Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Richard Fuller and Steve Baker

Thursday 16th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful, but I fear that I have still not been fully persuaded by my right hon. Friend in this battle between the never-to-be-demeaned insurance sector—the foundation of all human endeavour—and the entrepreneurial spirit. There is a third person in this little equation, which is the driver him or herself. I worry that the perpetuation of the word “monitoring” rather than “controlling” is essentially designed for a substantial amount of risk to be shifted from those two participants and on to the driver themselves. The message may go, “You were not providing sufficient monitoring of your circumstances in this autonomous vehicle.”

In this era of innovation, clarity is not only required by insurers and innovators, it is required by those people who create the demand for the product. Therefore, if we are setting up a regulatory structure that in any way takes away from the confidence of people to spend their hard-earned money on an innovation or new type of product, we are backtracking from that commitment. I would like a little more persuasion from the Minister—perhaps not today, but as he is going to write to the Committee prior to Report. Otherwise, I would say that there is a good case for the Government to review clause 1(1)(b) and replace the word “monitored” with the word “controlled”.

[Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has made an interesting case, which I have listened to carefully, but the word “controlled” is even narrower than the word “monitored”. Putting that word in instead would imply that vehicles listed by the Secretary of State might need to be monitored but not controlled, which would defeat the case he is making, so I am a bit confused about his end purpose. I have sympathy with what he seems to be suggesting, but the solution he proposes seems to defeat his argument. Will he be clear on what it is he wants to deliver in the clause?

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention, as always. We are wrestling with what is the most adequate and fair basis for defining this new set of vehicles, without trying to pick technologies or understand what might happen. The basis for that has to be what the remit is of human behaviours that will be differentiated by this new set of vehicles. There are a set of human behaviours aligned to monitoring, which will then define whether someone is in or out, and a set aligned to controlling, which will define whether someone is in or out. My argument is that a case can be made that a definition for these types of vehicles based on an expectation of control by the individual is clearer and provides a sharper allocation of responsibility between insurers and manufacturers, without passing the buck on to uncertainty about the responsibilities of individual drivers. That is what my questions to my right hon. Friend the Minister aim to understand.

The small point I wish to check with my right hon. Friend the Minister is whether he can advise how prototype vehicles will be treated? I listened to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes South talk about going around Milton Keynes in a prototype vehicle. Will the Minister advise how prototypes will be handled and insured in this era of innovation? We can anticipate that future field trials will be much more extensive. How will they be treated?

I agree with the Minister that the amendment does not really take us very far, and I do not think it is worth supporting. However, clause 1(3) says:

“The Secretary of State must publish the list when it is first prepared and each time it is revised.”

He may not know—I may be asking how long a piece of string is—but has he had some indication of what the regularity or frequency of that updating may be? Has the industry advised on its expectations?

Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Richard Fuller and Steve Baker

Thursday 16th March 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Baker]

At last it seems that it was worth studying for that MSc in computer science, not because we shall discuss formal specification using Object-Z, or the state of communicating sequential processes, and not even because of implementation languages, emulation and testing, but because I think it would be appropriate to replace the term “operating system” in clause 4 with the single word “software”. All the amendments in the group are intended to do that.

I should like briefly to elaborate on what I said on Second Reading, to explain why these amendments are necessary to achieve the purpose of the Bill. In the explanatory notes, clause 4 is described very simply:

“This clause ensures that insurers should not have to bear liability to the insured person in some situations where the vehicle’s software or operating system are altered, or not updated.”

That is the purpose of the clause, but subsection (1) refers to

“alterations to the vehicle’s operating system made by the insured person, or with the insured person’s knowledge, that are prohibited under the policy…a failure to install software updates to the vehicle’s operating system”.

I should like to make briefly and, I hope, engagingly the case that that is drafted too narrowly and that, to achieve the purpose of the Bill if it were tested in court, we need to simplify it and use the term “software”.

The “Oxford Dictionary of Computing” defines “operating system” as:

“The set of software products that jointly controls the system resources and the processes using these resources on a computer system.”

That refers to the software that controls the hardware and makes it available to other programs. Opposition Members have gamely tabled amendment 20, which would delete “vehicle’s operating system” and insert

“application software related to the vehicle’s automated function”.

There is great merit in what they are trying to do. Again, the dictionary defines “an applications program” as:

“Any program that is specific to the particular role that a given computer performs within a given organization”—

it is talking about business, rather than cars—

“and makes a direct contribution to performing that role.”

