Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

3rd reading: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Monday 29th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Karl Turner]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. In Committee, we discussed making the charging points as recognisable as telephone boxes. That is essential. I hope that the Minister has taken on board what was said in Committee and appreciates the work that the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings did on the Bill.

It would be eminently sensible for the Government to promote a national network of sustainable charging points for private vehicles. We welcomed the announcement in the Budget of £200 million of public money to be invested in charging infrastructure. Of course, that matched Labour’s manifesto commitment to invest £200 million to support ultra-low emission vehicles.

This Bill was an opportunity to set out a long-term plan for building the infrastructure needed to encourage the uptake of automated and electric vehicles, and it is a little disappointing that it has failed to do so fully. The Bill could have been a major step forward in taking high-emitting vehicles off our roads. We know that air pollution is linked to the premature deaths of around 50,000 people in the UK each year. That is a staggering number and the Government need to do an awful lot more to address that.

Electric and alternatively-fuelled vehicles are key to reducing air pollution and meeting the UK’s climate change objectives. In Committee, the then Minister said:

“It is very important that we monitor closely how charge points are rolled out. We have spoken about workplaces, local authorities, service stations and so on and so forth, but we need to get a clear view about where the concentrations of charge points are and what needs to be done to fill in any gaps that emerge.”––[Official Report, Automated and Electric Vehicles Public Bill Committee, 14 November 2017; c. 186.]

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I remind the House of my interest in the Faraday Institution.

Given that the whole House agrees, roughly speaking, with what the hon. Gentleman said and that the Minister has announced that he is going to produce the strategy that the Opposition Front Bench team very sensibly want, may I beg the hon. Gentleman not to press his new clause to a vote? Were he to do so, it would have the sad effect of dividing the House on an issue on which we really do not need to divide and on a Bill on which we are all agreed.

[Karl Turner]

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that I do not intend to push anything to a vote.

We agree with what the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings said in Committee, which I just read out, and believe that the Government should take this opportunity to set out in the Bill their strategy for doing that.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Karl Turner]

Clause 7 sets out when a car is deemed to be driving itself, or in automated mode, but there is no mention of what happens if the vehicle is designed or manufactured in a faulty way or is hacked due to a failure by the manufacturer to install adequate protective software.

How would our amendment improve the Bill? While we all welcome the opportunities that the new technology will bring, we also have to recognise that it will bring risk. A lot of those risks will be around the software used, and they therefore may be harder to pick up than in a conventional vehicle. We all know the risks of hacking in computer systems. We have had experience in this House relatively recently of a cyber-attack—a hacking event—on Members’ emails. That experience is commonplace in workplaces across the country. When hacking and cyber-crime can result in serious consequences, we need to be extremely cautious.

We have the opportunity to put safeguards into the Bill now to give protections in this area, rather than doing that later down the line. The Minister has repeated constantly that this is a modest Bill that is merely a skeleton and that regulation will have to come as technology improves. Indeed, given the uptake of these vehicles and the number of them being purchased, action will clearly be required where the technology changes, but there is a real risk in not legislating now, when we have the opportunity to ensure the safety of these things.

Our amendment would definitely tighten up this area of the Bill by setting out when an automated vehicle is capable of driving itself safely. That would give the driver protection with regards to liability, if it was proved that there was a manufacturer’s fault or if the vehicle had been hacked. I do not intend to press the amendment to a vote; its purpose is to start a discussion about this area, in particular the hacking element. The issue of cyber-security and vehicles being hacked has been discussed previously, in the predecessor to this Committee. I have read the Hansard report of those discussions and there was some very detailed debate, but it is important to look at it again now. I stand to be corrected, but the Minister previously said he would come back with potential changes in this area. However, I think he simply wrote to members of the previous Bill Committee.

