Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, and the very entertaining speech from the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, and to speak to your Lordships with a real sense of optimism over the Bill. In doing so, I declare an interest: my wife works for Amazon. Neither of us has any privileged information on operations in this sector but I suspect that Amazon, along with many others, will be taking a keen interest in the passage of the Bill.

I am really excited about the Bill. I have no expert knowledge in the field, but the Bill will profoundly affect us all. We are all passengers and pedestrians, and most of us are drivers, cyclists and users of online shopping websites. As we have heard, the Government have forecast that the automated vehicle sector could capture up to £42 billion by 2035. In this, they might be being cautious. It is also a good news story that as a nation we are so strong in this sector, the UK being a global thought leader on regulating AVs, according to Oxa.

We have already heard that we need to act quickly to avoid falling behind countries that have got off the starting grid quicker than us. We are looking at a landscape where, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, much of the on and off-road logistics and road passenger transport could be automated, particularly in rural areas, with a big impact on agriculture, mining and defence as well. The utopian dream is that the automatic vehicles blend seamlessly with our traffic systems, safely and efficiently working to reduce pollution, road rage and accidents, and allowing skilled workers to be deployed elsewhere. Obviously, the dystopian view is of robot vehicles crashing into each other and causing gridlock and mass unemployment while AI systems take over a post-apocalyptic dying planet. The main difficulty for the Bill is that it is trying to legislate for so much that we do not yet understand. I think that it does a pretty good job of it.

I would like some help from the Minister in clarifying a few questions that I have on the Bill. I am a lay man, so I apologise if my questions seem obvious to everyone else. I am a teacher and I always tell my students never to be afraid to ask a question if you do not understand, because I can guarantee that there are always at least two others in the room who do not know the answer either. I hope that one of them here is not the Minister.

Like many others, my paramount concern about the Bill is safety. Although the Minister said that it is baked in, the suspicion is that cyclists and pedestrians would disproportionately bear the brunt of casualties from the initial trials of the vehicles. In this I share Cycling UK’s concern that the safety bar is too low in that the definition of safety for a vehicle that travels autonomously is “acceptable” rather than “high”, and the definition of it travelling legally is if it travels at a “very low risk” of committing a traffic infraction. Therefore, tightening up the safety element of this is vital. However, I am not sure that the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, to ban jaywalkers quite works. I am an inveterate jaywalker and I will fight him on that one—although I have to say, from my daily observations from the top deck of buses in the City, that my fellow cyclists could help themselves by not running so many red lights.

My other big concern is actually who is in charge of the vehicle. The concept of a user-in-charge seems to be the very worst of all worlds, as mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Lytton. Having a driver in the cab who may be called on at any time seems to have all the risks and costs of traditional driving with very little benefit. We are surely aiming at no-user-in-charge, but here things get complicated for the lay man.

What is an authorised self-driving entity, who will be responsible for the way that the vehicle drives and meeting other regulatory obligations? Each authorised automated vehicle must have one. Every ASDE is an entity but it is not made clear, at least to me, what that is. The licensed operator is described as being similar to a bus operator, but the nuts and bolts of who controls what and how are not spelled out. Are fleets of vehicles going to be controlled by one person like a minicab company and, if so, what checks are being made on the person’s or team’s competence, state of mind and health to do such a vital job? Are they going to be more like air traffic controllers, in which case how are they to be trained and examined? Will they be subject to random alcohol and drugs tests? Will they need medicals? Perhaps the Minister can shed some light.

The purpose of a safety inspector is to identify, improve the understanding of, and reduce the risk of automated vehicle incidents through conducting a safety investigation. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch is cited as an example, but I am led to believe that bus operators, certainly in London, investigate their own incidents. Is the plan to get bus operators in line with train and air operators, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, alluded to?

Self-driving vehicles need an accurate and up-to-date understanding of the road and to know the legal parameters of the network. Traffic regulation orders will be provided via a common publication platform. Is this feasible? Will it be available for other services, so that an Uber driver, for instance, can at last navigate the low-traffic neighbourhoods of Hackney to get me to my house?

