Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, it gives me pleasure to take part in this debate and I declare an interest as a member of the all-party AV group. I am also grateful for so many members of the industry who came and briefed us last week. We also need to thank the House of Lords Library, which has produced a comprehensive summary of the issues, and of course the Law Commission, which has spent four years looking at it. I think it is a really good Bill and it is going to help us a lot, as many noble Lords have told us.

It will be good for the concept of who is in charge. I like this idea of a user-in-charge; that is a really important issue. But, given the fact that the Bill has, I think, 77 clauses, it is going to take some studying when we get to Committee. One of the issues is going to be, as one or two noble Lords have said, the question of interfaces between when you are on automatic mode, if I can call it that; when you are not on that; where you are when it happens and who else gets involved, or should not do. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, talked about the importance of having some self-drive capability, especially in the country, and he is absolutely right. To some extent, we could be using scooters or electric bikes—self-drive cars probably have a benefit of being more weather-resistant than my electric scooter, my electric bike or anything else—but the idea of individual transport is something we seem to have talked about a lot at the moment. It has to be good for everyone, efficient, convenient and a good investment.

I would like to spend a few minutes talking about safety. As the Minister said in his excellent introduction, safety is very important. But, like all things that are mechanical, when they come into contact with pedestrians, cyclists or other non-motorised users, the safety debate gets a little bit unfair. The AVs will probably be better than humans at avoiding collisions with other motor vehicles, but when it comes to humans on the road, or cyclists or whatever, there are a few questions we need to address. I was impressed by the background briefing that noble Lords will have received for the King’s Speech quite recently, which set out the requirements that came from the Law Commission:

“Only vehicles that can drive themselves safely and can follow all road traffic rules without the need for a human to monitor or control the vehicle … will be classified as self-driving and allowed on our roads”.


It carries on to say:

“Companies will have to meet safety requirements from the point a vehicle is introduced onto our roads or face new sanctions and penalties”.


We then come to the definition of what is safe: what are the safety principles that the Minister mentioned? We are told that road safety in Great Britain is better as a result of the use of authorised automatic vehicles on roads than it would otherwise be. I challenge that. This country’s road safety record is a lot worse than many other countries’. I am sure we will go into this in Committee. It is worse than Sweden, which had a target about 10 years ago of not having any road deaths at all in a year. It has not got there, but it is still better than us.

We have to get this safety rule better defined somehow. I am sure I shall have some amendments when we come to it. It is also a question of where we do it. If one is driving up a motorway, or your vehicle is, that is probably quite a good place to start the trial because there would be no pedestrians or cyclists, we hope, on the motorway. I expect that is one of the things that went quite well in the United States until recently. But when you get to narrow roads—maybe in the village that the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, mentioned; I do not know—or to towns and cities, it will get much more difficult. I will not read out my definition of safety now because that will come in Committee, but we can do a great deal better and have a target of making our road safety even better than it is at the moment.

On regulation, or how this will be policed and enforced, I recall proposing an amendment to some transport Bill a long time ago that suggested that the Office of Rail and Road should be responsible for road safety as well as rail safety. It does a good job on rail safety, as we all know, but it is not allowed to do much on road safety because that is thought to be the role of either the Department for Transport or the police. The ORR has a technical expertise that is well worth looking at. It would be quite nice if we had a consistent structure between these various transport modes—I include air as well as rail, road and sea—so that we have a safety regulator and, separately, an accident investigation branch that also does a blame-free investigation. We have a lot to learn, and it would be really good to bring in a bit of consistency.

Finally, I ask the Minister how this Bill and what we aim to do compares with what has happened on the continent in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain or wherever. Are we ahead or behind? If I want to drive my car to France, will it work on AV mode there or do we have a long way to go? I look forward to his comments and to this Bill’s passage through the House.