New clause 18 would do exactly what we intend it to do. We now have the opportunity, and I hope that the Government will listen carefully.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

I want to talk about clause 7(1)(b), which deals with the interpretation of what it is for a vehicle to be insured. That takes us back to the discussion we had in the Committee’s previous sittings. I am grateful to the Minister for providing access to his officials in the interim. I am satisfied that the issues I was raising are handled in the Bill, but want to set out how I now understand that to be the case, so that the Minister can give us an assurance that I have got this right and we know for the future that that is how the Bill is meant to work. It is a little sad that we have to do quite a lot of interpretative work to understand how the Bill is working, but I understand that that is caused by the fact that it is trying to piggyback on the Road Traffic Act 1988.

It turns out that clause 7(1)(b) is critical to the whole structure, because it defines a vehicle as being insured if there is a policy in force in relation to the use of it. Whereas one might think, under clause 2(1)(b), that when the Bill says the vehicle is “insured” at the time of the accident, it means the vehicle is insured at the time of the accident—indeed, I fell into the trap of thinking that that is what clause 2(1)(b) meant, because that is what it says—in fact clause 2(1)(b) has to be read in the context of clause 7(1)(b). Therefore, it is not actually the vehicle that is insured; it is the person who is, or may be—but maybe isn’t—the driver whose policy is the relevant policy and is actually insured to drive that vehicle. That is what I now understand clause 2(1)(b), in the light of clause 7(1)(b), to mean.

What clause 2(1)(b) is actually trying to say is that, as long as there is a person in the vehicle who, one way or another, is insured to drive the vehicle, then the insurer of that person is liable for the accident, even if the vehicle is driving itself. It follows from that that even if the driver, who is not driving at the time when the vehicle is driving itself, is not the owner but is insured to drive the vehicle on a policy that gives him insurance to drive other cars, it is also the case that the insurer of that person, not of the owner or the vehicle but of the person who is the driver—or would have been, if he was driving—is the insurer who is liable for the crash caused by the vehicle when it is driving itself. If I have at last understood all that correctly, it follows that the problems that I and several Committee members foresaw, about things such as transition, disappear, given that it is always the same insurer who is liable both when the car is in automated mode and when the car is being driven, because it is the insurer of the driver—or crypto-driver—regardless of whether he is driving or the car is driving itself.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karl Turner]

I want to speak briefly to new clause 18. Before doing so, I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister’s officials for the work they have done with my office. They have been extremely helpful.

New clause 18 covers the issue of cyber-security and the hacking of automated vehicles. It would require the Secretary of State to consult with such persons as he considers appropriate within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. I am not planning to push the new clause to a vote; its purpose is mainly to probe a little deeper to ensure that the Government properly and widely consult in this area. I would be grateful if the Minister indicated how that has already been done. I know that a great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes; will he assist the Committee by setting out who the Department has consulted with thus far?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I actually do not think that this matter can be dealt with in the Bill, but I agree with the shadow Minister that we should seek an assurance from the Government that they will spend the time that needs to be spent, once the Bill is out of this House, trying to deal with what is a very, very big problem.

It is easy to imagine that this is just science fiction, but it is not. It is more than imaginable that, as part of the convergence of networks and as the transport system becomes automated, the single biggest security vulnerability of the UK—and, while we are at it, of any other advanced economy—will be the ability of state or non-state actors to intervene in a whole series of its convergent networks. Obviously, there may also be threats from exogenous things such as space weather, which may affect convergent networks, including electricity, transport, communications and so on, but state actors and some non-state actors are employing serious and highly developed methods to intervene in our cyber-security, as the Government are well aware.

The capacity to do damage to the UK by bringing the transport system to a grinding halt, amidst thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of simultaneous crashes, is a delicious prospect. I absolutely guarantee the Minister, although I am sure that he does not need my guarantee to believe it, that someone sitting somewhere—if not several people sitting in several places—is planning that kind of offensive cyber-activity at this very moment. Many of those people have access to many of the people who will be involved in developing the software that will be used in the very machines that we want to be used on our roads.

That is an irony of the globalised world. This is not like the 18th century, when people sat behind huge national barricades and we did not use their technologies but they tried to use them against us. We are now in a position where the people who may use our technologies against us supply some of those technologies to us. That creates a degree of risk out of all proportion to anything we have witnessed before. I am a believer in automated vehicles—I do not think that we can resist this trend—but we need to ensure that an immensely higher level of cyber-security is built in from the start than we might think necessary under other circumstances.