I realise that with automation comes the fear of unemployment, although the APPG on Self-driving Vehicles claims that AVs will create over 38,000 new green jobs—but that is a subject for another day. I am excited by the future the Bill could lead us to. Overall, it is very logical and well thought-out, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s comments on my various points.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th January 2024 Lords Chamber

I have one other issue to raise, which I am not going to speak to in detail now—it is in my Amendment 37A —suggesting that all these issues should be considered independently of government by, I suggest, the Office of Rail and Road, because it is doing a very good job on road safety at the moment. It also does a very good job on rail safety. The key for me is that this should be done by an organisation that is independent of government, and of people in Swansea and everyone else. It should be independent of those who quite rightly want to pursue electric vehicles for all the benefit they are going to bring. There has to be some brake and some independent check on what they are doing, to make sure that all the other intentions that the public have a right to achieve and wish for will be provided—and, if they are not, there will be a voice independent of government. We can go on talking about independent voices on post offices, railways and things like that, but it is just as important to have an independent body for this, and I shall speak to that when we get to Amendment 37A.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 3, 5 and 8 in my name. I thank the Minister very much for the very informative meeting we had, and the Society of Motor Manufacturers was very helpful on any questions he could not answer on technicalities. That and a trip round the streets of King’s Cross in an automated vehicle thanks to Wayve—which was actually remarkably boring, which is what they tell me it is supposed to be—have put my technical questions to one side.

My concerns and my amendments, rather like those from the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Tunnicliffe, are all about safety. The Minister said, as I recall, that safety would be the cornerstone of this Bill and, if we lose the confidence of the public—who are very concerned about safety—we are going to run into trouble and, as the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, there are going to be bumps in the road. If we lose confidence, people are going to lose confidence in the whole concept.

In the meeting, the Government said that, if we set safety standards too high, it will deter manufacturers and companies from coming into the market. But, at the moment, if raising these standards is deterring companies, maybe these companies should not be entering the market anyway and should not be involved in the development of automated vehicles.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, I think that cyclists will bear a disproportionate brunt of any casualties. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, they will be the “losers” in this whole equation. I turned to Cycling UK for some amendments, which seem to beef up the safety standards. Amendment 3 says

“leave out ‘an acceptably safe standard’ and insert ‘a high standard of safety’”.

That does not strike me as rocket science. In the same way, Amendment 5 says

“leave out ‘an acceptably’ and insert ‘a very’”

to make

“a very low risk of committing a traffic infraction”.

That is very similar to Amendment 4 from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle.

Amendment 8 says that, instead of “better”, the Bill should state that road safety would be

“significantly better for all road users”.

To me, this seems self-explanatory and would mean that safety truly is in the heart of the Bill. This seems like common sense to me and I look forward to the Minister’s answers.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, who has done sterling work in contributing to this Bill. I apologise for the fact that I have not managed until today to fully engage with Committee stage. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, who raised a crucial issue which, as the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said, really does not seem to be covered here.

I want to take a specific example here of the tragic case—which is far too common—of small children, toddlers up to the age of about seven, being killed on domestic driveways by human drivers. A report from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents which was supported by the Department for Transport shows that, since 2001, 34 children have been killed in domestic driveways, nearly always in their own home. There have been 19 deaths since 2008. In 22 of those cases, the child was killed by a reversing vehicle.

Here we have circumstances where—one would assume—usually competent and careful human drivers were not able to make allowance for what was happening around them. If we are going to think about automated vehicles, we need to think very hard about circumstances where we are not on the road but are in situations where vulnerable people, or animals for that matter, are not going to behave in manners that follow some logical kind of algorithm. That is not how the world works and, if we are going to have automated vehicles, we have to allow for circumstances like that.

