Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Lord Swire

2nd reading: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

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

I draw the attention of the House to a potential interest of mine: I am discussing a possible role with the Faraday Institute, which promotes battery development in this country.

I want to make two points about two aspects of the Bill that will need further discussion in Committee. I would have raised them in proceedings on the earlier incarnation of the Bill if it had not become so evident that it was going to disappear from view due to the election.

The first relates to clauses 2 and 6. It is clear that the Bill intends to do what my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime said, which is to make the situation clear for the insurance industry. Unfortunately, it does not quite succeed in that in its current draft. He slipped into pointing out the problem himself when he inadvertently spoke of the driver not handing over control to the automated system, but, as Hansard will show, legitimately handing over control.

If one looks at the articulation of clauses 2 and 6, one sees that what determines whether the insurer or the person is liable—apart from the question of whether the vehicle is insured—is whether the vehicle was being run by the machinery rather than by the person. Unfortunately, that is not quite a complete explanation of what we need to have explained in order to make this work in terms of liability. It will not be a complete explanation of what we will need to treat this in the criminal law—clause 6 comes very close to a piece of criminal law. It will be very important that the criminal law does reflect the liability structure in the civil law. The reason why none of these questions is completely answered is that the question arises, “Was it, under these circumstances, appropriate or not appropriate for the person who was or might have been the driver to hand over control to the machine, which had become the driver?”

In case anybody thinks that that is an academic point, let me point out that it is extraordinarily likely that, as the technology develops and as artificial intelligence more and more becomes a part of that technology, we will find that, under these clauses, the Minister has to distinguish between different moments when it is appropriate to hand over control, and moments when it is not. For example, it may be that, for the sake of our motorways running much more efficiently, much more accident-free and much more intensively, it would be appropriate and, at some point, even mandatory for a motorist to hand over control of the vehicle when they are on a motorway in a way that might not be appropriate when they are on a single track road in my constituency on a rainy day. It may take a lot longer for the machinery to be able to handle the single track road in West Dorset than for it to be able to handle steady progress along the M4. As that is a likely situation, the moment of handover is a crucial element of getting the liability structure sorted out. If we do not get that sorted out now at this early stage, the insurance companies, when they come to consider the legislation, will discover that they do not have the framework that they thought they had, and we will not get the benefits that my right hon. Friend rightly seeks from that part of the Bill.

I also welcome part 2 of the Bill. When I was in government, I was involved in considerable efforts to improve the charging structure. It is the right thing to do. Much that needs to be done is dealt with in this part of the Bill. The regulation-making powers enable Ministers to deal with many of the points that have been raised in the preceding parts of this debate. Unfortunately, the regulation-making power in clause 9 and even in clauses 10, 11 and 12 is not only incomplete, but very materially incomplete. It will miss out the single biggest part of what needs to be regulated.

Reference has been made in this debate to off-street charging and to free-phase charging. These are the crucial elements because for that half of car users who do not have off-street parking—typically that is urban dwellers, particularly those who live in flats and terraced houses in urban settings—charging overnight, or at any time when they are not at work, will typically have to take place on urban streets. The people who will deal with urban streets are not local authorities, which was mentioned in the debate, or any of the objects of regulation here, but the public utilities that service our streets with the electric cables that run through them.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Does my right hon. Friend not agree that, during the transition stage when we move to electric autonomous vehicles, there will be a period in which a goodly percentage of the population will retain normal diesel or petrol vehicles? How will we divide up the streets? If every single parking space in an urban area is given over to electric charging, will that prevent those who do not need to have electric charging from parking? Will we have to discriminate against them?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

My right hon. Friend raises a good question, which has a very clear answer. For decades, in Saskatchewan and other parts of western Canada where it is extremely cold, every single parking meter—parking meters are common on the streets there—has been equipped with a power point, enabling the driver to plug in the car radiator with the signal advantage that the car can then be started, which it otherwise could not be. It is perfectly possible to mandate that the utilities place charging throughout all urban streets so that every place is a charging point and then the question that he raises disappears, because a driver uses it if they are a conventional internal combustion engine and if they are electric. Gradually, there will be more electric cars and fewer internal combustion engines. The space will be the space and it will always offer charging. If we do that—it will not be expensive if it is done incrementally, starting now under regulations—we will find that the largest part of the problem of charging disappears. Unfortunately, with the way that the regulatory powers have been cast, the Secretary of State does not have the power to make regulations of that kind and therefore a substantial amendment is needed to clause 9. That will also enable the Secretary of State to do the second most important thing, which is to mandate that there be free-phase charging. That is important because the speed of charging for those who have off-street parking is very material to the take-up of electric vehicles. That speed will be materially improved if free-phase charging is available.

My point is very simple. This is an excellent Bill as it does some very necessary things. It is not the whole answer to life, or even to automated electric vehicles, but it was never meant to be. However, there are deficiencies in the way that it is drafted that will need to be cured in Committee if it is to achieve the two main purposes that it sets out to achieve.

[Sir Hugo Swire]

Let me elaborate further on the point about charging versus non-charging. On domestic charging, the whole point with an electric car is that a person can feed back some of the electricity into a meter overnight and make some money. What happens if they have parked off-street and plugged their car into a meter? If they want to feed back some of their charge overnight, will there be a way of gaining compensation financially?

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

It absolutely needs to be so and clause 12 has actually been correctly drafted in that respect. The provisions for smart charge points precisely allow the Secretary of State to ensure that there is interactive charging, which is evidently exactly what we need on our streets so that the electric cars of Britain become a massive battery resource. That will squish the shape of the load curve, so there will be longer periods during which renewable and nuclear resources will produce unlimited quantities of energy at a zero marginal cost without having to build the large amounts of back-up that would otherwise be required to deal with the peak. That is because one hopes that the peak will increasingly be dealt with by the battery resource of the nation’s cars when they are not being used. We will only get that effect if all the cars that are plugged in are plugged into smart points that can receive, as well as transmit, electricity. Of course, that also requires a design of vehicle that enables the on-board computer to respond to the price signals coming through the grid. It also requires half-hourly settlement of the grid, which is, in fact, already being introduced. We have made a good deal of progress towards the aim that my right hon. Friend rightly advocates. In that respect, the Bill will enable us to press the progress much further, but it will only do so if it relates to on-street car parking made possible through the utilities that can do this on a universal basis, and those measures are urgently needed.