I want to make one further point. This is one of those cases where externalities will not be internalised. It is not in the interests of particular manufacturers to worry very much about this issue. If I am a specific manufacturer of a specific automated vehicle, my interest is in producing something that is good to drive, cheap and normally safe, because that is the way I will sell the maximum quantity of it. If somebody tells me that I could make it safer from hacking, which is unlikely to occur, in the sense that there is a one-in-1,000 or one-in-10,000 or whatever chance of it being hacked, by making it significantly more expensive, my natural and commercial response will be not to add that protection, because it would make me less competitive. I am not particularly worried that Britain may be brought to a halt, because I am not Britain; I am a manufacturer, and I am answerable to my shareholders, not to the electors of the UK.

There is a clear area of intrinsic market failure here, where, however pure a free marketeer one is, Adam Smith principles apply and it is for the state to ensure that the externalities are internalised by legislating or regulating, or by reaching agreement with manufacturers. As I say, I do not believe that the Bill can be the vehicle for creating a whole new structure of invigilation of the cyber-security standards of automated vehicles, but the Minister, in conjunction with Ministers in parallel positions in other jurisdictions, needs to get to work on that rapidly. If that is not done, the Bill will be useless, because it will provide a framework for something that no rational Government will ever allow to occur.

We cannot allow the UK’s transport system to be put in peril by being easily accessible to hackers in a way that could cause hundreds of thousands of accidents simultaneously. It is a necessary concomitant to the Bill that there should be a serious attempt to create that degree of universal cyber-security for level 4 and level 5 vehicles. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that he is at this very moment getting the plane tickets to go and talk to all the other relevant Ministers and set up the international systems required to do something similar to the protocols that govern the GSM standard, which make it not unhackable, but much less hackable than previous mobile systems.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

Committee Debate: 6th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Of course I will wait until we get to clause 12. I do not read it the way the Minister does, but we will come to that.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 11 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 12

Smart charge points

[Karl Turner]

I beg to move amendment 6, in clause 12, page 7, line 29, after “security” insert “and provide safeguards against hacking”.

This amendment clarifies that smart charge points must have measures in place to safeguard against the risk of being hacked.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karl Turner]

Amendment 6 and new clause 19 address the issue of cyber security and hacking in relation to charging points. A lot of what we covered this morning applies to the amendment and the new clause, so I do not want to repeat what has already been said. Any element of data, digital infrastructure or digital function is incredibly valuable and increasingly involves a risk of being hacked. The data infrastructure and digital function behind the charging infrastructure and its interface with electric and automated vehicles are no different. We need to address cyber-security and data protection in relation to all these areas, including charge points.

Amendment 6 relates to charge point cyber security. Clause 12 contains a range of non-exhaustive specifications —we discussed them a few minutes ago—that a charge point must comply with. It appears that will involve a large amount of data being transmitted from the charge point. Measures are therefore needed to ensure that charge points and the data they process are protected against attempts at hacking. I think that is what the Government are getting at in subsection 2(e). Will the Minister clarify whether that provision also covers cyber security and the risk of hacking? I also invite him to clarify who the information that clause 12 refers to is to be shared with and where.

We need safeguards. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that if the safeguards are not in place, information could be downloaded from an electric or automated vehicle being serviced that would allow hackers to obtain information or—perhaps worse—control safety-critical elements of the vehicle’s functions.

On new clause 19, I will not repeat the points made this morning, but I would be grateful if the Minister could indicate what work has already been done. I am aware that a great deal of work is being done behind the scenes, but it would assist us to know who specifically his Department is consulting.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

In this useful dialogue we have got to the point of agreeing that it is necessary to have the information flow back to NGC, and that clause 11 does not provide for that to be mandated. The Minister ended his remarks on clause 11 by saying that clause 12 does allow the Secretary of State to mandate the provision of that information by charge points to the National Grid Company.