I will pick up a point that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and a number of others made. Whether we have this Bill or not, and whether we have automated vehicles or not, we should be aiming to do vastly better than we do now on road safety. In the most recent figures we have, in 2022 there were 1,711 fatalities and nearly 30,000 when you put the “killed” and “seriously injured” figures together. That was five fatalities per billion vehicle miles travelled. That sounds like a big number, but the figure is up 2% on the last time we had a year like it, which was 2019, the pre-Covid year. So, on the metric we should be counting, we are heading in the wrong direction.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, I think that, of the amendments we have before us, Amendment 8, which says

“significantly better for all road users”

is probably the best one; we have a number of ranges before us. Again, I am not sure that this would get past the Table Office, but I believe, and the Green Party very strongly believes, that the Government should be adopting a policy known as Vision Zero. It is the idea that we should have the goal of no deaths or serious injuries on our roads. We know that humans will make mistakes, that pedestrians will make mistakes and that there will be children, animals and all sorts of things. We have to design everything to reduce the risk to as close to zero as we can possibly manage. I do not know whether we could write Vision Zero into this Bill. I can foresee the wrestle we might have with the Table Office now, but I think that

“significantly better for all road users”

at least takes us in the right kind of direction.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, I thank Cycling UK for its excellent briefing. We often talk about cyclists as vulnerable road users and this briefing is from Cycling UK, but the most vulnerable road users are pedestrians, particularly young people and, increasingly, older pedestrians who on average tend to move more slowly and are more vulnerable in all sorts of ways. In recent years we have seen a real increase in the dangers to older pedestrians, such as in changes made a few years ago to traffic lights in London that had disastrous, hideous impacts on them. Amendment 8 refers to “all road users”; a lot of the discussion at Second Reading was about interactions between two motorised vehicles, but we have to make sure that we think about all the other interactions as well. We need a great deal more work and thought on this Bill, particularly this element of it.

Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 6th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tunnicliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I think this group has two subgroups. There is the subgroup of amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and my noble friend Lord Berkeley’s subgroup. I am afraid to tell my noble friend that we will support the Davies subgroup and not the Berkeley subgroup.

There are many reasons for this, ending with a very pragmatic one. First, the proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Davies, are structurally sound as they separate the roles of Clause 1 and Clause 2. Clause 1, as it will stand after these amendments, in essence says, among other things, that there shall be a safety standard. The clause is headed “Basic concepts”. Clause 2 attempts to address what that safety standard shall be.

We believe that government Amendment 3 is right. It is a very sound definition of “safe enough”. It is built around the well-crafted concept of

“careful and competent human drivers”.

It is today’s standard at its best. It is today’s standard after, as is set out in the commissioners’ report, eliminating the distracted, the drowsy, the drunk, the drugged and the disqualified. It is a high standard but not an infinite standard. It recognises that there has to be a limitation, otherwise the whole pursuit of a standard that is not defined becomes impossible.

It passes what I consider to be the death test. One of these vehicles is going to kill somebody. It is inevitable; the sheer volume of events will mean that something will go wrong. It is at that moment that you have to be able to respond to public opinion, have a standard that is easy for people to understand and defend it. I know this because I have been in that position when running a railway. The 1974 Act that applies to railways demands a standard: that the risk is as low as reasonably practical. It is one of the most brilliant pieces of legislation ever passed. Its impact on safety in this country has been enormous. Its impact on construction and railways, and its crossover impact on nuclear, have served this country well. I believe that this standard, which involves being as safe as a careful and competent driver, is the natural equivalent.

I also note that the law commissions produced three answers. Since they took three years or something to come to these three answers, it seems a pretty good idea to pick one of them. They were options A, B and C. Option C is, in my view, clearly rejected by these amendments. That option was to be

“overall, safer than the average human driver”.

The average human driver includes this wonderful list of distracted, drowsy, drunk, drugged and disqualified drivers. The world is a better place for eliminating them. Option B was

“as safe as a human driver who does not cause a fault accident”.

That is so ill defined that even the law commissions gave up on it. Option A is this one:

“as safe as a competent and careful human driver”.

It passes that test in a way that, when the experts set about turning this into regulations, I believe it will be feasible for them to achieve.

We also support government Amendment 7, which is a compromise. It ensures that Parliament—the importance of Parliament is very much brought out in the supporting documentation—has a positive involvement with the initial statement of safety principles. It also assures us that there will be a negative involvement with subsequent revisions. That is a balance, and we can support that.

