Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Liddle and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Monday 15th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of amendments in this group, but I will start by talking about Amendment 51 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. If he wants to come in ahead of me and take precedence on it, he is welcome to do so. No? I thank him.

Last time, I talked about what I referred to as my Eastbourne letter. Since then, I have had a courteous non-reply. It seems to me that the Government are really lacking energy on this. They are not making speed; they are not forging ahead; they are not looking for opportunities in the way I would hope. What the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has just said about delivery vehicles is typical of that, as is their inability to give me an idea of how a particular operation might be tackled by automated vehicles. What are they looking at? Where are they taking this industry? Are they a Government who are in the lead or just sitting back and waiting for things to happen? Currently, they are giving me the second impression. I hope I am wrong, but nothing I have heard in our previous session, today or in the letter has given me any comfort on that.

I very much support Amendment 51 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. Let us pin down the Government on this matter and get them to produce a very useful strategy in six months’ time, so that we know what they intend to do and we get some energy and direction, rather than just the gentle, permissive Bill we have at the moment.

I have two amendments in this group, Amendments 44 and 45. The former looks forward to the point where automated vehicles become standard. In the early days, there will be a little fleet, and whenever it needs recharging, it will trundle back to its base. But that is not the way of operating any large-scale automated vehicle rollout; they have to be able to charge at ordinary, public charging points. If that is to be possible, we have to start thinking about the problem now. There is no point putting in a whole network of charging points, which we are making reasonable progress on, if none is usable by automated vehicles. We have to remember that, under our intentions, these charging points will be used by automated vehicles in five or 10 years hence. What does that look like, and what are we asking for? This comes back to the point I made last time about international standards: what do we expect to be available for an automated vehicle to hook into a roadside charging point? It does not carry a credit card with it—at least not in the ordinary way. These problems have to be addressed, solved and agreed internationally early and then incorporated into the rules and regulations we have for the charging point rollout. The point of my Amendment 44 is to give the Government power to specify how the charging point rollout should be made accessible to automated vehicles. They should commit to do at least that in the Bill, and then we can push them to do it speedily.

My second amendment is about using automated vehicles on railway track. There are two railways—particularly in relation to the Beeching railways—that we might want to revive. They will start off as routes that people are not used to using and where there is no existing train service—we are not trying to divert trains down them, by and large. Why do we not want to consider using the best available technology and run a service which runs every minute, rather than every hour, and that stops at the stations that the people in the vehicles want to stop? There are all sorts of other things that could come from using automated vehicles. From the point of view of automated vehicles, you are dealing with an environment where there are no people—but maybe the occasional cow. It is therefore a much less problematic environment to run an automated vehicle service than a public road. Where we are looking at reviving railways, or looking at a low-use branch service that we would like to make much better, we ought to look at automated vehicles as an alternative. The point of my Amendment 45 is to make sure that the Government have the power to do that, should they ever have the opportunity. I very much look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, proposing his amendment.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had two very interesting and productive contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. The noble Lord has, in essence, put his finger on a real point about whether the Bill is satisfactory. On our side of the House, we want to promote innovation: that is what the country needs. The country needs new ideas and new things that will work and will be commercially successful. An innovation policy is not just a matter of making regulations for something that somebody has already had an idea about that might work—which, I think, is the case with the classic automated vehicle—it is also about considering how the technology that we are on the threshold of developing can be applied more widely in a way that leads to great human benefit and advance. Our probing amendments—and they are very much probing amendments—are on the theme of how wide the scope of the Bill is and whether the issues have been thought through as a genuine innovation policy for the country.

My two amendments, Amendments 51 and 56, are really about what is in the scope of the Bill. Are we regulating for delivery robots or not and, if we are, have we thought about how this framework might be different from the automated vehicle framework and how it would be the same? This is a very serious issue, and you can think of lots of social benefits from a widespread rollout of delivery robots. On Amendment 51, have we thought about these questions in terms of public transport, as against the automated car? What special arrangements do we have to make for public transport, if any, and where? These are speculative amendments, but I think they are raising fundamental points about whether this Bill is going to be a great leap forward for us or not.

The other aspect which we are concerned about is the infrastructure element. What changes in infrastructure will be necessary? Have the Government done work on that? Have they thought about where roads need to be redesigned and how the sensing systems of artificial intelligence will work on our infrastructure? I can see quite a lot of potential costs in this, but I do not want the cost to be a barrier to innovation. I want the Government to have thought in advance about how you deal with the question of what changes in infrastructure are necessary. I do not want a repeat, if I can say it plainly, of what I think has been the pretty chaotic rollout of charging points for battery vehicles. We need a plan. Is the Bill giving us a plan or a road map for these developments? With those comments, I commend our amendments and look forward to the Minister’s reply.