I said that I did not read clause 12 the way the Minister does, and that is because I suffer from this problem of reading the thing as if it were in English and I were a speaker of English. Let me illustrate to the Minister why a normal reader of English would not take clause 12(1) and (2), as currently constructed, to have the effect he is describing. If he can then explain to me why a lawyer reading it in some other language believes that it will have that effect, I will gracefully and happily give way, because I have no desire to engage in unnecessary redrafting.

In English then, clause 12(1) states:

“Regulations may provide that a person must not sell or install a charge point unless it complies with prescribed requirements.”

That is entirely about the design of the charge points; it says nothing about the provision of information. It is perfectly true that clause 12(2), again in English, states in the governing phrase:

“The requirements that may be imposed under subsection (1) include requirements relating to the technical specifications—”.

It then gives some examples—I take the point that this is not an exhaustive list—which do include, in clause 12(2)(g), the capability of the machine in question to be “accessed remotely” and, in clause 12(2)(a),

“to receive and process information provided by a prescribed person”

and even more appositely, in clause 12(2)(c),

“to transmit information…to a prescribed person”.

I accept that clause 12 is drafted in such a way that, when read in English, it would enable the Minister to pass a regulation stating that the charge point in question must be designed to have the capacity to transmit information to the prescribed person—namely, the NGC, if the Minister prescribed that. I accept all that, but having a machine with the capacity to transmit certain information does not entail the person who has the machine in their possession actually transmitting or allowing the transmission of the data in question.

There is nothing here in English that gives the Minister the power to mandate that the person who owns or supplies the relevant charge point has to allow the transmission of those data. I know of no obvious principle of jurisprudence that would mean that having a machine of a certain capacity means that it has to be used in a way that lives up to that capacity. It would indeed be strange if there were such a thing, because there are many instances in which people have things with capacities that are lawful, or even mandated, without having the obligation to use them in that way.

If the Minister can explain why enforcing a rule that the charge point has the capacity to deliver the relevant information to the NGC will automatically entail the machines all doing that, I will be delighted and I shall stop inquiring about it. If he cannot, this clearly needs some adjustment so that he has the further power to mandate the flow of data and not just the capacity of the relevant equipment to transmit such data.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

Committee Debate: 5th sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 14th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Karl Turner]

Clause 7 sets out when a car is deemed to be driving itself, or in automated mode, but there is no mention of what happens if the vehicle is designed or manufactured in a faulty way or is hacked due to a failure by the manufacturer to install adequate protective software.

How would our amendment improve the Bill? While we all welcome the opportunities that the new technology will bring, we also have to recognise that it will bring risk. A lot of those risks will be around the software used, and they therefore may be harder to pick up than in a conventional vehicle. We all know the risks of hacking in computer systems. We have had experience in this House relatively recently of a cyber-attack—a hacking event—on Members’ emails. That experience is commonplace in workplaces across the country. When hacking and cyber-crime can result in serious consequences, we need to be extremely cautious.

We have the opportunity to put safeguards into the Bill now to give protections in this area, rather than doing that later down the line. The Minister has repeated constantly that this is a modest Bill that is merely a skeleton and that regulation will have to come as technology improves. Indeed, given the uptake of these vehicles and the number of them being purchased, action will clearly be required where the technology changes, but there is a real risk in not legislating now, when we have the opportunity to ensure the safety of these things.

Our amendment would definitely tighten up this area of the Bill by setting out when an automated vehicle is capable of driving itself safely. That would give the driver protection with regards to liability, if it was proved that there was a manufacturer’s fault or if the vehicle had been hacked. I do not intend to press the amendment to a vote; its purpose is to start a discussion about this area, in particular the hacking element. The issue of cyber-security and vehicles being hacked has been discussed previously, in the predecessor to this Committee. I have read the Hansard report of those discussions and there was some very detailed debate, but it is important to look at it again now. I stand to be corrected, but the Minister previously said he would come back with potential changes in this area. However, I think he simply wrote to members of the previous Bill Committee.

