Automated Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Moylan Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 28th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moylan (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness. Before I come to my main remarks, I have a question for my noble friend the Minister arising from something he said in his introduction. He referred to the scope of the Bill covering England, Scotland and Wales and said that if these vehicles crossed the border into Northern Ireland, they would not benefit from its provisions. I wanted to ask him what border he was referring to, because as far as vehicle regulation is concerned, there is, as I understand it, no border and Northern Ireland is subject to the vehicle regulations in operation in this country. Was it a slip of the tongue or an implication that autonomous vehicles if introduced into Northern Ireland would be subject to the undemocratically made laws of the European Union—undemocratic, that is, as far as their application to Northern Ireland is concerned, whose people, of course, have no say in the legislature which will be making those laws? I would be grateful for his elucidation on that. I am perfectly happy to accept that it was a slip of the tongue and that would end the whole matter, but there may be something behind it he would like to reveal.

On the Bill itself, the substance of my remarks is that this is a piece of work from the Law Commission and is, in essence, to do with warranty, liability and insurance, which is why I thought I would have very little to say which was germane to the text. However, I find that most noble Lords have had very little to say about those issues and we have wandered—I think very properly and inevitably—into a broader debate about the desirability of automated vehicles and their consequences for other road users.

I have great interest in that because during much of my life I have been involved in urban design. I am particularly interested in the urban consequences— I am less interested in what happens on motorways—and how our cities are shaped. I have to admit—I would be in the naughty corner, no doubt, for this—that I have been a great advocate for and implementer of shared spaces, which I would characterise in very different language to that used by my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.

Let me offer a few thoughts to add to this pile of imponderables that the Bill has given rise to this afternoon. As I say, most of them relate to the way in which cities work. First, I accept on the basis of my experience of railways that it is likely that these vehicles will be safer than those driven by a human. Anyone who doubts this would not get on a Victoria line train, for example; they would take the Piccadilly line on every occasion. The Victoria line train is driven by computers; the Piccadilly line train is driven—currently, sadly, because there is not enough money—by a human being. But which one arrives with a minute interval between each train, safely, every time? Which is the one that can carry those people because of that frequency, that huge capacity, on the Victoria line and which has a three or four-minute interval between trains because the driver cannot stop as safely as the computer-driven trains?

It is worth saying—with every possible respect to my noble friend Lord Naseby—that the comparison with aviation is not appropriate. Rail safety is based on the principle that if something is missing, if something goes wrong or if something is not quite right in the system, the train comes to a stop. The system stops. The electricity is cut off. That cannot possibly be the basis of aviation safety. If something goes missing, you cannot just stop the plane at 30,000 feet and say: “We are going to work out what has gone wrong”. Aviation safety is all about building in all the safety measures from the outset before the plane ever takes off and making sure that they are working. It is a totally different approach. I am assuming that automated vehicles would operate similarly to the rail principle; that is, if something was missing and they could not see something, they would stop. This might cause inconvenience—as indeed it causes inconvenience if a train on the Victoria line stops and people have to work out what has gone wrong—but it is at least a safety measure and a relatively reliable one.

I am very concerned about the point made about the consequences for streetscapes of jaywalking made by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and to some extent referred to by my noble friend Lord Borwick. We have spent years trying to take railings out of cities and allowing people to cross streets in a more natural, human sort of way—to move away from the Le Corbusier dystopia that arose from separating vehicles and pedestrians at every level. It was a perpetual Barbican vision of our cities. We have moved away from that, and people who want to see it in operation can go to places such as Piccadilly. Only a few years ago, it was a one-way motorway with barriers all along it, and it has been returned to a calm and more attractive street running two ways without all those barriers and so forth.

As the noble Lord rightly pointed out, the very fact that you can walk in front of an automated vehicle, confident that it will stop, means that the manufacturers will quickly say, “We can’t be having that. We will have to have the barriers back. We’re going to have to have designated crossing places for pedestrians, and we will have to have laws that stop them walking out in front of the cars”. That risk balance will have changed. I do not walk out in front of cars generally when they are moving, because I worry that they may hit me, but if I know for a certainty they will stop, what is to prevent me? I will just cross the road. As my noble friend Lord Borwick said, if you are a six year-old, the fun may go out of it after three attempts, but that is not my circumstance. I am not doing it for fun, I am doing it to cross the road, and I shall do it exactly as I want. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, was right to make that point.

The next thing I want to say is about congestion and the consequences for public transport. We are talking about automated vehicles as if they are going to be private possessions. Of course, there is an alternative vision where automated vehicles are communally or corporately owned. They are pods, and they do not belong to you. You summon them like an Uber and they arrive, take you somewhere and then park, vanish or find another passenger somewhere. That is an alternative model. Let us imagine 80 of those lined up nose to tail, very safely moving along Piccadilly from Hyde Park Corner up to Piccadilly Circus, each containing an individual passenger—and bang close to each other because it will be very safe, for the reasons I explained. It will be 80 passengers moving up Piccadilly. What is the difference between that and a bus? A bus takes 80 passengers from one end of Piccadilly to another. I know noble Lords will say, “Ah, but these pods, when they get to Piccadilly Circus, they can split off and all go in different directions. They can take you to your office, the hairdresser or wherever you want to go in that vicinity”. That illustrates what automated vehicles are really addressing, which is the last-mile problem rather than the main trunk problem of transport. It is to get that last mile from the hub that you want a vehicle to be available to take you, but not necessarily all the way along the journey. Why would we be encouraged to do that, given both the effects on congestion and the possible consequence of a collapse in demand—not a total collapse—for public transport?

Finally, what will happen to traffic lights and why are we still investing in them? I think it is public knowledge—I know it to be true—that Transport for London is planning to spend a very large amount upgrading its extremely comprehensive traffic light system that it has rolled out over the years, which still depends on the SCOOT software technology that has been in use for at least 20 years and possibly longer. It is thinking of spending a large amount of money upgrading them, but why will anyone ever need traffic lights? Automated vehicles do not need them. They are there for people such as me to look at something terrestrial in front of them, and see that it is green, red, orange or whatever. If their motion is dependent on their sensing where other vehicles are, together with communication with a satellite at the same time, they will not need traffic lights. What will happen to traffic lights?

I am against traffic lights on the whole. They are a complete misery, of course—we all know that. However, they have some uses—for example, helping people to cross the roads at junctions. What are the consequences for that and for the money that we are still spending, even today, on upgrading our traffic light system if we are moving over to an automated vehicle system?

I am speaking quite late in the debate and there are one or two very interesting speakers to follow. I have a feeling that my noble friend the Minister will not be able to deal with all the questions that we have put to him. I look forward to a more detailed response in writing to some of them, although he may be able to answer the Northern Ireland one. A lot might arise in Committee that I did not expect and there may be amendments that test the scope of the Bill a little. I look forward to them.