Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Seventh sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Matt Western

Committee Debate: 7th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 16th November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

I am delighted that the Minister is talking to the National Grid and others. I entirely sympathise with the hon. Gentleman’s desire to see a transparent product of those discussions: a continuous published analysis of impacts.

There are two kinds of impact. The hon. Gentleman mentioned the adverse impact on the grid from peak moments early in the morning or late in the evening, and in winter there is a lot of fast charging, which will increase the peak effect. However, I am much more interested in the other kind of impact, which I see as much more serious: the benefits, which many of us have seen for some years, that the National Grid anticipates from peak shaving. Night-time, and indeed daytime, vehicle charging can be switched off at moments indicated as economically advantageous to the car owner by the half-hourly settlement price. It is also highly economically advantageous for the grid to have reduced demand at such moments, avoiding the need for additional power. That would transform the economics of intermittent energy supply, including through renewables, for example solar, which are currently not regarded as having any contribution to capacity. I am very much in favour of new clause 14’s general principle; I am sure the Minister is about to assure us that he will fulfil that principle through regular publications.

[Matt Western]

To emphasise the point and go back to buses, which I mentioned earlier, the scale of the need will be quite significant, say in our town centres, where we may have a bus that will be using these charge points for opportunity charging—an immediate fast charge—drawing 300 kW. If we think about, say, 10 buses in our town centres, we can imagine what sort of requirement would be needed. I add that to the debate.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

The hon. Gentleman is clearly right that the bus issue is serious. This is not the place for a prolonged discussion about the patterns of charging and so on, but my own instinct is that battery life will have got to the point at which overnight charging will probably mainly suffice for buses. I am also quite optimistic about the ability to have charging en route on the most thickly used routes. Let us leave that aside for the moment. Clearly, we are joined in the view that the Minister will need, through the grid and others, to publish assessments of all kinds of use and storage, including not just cars but buses, taxis and vans, and indeed bicycles, although that is a minor item.

Another issue connected to new clause 14 goes back to the third of the letters that the Minister has helpfully written to the Committee in response to points that I raised earlier about clauses 11 and 12. I am very grateful for the subsequent discussions the Minister has facilitated about that with his officials. I hope he can confirm that he will now look at one specific issue further, which I do not think is wholly handled in the third of his letters. That is the question of ensuring that the vires given by clause 12(1) and (2), for him or the Secretary of State to issue regulations mandating the transfer of data from charge points through to the grid and the distribution network operators, are sufficiently well established by a technical drafting amendment to ensure that they are not challenged successfully in court.

That is obviously vital, because if the spirit of new clause 14 is to be observed and the grid is to be able to publish reasonably reliable forecasts of the pattern of charging and storage provided or demanded by electric vehicles, it needs to be able to use and mine the data from the use and charging of electric vehicles as it evolves. The only way to structure an electricity system is to plan some years ahead. Therefore, we need evolving information to be relayed from an early stage, so that before the load or the opportunity for storage become very big, the pattern is well understood.

To say one further word about that, the Committee must be aware that it is not a marginal point. If those patterns are well understood, the history suggests that one can save in the order of one quarter to one third of the investment costs of the entire electricity supply industry, compared with a situation in which there is chaotic unanticipated demand. The whole system relies on ensuring that one has a capacity margin at peak. If we cannot accurately predict the peak, because we do not understand the configurations of demand and supply on the system, we have to over-provide. We thus end up having bought a lot of heavy metal that is sitting there doing nothing, which is very expensive for the economy. We are talking about fives or 10s of billions of pounds. It is material that that data flow starts, starts early, and starts accurately, without missing anything off, so that the grid can start building a transparent picture that then, as in the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun’s new clause 14, is regularly published and updated.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Matt Western

Committee Debate: 3rd sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 2nd November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Undoubtedly so—it is No. 10 calling the Minister to higher things, yet they may not be of such great significance to our future as the Bill.