New clause 18 would do exactly what we intend it to do. We now have the opportunity, and I hope that the Government will listen carefully.

[Sir Oliver Letwin (West Dorset) (Con)]

I want to talk about clause 7(1)(b), which deals with the interpretation of what it is for a vehicle to be insured. That takes us back to the discussion we had in the Committee’s previous sittings. I am grateful to the Minister for providing access to his officials in the interim. I am satisfied that the issues I was raising are handled in the Bill, but want to set out how I now understand that to be the case, so that the Minister can give us an assurance that I have got this right and we know for the future that that is how the Bill is meant to work. It is a little sad that we have to do quite a lot of interpretative work to understand how the Bill is working, but I understand that that is caused by the fact that it is trying to piggyback on the Road Traffic Act 1988.

It turns out that clause 7(1)(b) is critical to the whole structure, because it defines a vehicle as being insured if there is a policy in force in relation to the use of it. Whereas one might think, under clause 2(1)(b), that when the Bill says the vehicle is “insured” at the time of the accident, it means the vehicle is insured at the time of the accident—indeed, I fell into the trap of thinking that that is what clause 2(1)(b) meant, because that is what it says—in fact clause 2(1)(b) has to be read in the context of clause 7(1)(b). Therefore, it is not actually the vehicle that is insured; it is the person who is, or may be—but maybe isn’t—the driver whose policy is the relevant policy and is actually insured to drive that vehicle. That is what I now understand clause 2(1)(b), in the light of clause 7(1)(b), to mean.

What clause 2(1)(b) is actually trying to say is that, as long as there is a person in the vehicle who, one way or another, is insured to drive the vehicle, then the insurer of that person is liable for the accident, even if the vehicle is driving itself. It follows from that that even if the driver, who is not driving at the time when the vehicle is driving itself, is not the owner but is insured to drive the vehicle on a policy that gives him insurance to drive other cars, it is also the case that the insurer of that person, not of the owner or the vehicle but of the person who is the driver—or would have been, if he was driving—is the insurer who is liable for the crash caused by the vehicle when it is driving itself. If I have at last understood all that correctly, it follows that the problems that I and several Committee members foresaw, about things such as transition, disappear, given that it is always the same insurer who is liable both when the car is in automated mode and when the car is being driven, because it is the insurer of the driver—or crypto-driver—regardless of whether he is driving or the car is driving itself.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karl Turner]

I want to speak briefly to new clause 18. Before doing so, I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister’s officials for the work they have done with my office. They have been extremely helpful.

New clause 18 covers the issue of cyber-security and the hacking of automated vehicles. It would require the Secretary of State to consult with such persons as he considers appropriate within 12 months of the Bill receiving Royal Assent. I am not planning to push the new clause to a vote; its purpose is mainly to probe a little deeper to ensure that the Government properly and widely consult in this area. I would be grateful if the Minister indicated how that has already been done. I know that a great deal of work has gone on behind the scenes; will he assist the Committee by setting out who the Department has consulted with thus far?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I actually do not think that this matter can be dealt with in the Bill, but I agree with the shadow Minister that we should seek an assurance from the Government that they will spend the time that needs to be spent, once the Bill is out of this House, trying to deal with what is a very, very big problem.

It is easy to imagine that this is just science fiction, but it is not. It is more than imaginable that, as part of the convergence of networks and as the transport system becomes automated, the single biggest security vulnerability of the UK—and, while we are at it, of any other advanced economy—will be the ability of state or non-state actors to intervene in a whole series of its convergent networks. Obviously, there may also be threats from exogenous things such as space weather, which may affect convergent networks, including electricity, transport, communications and so on, but state actors and some non-state actors are employing serious and highly developed methods to intervene in our cyber-security, as the Government are well aware.

The capacity to do damage to the UK by bringing the transport system to a grinding halt, amidst thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of simultaneous crashes, is a delicious prospect. I absolutely guarantee the Minister, although I am sure that he does not need my guarantee to believe it, that someone sitting somewhere—if not several people sitting in several places—is planning that kind of offensive cyber-activity at this very moment. Many of those people have access to many of the people who will be involved in developing the software that will be used in the very machines that we want to be used on our roads.

