, when it is finalised, on these shores. Of course, Dyson has form in this area.

[Sir Hugo Swire (East Devon) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that this country manufactures more automobiles than the whole of Italy. Does he not think that that manufacturing can go on when we change from the combustion engine to the electric vehicle?

[Justin Madders]

I shall develop that point, because we need to address some challenges relating to investment in manufacturing. The move to the manufacture of electric vehicles is going to require huge investment in plant machinery if we are to maintain our manufacturing base. The majority of engine plants in this country are still building combustion engines, so we need to think about what assistance we are going to give to those companies so that they can make the change to manufacturing electric engines. The Bill is pretty comprehensive on the infrastructure for consumers, but I am not sure there is the same level of commitment to the idea of the country as a producer of these vehicles.

We have heard that the Government intend to cease the sale of all petrol and diesel cars by 2040. The temptation might be to think that that is a couple of decades off so we do not need to worry about it now. However, if we are serious about it, the major manufacturers will begin to shift production to the new model types within the next one or two production cycles, particularly if consumer trends accelerate that. People will begin to look at the resale value of their vehicles, and if they see that petrol and diesel vehicles lose their value at a much quicker rate than electric vehicles, they are bound to purchase electric vehicles in much larger numbers. The right hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs Gillan) mentioned some studies that suggest that the Government’s predictions on electric vehicle take-up are possibly a little on the conservative side. We need to be ready to intervene swiftly when decisions are made on new-vehicle manufacturing so that we have the best possible conditions for companies to invest in their production lines. For example, Vauxhall tells me that every time it looks to invest in new machinery, that has a negative consequence for its business rates.

Of course, at the moment the real challenge to the automotive industry—to all manufacturing—is the uncertainty created by Brexit. Investment in the automotive sector has halved over the past 12 months. We need to reverse that trend as a matter of urgency; otherwise, the new vehicles that it is hoped the Bill will facilitate will be manufactured elsewhere. A big part of that is reassuring as much of the car-manufacturing supply chain as possible. Too many parts needlessly travel back and forth across the continent. In the long term that makes little economic or environmental sense, and in the short term minimising it will lower the risk of a hard Brexit.

There is an immediate short-term need to proactively support UK car manufacturers, and I hope we will hear some good news in next month’s Budget. There is also the bigger long-term issue of how the Bill might affect employment levels. There are plenty of predictions out there about how many jobs will be lost to automation, and I know that there is always the argument that in the past technological advances have always created more jobs than they have caused to be lost, but this revolution is going to be on a scale and at a pace for which we are still quite unprepared.

It is estimated that 1 million driving jobs could be lost within the next 10 to 15 years. With some studies indicating that up to half of all jobs could be lost to automation and artificial intelligence in the next 20 years, there needs to be a twin strategy for dealing with the economic impact of the proposals in the Bill. To that end, I would have liked to have seen an economic impact assessment on the likely job changes that will occur because of the Bill. Even in the optimistic scenario that lots of new jobs are created following this revolution, what do we know about the sort of jobs that will be created and where they will be based?

A report published last week looked into the impact of automation constituency by constituency. It said that the worst-performing constituencies were set to lose around 40% of their jobs within 15 years. Although there were plenty of constituencies throughout the country at the top end, the pattern was clear: the biggest losers tended to be in the midlands and the north. I would like to see a similar study that shows the pattern of job creation in the new industries, but unfortunately none yet exists. If we did one, I rather fear that it would tell us that the new jobs created are not going to be in the areas that are set to lose the most. I do not want to see a repeat of the 1980s, when industry outside the south-east was subject to catastrophic losses of jobs that simply were not replaced.

Although I have painted some rather gloomy pictures, I am not a Luddite; I am a realist. I realise that the genie is out of the box and that there are tremendous advantages, and several Members have referred to the positives that driverless technology can bring to society, but we should not be blind to the consequences that these changes may bring. We need a fundamental debate about what we are trying to achieve here. The manufacturing infrastructure is just as important as the consumer infrastructure. The impact on existing jobs needs to be considered as much as the tremendous opportunities that this new technology brings. Finally, the new legal framework that we are setting up needs to be considered in the context of the moral framework that underpins it.