I am afraid that government Amendments 3 and 7 have a rather unique advantage that we should not ignore: the name on them is the Minister’s, that of the noble Lord, Lord Davies. But, with the greatest respect to him, if you rub out “Lord Davies” and look under that name, you see “His Majesty’s Government”. Their majority in the other place means that these two amendments will become law—a piece of law that will guide this industry well.

I turn to an issue that is not so directly involved but needs to be there to tidy things up: the principles relating to equality and fairness. What does this mean in this environment? This too is set out in the law commissions’ report. In essence it means that an autonomous vehicle does not come at the expense of any particular group of road users. The policy scoping notes say:

“Government is likely to include a safety principle relating to equality and fairness”.


That is not there at the moment, but I am delighted to be advised by the Minister that this will be changed from “likely to include” to “will include”. This emphasis is particularly important for pedestrians, who must not be sacrificed to achieve the introduction of automated vehicles.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendments 1 and 4 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. We dealt with safety a lot in Committee, and it is paramount. This is the most important part of the Bill. I became an enthusiast about automated vehicles because I turned up to a briefing. Most people you talk to are ambivalent at best, and there is a sort of dystopian “Blade Runner” worry about faceless terminator drones.

Safety needs to be beyond reproach when bad things happen. As the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said, bad things will happen—deaths will happen. We need to be able to face people and say that we did the best we possibly could. The noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, said this needs to be easy to understand and define; that is absolutely right, but it needs to be equivalent to, or better than, a driver who does the best in a driving test. That does not sound too high to me.

Amendment 4 mentions “significantly” improving road safety. The noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said that we should expect all autonomous vehicles to be better than human drivers, but what if they are not? We need to hold them to account. This would make the whole thing easier to sell to a sceptical public, as opposed to the government amendment. I am not a lawyer, but I do not see why trying to make things significantly better would deter players from joining the market. The industry will spend money on this only when it sees a momentum shift in public opinion, which is why safety is so important and why these amendments are so important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Bradshaw (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I might add a word for the very large number of people who are not in wheelchairs but who depend, like I do, on a stick. When pavements are so awful in this country, they need a lot of consideration. They walk around at their peril, often due to the irresponsible use of scooters, which are insufficiently regulated by the department.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 8, 18 to 20, and 27, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to which I have added my name. In Committee, I was struck by the powerful speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, whom we have often heard in your Lordships’ House talking so powerfully about her lived experiences.

This is not a once-in-a-generation nor a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but it is a new, unique opportunity for disabled people to be front and centre of the development of a transport system. A great friend of mine is blind and when we first met, he had a clunky old phone with Braille on it. As soon as the iPhone came out, he had a phone with perfect accessibility built in. There was nothing new there. He has the same iPhone as everybody else. It just has the features to work for him, and I think this is what we can do with automated vehicles.

Elderly or disabled people, who have never dreamed of owning a car, can now look to the near future and see that this is a possibility—but only if they are included in all stages. As a design and technology teacher, I am all over inclusive design. This is not a bolt-on. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, said he wanted this bolted on to existing stuff, I want this designed from the ground up. It is a unique—and I mean unique—opportunity to give disabled people a level playing field. It must not be squandered. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, while I support the general principle of these comments—indeed, I personally made great changes to the taxi industry to get there—the particular circumstances that enabled me to do that a long time ago were very unusual.

The current situation with autonomous vehicles is that there are many manufacturers that are converting existing vehicles. They cannot change their donor vehicles to make them accessible for disabled people, however desirable that might be. Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, Wayve, Oxa and, indeed, Mercedes are all working on autonomous vehicles, but they are not likely or able to change their vehicles to make them accessible because they must be accessible from the original design. Automotive history goes back 120 or even 150 years. We are not able to change existing vehicles, however desirable that is.

What these clauses would do is stop disabled people being helped by autonomous vehicles coming along. I am thinking particularly of people disabled by a severe learning difficulty who would not be able to learn to drive, or safely drive, a normal vehicle who would not be able to drive as a passenger. I am afraid the clauses would prevent these manufacturers from coming into this market. They would rather go to a market where they could use their existing vehicles than make the changes.