That is an irony of the globalised world. This is not like the 18th century, when people sat behind huge national barricades and we did not use their technologies but they tried to use them against us. We are now in a position where the people who may use our technologies against us supply some of those technologies to us. That creates a degree of risk out of all proportion to anything we have witnessed before. I am a believer in automated vehicles—I do not think that we can resist this trend—but we need to ensure that an immensely higher level of cyber-security is built in from the start than we might think necessary under other circumstances.

I want to make one further point. This is one of those cases where externalities will not be internalised. It is not in the interests of particular manufacturers to worry very much about this issue. If I am a specific manufacturer of a specific automated vehicle, my interest is in producing something that is good to drive, cheap and normally safe, because that is the way I will sell the maximum quantity of it. If somebody tells me that I could make it safer from hacking, which is unlikely to occur, in the sense that there is a one-in-1,000 or one-in-10,000 or whatever chance of it being hacked, by making it significantly more expensive, my natural and commercial response will be not to add that protection, because it would make me less competitive. I am not particularly worried that Britain may be brought to a halt, because I am not Britain; I am a manufacturer, and I am answerable to my shareholders, not to the electors of the UK.

There is a clear area of intrinsic market failure here, where, however pure a free marketeer one is, Adam Smith principles apply and it is for the state to ensure that the externalities are internalised by legislating or regulating, or by reaching agreement with manufacturers. As I say, I do not believe that the Bill can be the vehicle for creating a whole new structure of invigilation of the cyber-security standards of automated vehicles, but the Minister, in conjunction with Ministers in parallel positions in other jurisdictions, needs to get to work on that rapidly. If that is not done, the Bill will be useless, because it will provide a framework for something that no rational Government will ever allow to occur.

We cannot allow the UK’s transport system to be put in peril by being easily accessible to hackers in a way that could cause hundreds of thousands of accidents simultaneously. It is a necessary concomitant to the Bill that there should be a serious attempt to create that degree of universal cyber-security for level 4 and level 5 vehicles. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us that he is at this very moment getting the plane tickets to go and talk to all the other relevant Ministers and set up the international systems required to do something similar to the protocols that govern the GSM standard, which make it not unhackable, but much less hackable than previous mobile systems.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Karl Turner]

I beg to move amendment 2, in clause 3, page 3, line 4, at end insert—

“(3) The Secretary of State may by regulations define when it is and is not appropriate for a person in charge of the vehicle to allow the vehicle to drive itself.”

This amendment requires the Government to provide regulatory guidance for when it is and is not appropriate for a person to allow an automated vehicle to drive itself.

It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I do not intend to keep the Committee terribly long on this issue. As the Bill is drafted, the

“insurer or owner of an automated vehicle is not liable”

where the event was caused by a person allowing the vehicle to drive itself

“when it was not appropriate to do so.”

The Bill does not define when it is and is not “appropriate to do so”. Our amendment requires the Government to provide regulatory guidance on when it is and is not appropriate for a person to allow an automated vehicle to drive itself.

This goes to points made previously by members of the Committee, not least the right hon. Member for West Dorset. It would clearly not be appropriate in some circumstances for vehicles to drive themselves. For example, early automated vehicles might be deemed safe to use only on motorways and not on some urban roads; or, for example, a software issue might arise such that using the automated function at that point would be absolutely inappropriate. It appears to me that the true intent of subsection 2 was to focus on bimodal vehicles, because it does not seem to apply to fully automated vehicles. Perhaps the Minister can clarify the position in his response.

