Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I do not have any problems in principle with the Bill at all, but I look forward greatly to Committee, given all the speeches I have listened to—we will have a lively time of it. My contributions will be on vehicle identification. Number plates clearly will not do, as there are millions of infractions. Lots of cars drive around with no MoT or insurance, and some are completely untraceable; we cannot rely on that system when it comes to automated vehicles. Automated vehicles need a different kind of identification anyway; they need to communicate a lot, they will need to include that identity in their communication and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, said, we cannot let that system be hacked—that will need to be baked into the hardware. Therefore, you will need a set of international standards.

I emphasise to my noble friend the importance of being in the lead on international standards—it really gives you a grip on an industry. Look at what has happened in telecommunications. When I was young, we had GEC and Plessey and we were top of the world. We have lost that now, and one of the reasons we did not manage to hold on to even a bit of it is that we let the whole business of standards slip. The work we were doing on standards in this country was no longer thought important, no longer given emphasis, and therefore people in this country really did not have a grip on what was going on and where the industry was moving. Standards are absolutely the core of this and we really should put effort into the standards that are going to be embedded in automated vehicles, for they are many and they are really important, and identification is very much one of them.

As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said, interaction with the police—my noble friend Lord Naseby expanded that to the emergency services generally—will rely a lot on communication. Policemen must have a way of talking to an automated vehicle, and the automated vehicle will want to make sure that that person is a policeman. This is a two-way system; at the base of it are standards. It is really important that the Government get this right.

I also hope to make sure during the Bill’s passage that, where we have a system of automated vehicles for general hire, the information on what vehicles are where and what they will cost is available universally to customers. We should not get into a system where people are confined to the particular operators they may have the app for. They ought to have access to universal information.

Data will be important. As my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond said, we need to have access to all the data so that we can understand what is going on and make sure that we are into a self-improving system and not developing areas of dystopia. At the same time, we have commercial confidentiality and value in the data; its governance will be really important.

In the short term most of these vehicles will charge at a depot, but that will not last. They will want to use public charging stations, so we have to look ahead. We have to be part of developing a standard for how an automated vehicle can charge any old where. Then we will have to start putting those charging stations in well ahead of demand. Again, it is about thinking ahead and standards.

I will delight the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, by saying that we ought to look at automated vehicles on rail. Looking at what is happening on the periphery of the network—the sort of place I live—having a train every half an hour is not an efficient use of a dedicated corridor. If we had automated vehicles running in the same space, they could run when people wanted them to. They could just be there: you would get on when you arrived at the station, and it would stop at the station you want it to stop at. You would start to get a much more efficient system of transporting, using a space we already have and which is free of humans and cyclists. It is much easier to program for. I am not saying that it would do on the core network, but it would absolutely do on the peripheral network. It would be a really efficient way of reviving redundant rail lines, because you would not even need to install rails; you could just use ordinary wheels and tyres, and what remains of the railbed would carry a road very cheaply, as long as you were not running heavy trucks on it.

I am really concerned about the systems for reporting on the condition of the vehicle being effective and quick, and resulting in it being taken off the road and maintained speedily. It is not clear to me how the Bill will work in that area.

I listened carefully to what the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, said about road design, AVs being able to signal to others that they are AVs, and safe roads. We ought to be able to license AV to go just on the roads that are safe for them to use, not the ones where we know they will run into difficulties. I do not doubt that the noble Earl will table amendments on all these aspects. I shall be there to take a close interest in them.

The aspects of safety mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles of Berkhamsted, and the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, were absolutely on point. If we are to define safety, which has such a crucial place in this Bill, it has to be an effective and practical definition. We really have to understand how it works. The current wording is just too indefinite and imprecise. Does it effectively rule these out for 10 years, or does it allow anything? It is just not clear at the moment. Insurance will obviously be an important area; people such as cyclists and pedestrians who do not carry their own insurance need an easy, quick way of getting compensated when they are hurt by an AV. We need to keep the sort of model we have for being injured by a vehicle at the moment, and make sure that it applies to an AV in all circumstances.

Noble Lords will not be surprised that I will be pursuing the general question of automated vehicles and Eastbourne. People have talked about AVs in the middle of London; I do not think that is the best place to start with them. Somewhere like Eastbourne, where public transport does not work, you can use AVs to make public transport happen. We should be able to move away from being the town with the highest proportion of short vehicle journeys to one that is much more reliant on public transport, because automated vehicles should make that economic. We can also start to look after tourists much better, getting them out to the neighbouring attractions and around the countryside, and enabling bicycling and disabled access and other things, which are really difficult to do with current systems. It is the opportunities that I see, not the disadvantages of cluttering up Piccadilly, and which I really hope to pursue in Committee.