Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I first make it clear that the Opposition—the Labour Party—support the principle of this measure, although as we have seen in this debate, there is a wide-ranging set of issues that arises, which I dare say that the civil servants who have been listening will be busily examining over the coming days. We are looking forward to a somewhat extended Committee stage, if some of these issues are judged within the scope of the Bill. It will also be a very entertaining one if we continue to have contributions such as those from the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, and some of the other noble Lords who have spoken.

Why do we support the Bill? It is because we desperately need to move forward in this country to try to raise our rate of economic growth. One of the most obvious ways of doing this is by harnessing, through successful commercial exploitation, the advances in science and technology for which we, as a country, are renowned. So this is part of a big agenda that is crucial to our future prosperity.

We do have a real problem. I will put this in a non-party-political way. In the John Major and Tony Blair premierships, from 1991 to 2007, national productivity rose by 27%. Since 2007, it has risen by 1.7%. So we have a dramatic growth problem. I suppose this is a subset of the artificial intelligence revolution, which we have to be part of if we are going to succeed as a country. My friend and colleague in the other place, Peter Kyle, who is now in charge of innovation and research—whatever that new department is called—sees this question of how we mobilise these technological advances for growth as one of the great progressive causes of our time.

In some respects, the Government have gone about this in the right way, in trying to establish a partnership body through injecting public money in partnership with academic expertise, scientists, engineers and corporations. I share the view of the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, that this should not exclude the smaller innovators, but I also very much share the view of my colleague, my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe, that any partnership work should involve the trade unions. As someone said, this will have enormous consequences for jobs in the future and we must involve the trade unions from an early stage.

The Bill is legal and technical, and it is necessary, but of course it is not the whole answer—it is not a policy framework for autonomous vehicles. Reading it, I thought that, if only we had a magic wand and could bring automated vehicles into play overnight, getting rid of all that we have now, the Bill would be a perfect example of how to regulate that. But we are not in that situation: we in fact face decades of hybridity, or a mixed system—however you want to describe it—and that is the immediate regulatory task.

I will pick the Minister up on one point he made early in his remarks. He mentioned that the safety benefits of automated vehicles were “plain to see”. Well, they might be in this idealised future that we might get to some time, but are they “plain to see” in this hybrid world, which will be the real world of the next 20 or 30 years?

There are lots of issues about what safety standards we set. If we have a significant number of accidents, it will put back the development of these technologies in a very rapid way. I picked up an article in the Financial Times—a great authority—by a Mr Richard Waters, describing what had happened in California, where the regulators have actually halted operations at Cruise, the General Motors driverless car division, because of accidents in California. We do not want to get ourselves into that situation, so we have to move forward in a way that will prevent that kind of eventuality—and there are lots of issues in that regard.

The insurance and legal questions around what happens when a so-called “transition demand” occurs are very complicated. There is the issue that the House of Commons Transport Committee raised in a very good report: what happens to the driving skills of drivers who become gradually reliant on automated systems? How do we keep their driving skills up to date? What sort of test should you have to pass to be a driver who part-relies on automation but is then capable of taking control in an emergency? I know that some people talk about 10 seconds but, if you are doing your emails or talking on the phone to an important colleague, would you be capable of doing this in 10 seconds? I do not know. There seem to be a lot of issues here.

Of course, there are other issues, not just to do with the car, the systems and the driver but to do with the networks within which these vehicles will run. Failings in digital connectivity is the obvious one. I have just finished 10 years on Cumbria County Council and, if someone had told us that we had to spend millions of pounds on the database of our road system, I would have had lots of Conservative councillors getting up and saying, “You’re not wasting your money on all of that—what about the potholes?” We would have a real problem with local authority finance in what strikes me as potentially a very costly exercise.

Then there is the question of regulation of the agencies in the Department for Transport that will have to put these systems in place. There is the question of skills: will the people in the agencies have the right skills to do the job properly? We all know that what will happen is that the brightest and most capable people will be employed by the companies, which will have the sources of expertise. So there are lots of issues that we need to face.

We need an effective system of regulation, and we have to think about how that is going to work. We do not want a system of regulation that holds things back —the man with a red flag who has to walk in front of the vehicle. We have to avoid that kind of regulation. Equally, we have to approach it from the point that people will expect that this new technology will produce not just the status quo in safety but a real advance, with fewer accidents, fewer deaths and fewer life-changing injuries.

The key is to develop a regulatory system that is rapidly adaptable. That is an easy thing to say, but when we think about regulation and the way it works—or the way I have observed it working in Britain in many different forms—we see that it is not very adaptable. We have great crises that result in regulatory reviews; they come up with long reports that make lots of recommendations and then those reports lie on people’s shelves and do not get acted on. We have to be more flexible and adaptable than we have been. Regulation is a good thing, but it has to be flexible and adaptable. We have to get away from the mindset of, “As little regulation as possible is what is good for the country”. We have to have good regulation, not bad regulation, and if we do, we may be able to take advantage of the great opportunities that these technological advances offer.