One of the primary purposes of part 1 of the Bill is to provide a framework to give insurers, manufacturers and potential users greater clarity, providing confidence and encouraging progress on automated vehicles. However, it is still not clear from the Bill what the Government have in mind about when use of those vehicles would be inappropriate. I do not propose to press the amendment to a vote at this stage; I think the Minister has got the point I am making. It has been made and reiterated several times by members of the Committee. We are simply asking for regulations that better define those circumstances to be brought forward, because we cannot afford any confusion here. People must be absolutely clear where their obligations lie if we are to see the growth of the industry, which is something we all want. We do not want to leave these issues hanging over us.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I will address the points the shadow Minister has raised in a moment. Before I do, I want to come back to a fundamental point about the drafting of clause 3(2)—if you will allow me to do so now, Mr Bailey, rather than in a stand part debate—because it is relevant to the rest of the question. My concern relates to the word “wholly” in subsection (2). We discussed this point earlier today. My right hon. Friend the Minister said to me and the Committee that clause 3(2) was meant to solve the problem that I am worried about, which is that there are circumstances under which strict liability for the insurer of the machine is inappropriate, because the driver may do something either immediately before or some while before handing over to the machine that means he or she should not have handed over to the machine. Those are the very circumstances that the shadow Minister is also concerned about.

The Minister directed my attention to clause 3(2) as the solution. I pointed out then—I will now expand on the point—that if subsection (2) is intended as a solution, it is in desperate need of redrafting. The word “wholly”, which I assume has been inserted mindfully by parliamentary counsel, has a very definite meaning: it means “wholly”. Courts know perfectly well what to do with that when they come across a statute that very unusually—this is not something that we normally find—says that a contributory agency is not contributory, but absolute, and the person in question is wholly responsible. The court will interpret that very strictly, and rightly so, otherwise what on earth are we doing drafting Bills and Acts of Parliament?

There could be a circumstance under which the driver was wholly the cause of the accident. Incidentally, I cannot quite think what that might be. It is a pretty remote circumstance, and I would be interested to know whether the Minister can think of an example, but I accept the possibility of such a thing. Most of the time, however, it will be jolly tricky to work out who is actually responsible.

Let me go back to my example of leaving the motorway, but this time the driver was awake and flicked a switch that specifically made the machine take over. Let us imagine that the technology allowed that—it might or might not, we heard conflicting evidence on that, but suppose that it did—and the driver thought that the circumstances were such that the machine could take over and the machine thought, and that is probably an appropriate word to use, given that it is artificial intelligence, that it was appropriate for the machine to take over. However, they were both wrong. The machine was not good at handling the circumstance and it crashed. The machine got it wrong because it should not have taken over, and the driver got it wrong because they should not have asked the machine to take over. Who has caused the accident? I do not know. I am absolutely sure that there are people who will make millions and millions of pounds, and they are the QCs who will argue such cases in court, along with the rafts of solicitors and the enormous apparatus that goes with that. They will all be arguing about who is responsible.

If we lose the word “wholly”, we eliminate that argument, which I assume is the point of putting it in, because, as clause 3(2) is drafted, it says, “If there is the slightest doubt about whether the machine was in any scintilla of a way responsible for the crash, the driver is not wholly responsible and therefore the machine is wholly responsible, so there is strict liability for the insurer of the machine.” It may be that that is what the Minister wants to do, but it is a very odd thing to do, because the costs of insuring these machines would go up compared with what they would otherwise be. Under circumstances in which the driver was a heavy contributor to the cause of the accident by handing over inappropriately, the insurer of the machine would nevertheless be strictly liable because the machine made one millionth of the contribution to the cause of the accident. That is the effect of clause 3(2) as drafted, and I do not believe that that can be the Minister’s intention. That needs looking at.

Turning to the point made by the shadow Minister on regulations and clarification, I agree that it should be perfectly possible to handle the question of when it is appropriate or not to hand over through secondary legislation. I suspect that it will not be the kind of secondary legislation that we have been used to in the main hitherto. It will be very complicated legislation, because it may have to specify processes rather than results. I do not believe that the technology is likely to develop in a way that will make it obvious to the driver in advance, by reading some kind of guide, when the driver is meant to hand over and when not. I suspect that will be interactive and dynamic, and I suspect that the Minister’s successors—the Secretaries of State who will do such things in regulation—will have to find some way of compelling the manufacturers to create an apparatus that tells the driver in a dynamic and interactive way, as they are driving along, whether, as a matter of fact, it is safe to hand over to the machine or not.