In clause 1(1)(b), the Secretary of State is asked to opine on whether the vehicle that is being approved and put on the list is capable of “safely driving”. An awful lot will hang on that word “safely” in what will probably be a rich jurisprudence over many decades. The hon. Member for Eltham is rightly drawing our attention to the fact that “safely” in this context could mean something technical—is the machine technically sophisticated enough to deal with circumstances—or it could mean something much deeper. It could mean the ethics and applied intelligence built into the machine so as to produce views or choices that accord with the social preferences of Parliament about, in trying to minimise the effect of an accident, who is to be sacrificed under circumstances where two different groups of persons could be sacrificed. Alternatively, it could mean any other set of very complicated ethical choices.

I of course bow to the Department’s legal advisers, parliamentary counsel and any external counsel, but my own hunch is that there is not enough jurisprudence available to guide us on whether “safely” will bear that amount of weight. I wonder whether the Minister should consider at least giving the Secretary of State the duty in due course to consider not just whether the machinery is capable of driving “safely”, but whether it is capable of driving—I do not know quite what words parliamentary counsel would want to choose—ethically or properly or in a socially desirable way. That is an odd kind of question to ask about a machine, I grant, but these are odd machines we are considering.

The hon. Member for Eltham is on to a good thing with amendment 8, even if he does not press it to a vote, because he raises an issue we will have to address. What we all do not want to get to—I think the Committee is united in this—is a sort of red flag situation where machines have been authorised because they have a large amount of technological wizardry in them that makes them highly sophisticated, but they make choices that any sane Parliament or Government, or indeed public, would regard as wholly morally objectionable, socially undesirable or both.

We need to think very hard about ensuring that the legislation at least lets our successors—whoever may be Secretary of State at the time—consider that range of issues when approving something. Otherwise, the Secretary of State will say, “Oh well, this is technically okay, but I don’t like the look of what it is going to do by way of the kinds of decisions it is going to make,” and some adviser will tell that Secretary of State, “Sorry, Secretary of State, it is ultra vires for you to refuse this vehicle on the list just because it is going to mow down young people in preference to old people”—or something—“because you are only allowed to determine safety, not ethics.” It is quite important that we get that precise wording right. I am grateful to you for your tolerance, Sir Edward.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

I want to pick up the points made by the right hon. Gentleman. I was trying to think of parallels to try to understand this and imagine what it might be like in five or 10 years from now, and I guess I was likening it to the introduction of, say, cruise control and how that works with the insurance industry. If a driver instigates cruise control in an urban area and sets it at a speed that is in excess of the limit on that roadway, where would the responsibility and liability fall? The industry and technologies are improving at a pace. As was said in the Chamber on Second Reading, it is difficult to imagine where we will be, but I imagine that essentially the liability should be with the driver. If the driver has introduced the cruise control or automated driving system—in whatever form that may take—that is their choice just as it is their choice to manoeuvre from one lane to another today, which might ultimately result in an accident.

Perhaps I am not appreciating the fine nuance of the debate, but I would have assumed that, ultimately, the liability has to be with the driver. In the event of an accident, the telematics would be able to provide data to the insurance industry to prove things one way or another.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Oliver Letwin and Matt Western

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

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q I was interested in Mr Madderson’s point about not mandating. The car industry has often reacted well when it has been mandated to do things; when things such as Euro NCAP were introduced, it followed suit and made dramatic improvements. Given the ambition of the Government and across all parties to see more adoption of ultra low emission vehicles, and given that markets such as Norway’s are much further ahead than ours, what should we be doing to ensure that we are in a leadership position in electric vehicle technology?

Brian Madderson: It is also about providing the carrot by way of funding. That is going to be the big spur to encourage firms, in a rapidly changing market, to take that investment decision and to ensure that such decisions are supported by their banks, lenders, shareholders and others. At the moment, you do not appear to be mandating hotels, leisure centres or workplaces, all of which are admirably fine locations for charging points; you just seem to be mandating motorway service areas and large fuel retailers, whatever that description means. We do not think that is fair, reasonable or necessary.

[Sir Oliver Letwin]

Q I just want to clarify something that Steve Gooding said. Why do you think that it is clear that clause 2(1), which refers to

“an automated vehicle when driving itself”,

applies only to level 4? Why does it not apply to level 3?

Steve Gooding: I am not a parliamentary draftsman, so I would have to be reassured about this, but to me “when driving itself” means that the driver of the vehicle is not legally responsible for the vehicle; the vehicle is driving itself. That is what I intended to convey.