One way in which that could happen is the way we were presented with in the evidence sessions. The machine invites the driver to take over and then there is a simple double rule: only machines that invite drivers, as opposed to giving them instructions, are allowed on the road—and, while we are at it, only those certified by the Secretary of State as being safe when they offer the chance to take over are allowed—and, moreover, the driver is never allowed to hand over to the machine except when it does offer that. That is a possible configuration. That would be quite a complicated piece of secondary legislation, because it would have to be accompanied by a series of quite complicated technical codes that ensure that it is put into practice and that the cars manufactured fulfil all those requirements.

There are of course many other models, but it is terribly important to recognise that if the Minister wants to achieve clarity here—as I think he does, and rightly so—as well as getting the drafting of clause 3(2) right, so that it is clear under what circumstances there really is liability for the insurer of the machine when there is a mixture of causation, he needs to recognise that there will need to be either a quite large superstructure of regulation that gives us clarity about the circumstances under which handover is appropriate or, at least, processes that make it unnecessary to have such clarity in a set of rules. I hope that he will recognise in his closing remarks that even if the Bill does not give new powers to do that—because he believes he has somehow got them already—he will consider all those questions anon, as well as looking at the drafting of subsection (2).

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Karl Turner

Committee Debate: 2nd sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Karl Turner]

Q On charging infrastructure, we have just heard evidence from the Petrol Retailers Association, which is very worried about being mandated to have charging points on the forecourts of its members. What is your prediction of what would happen if we did not mandate them to do that? If it was not required by law physically to invest and have them on their forecourts, would they bother?

Marcus Stewart: At the moment, the majority of people who own electric vehicles charge them at home, but there is a limit to how many houses have off-street parking. About 43% of properties do not have access to off-street parking, therefore other forms of charging facilities need to be available. They could be a mixture of charging types at destinations, workplaces, supermarkets, and so on.

From the evidence that we have gathered when we have talked to and interviewed people, key locations on the motorway and strategic network are seen as key enablers for the roll-out of electric vehicles and will help to remove some of the concerns around range anxiety which is seen as one of the main barriers to the take-up of electric vehicles at the moment. Charging and plus charging in particular at key locations across the country will facilitate the roll-out. If you do not have that, it is likely that the roll-out will be slower.

Suleman Alli: I support that. I would say that there is going to be a paradigm shift. It is a bit like when we used to get water from a well and we now get it from a tap in our home. In the same way, I do not think that petrol forecourts will be the only place where we will recharge our vehicles in the future. In our engagement with the marketplace, we are seeing major supermarkets looking at how they can offer fast charging to be a key differentiator for their customers. We are seeing hotels considering the same and local authorities looking to explore how on-street charging can be part of the solution. Based on the engagement we have done, I believe that it will be a much more diversified charging environment: it will not just be petrol forecourts.

Robert Evans: We have members who are very interested to install charge points at these locations. They see them as locations where there will be high utilisation rate and a good economic case for those charge points to be used. We are also talking here about an insurance policy—it is not a mandating per se. If the market does not deliver, the Act gives Government the ability to step in. It is not by definition a mandating until you pass additional legislation.

The members are very interested in installing in these locations, but they are other people’s land. Part of the issue here is the ability to encourage landowners to install charge points at their locations. In some cases it is a fuel supplier, in other cases it is one of the three main companies that operate motorway service areas. You have to recognise that there is a desire to install in those locations, but you cannot put your asset on someone else’s land.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Q I am delighted to hear what you say and absolutely agree with you. If the problem of range anxiety is addressed or partially addressed by fast charging at service stations and so on, we are still left with—I think you said—40% of homes that do not have off-street car parking. Have you done any assessment of the kinds of costs involved for the distribution network operators if over the period between now and 2040 there was a roll-out of universal charge points on the street in towns and cities—probably not all areas—where there is lawful parking?