Just as I said on Second Reading, it would technically be the application software that did the automated driving in such cars. I therefore fear that if the Government and the Committee were to keep the definition used throughout clause 4 and specify the term “operating systems”, we could find that an unintended conclusion was reached if it was necessary to test the law in court after an accident.

The solution is simple. The “Oxford Dictionary of Computing” defines software as:

“A generic term for those components of a computer system that are intangible rather than physical.”

I propose in amendment 8 that

“‘software’ in relation to an insured vehicle…means those components of the vehicle’s computer system that are intangible rather than physical, however stored.”

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his dissertation on software systems, but can he advise me? We want to avoid the problem that we were talking about earlier in trying to define what might happen in the future. New software systems might be created that were unknown at the beginning and software—malware, for example—that was never conceived of when the operating system was developed might be added and somehow find its way into the computer systems of an automated vehicle. Under my hon. Friend’s amendment, how would those adaptations, legal or otherwise, or those new types of software be handled?

[Mr Baker]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for extending my remarks with his question. The reason why I have included “however stored” is to distinguish software stored in volatile memory from software stored in non-volatile memory, such as a USB key, and to include the firmware used to start up the low-level devices. The term “software” as I have defined it from the “Oxford Dictionary of Computing” is all-encompassing; it includes everything in the computer system that is intangible rather than physical. To answer his question directly, that definition encompasses all the software in the system however it might arise, so it is the maximal definition.

If we go back to making the legislative definition work, what I propose in amendment 1 is to leave out “operating system” and insert “software”. Amendment 2 would delete “’s operating system”, because that phrase is otiose, as a colleague said earlier. Clause 4 would simply read “a failure to install software updates to the vehicle”. I am trying to make this maximal to ensure that the Bill is absolutely clear that all the software in the system must be untampered with and up to date.

Industrial Strategy

Debate between Richard Fuller and Steve Baker

Thursday 20th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) on securing the debate. May I apologise to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and to other Members for not being here for a number of speeches? I hope I do not repeat what has been said.

[Mr Baker]

That is not likely.

[Richard Fuller]

I know that there is little chance of that.

George Brown, the noble Lord Heseltine, the noble Lord Mandelson, Vince Cable—to this hallowed series of greats we should now add the names of the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation and the Secretary of State as the people who will champion industrial strategy for our country. There are no two better minds in this House that we could apply to the task, but my concern is that we are sending our best brains in pursuit of a nonsense.

As the hon. Member for Aberdeen North has just said, we do not know what industrial strategy is—no one has defined it. When I heard earlier that the Minister had not yet published what the industrial strategy was, I raised my hands in prayer. As long as the Government continue not to define their industrial strategy, they will keep themselves out of a great deal of trouble. As soon as they define it, people will start to disagree with them, because the phrase “industrial strategy” is a wonderful grab bag of good ideas. There are loads of ideas in industrial strategy, every single one of them good. Ne’er a one is a bad idea, because a bad idea will not be allowed into the industrial strategy. In industrial strategy, all are winners, because no industrial strategy will pick a loser. The Minister will always say yes, because with an industrial strategy, one can never say no.

I hope that the Minister will maintain his rather reticent approach to industrial strategy so that he can continue to be friends with all Members across the Chamber and not upset anyone. In the phrase “industrial strategy” it is, first of all, hard for him to define industry. Is financial services an industry? The word “industry”, as my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington conjured up in his opening speech, is about manufacturing. What is strategy? Strategy is the pursuit of a goal, but what is the goal for an entire economy and, if there is a goal, how on earth is it the Government’s role to tell everyone what it is? That went out in the 1940s and ’50s with Soviet planning. I know that my friend the Minister has no interest in returning to those days, but unfortunately he may unwittingly, in his endeavours, encourage Opposition Members to think that the good old days of centralised socialism are back. He would not wish to be a fellow traveller on that journey to despair.

Industrial strategy, we are told, is positive because it enables us to think about the long term, but that is what shareholders do. We think about the news cycle and we think about the election cycle. We have to make sure that, in five years, we are re-elected. When we talk about consensus in other countries, we have to recognise that consensus in this country is built differently; it comes from the competition of ideas, and from one set of new ideas being subsequently accepted by the opposing party. The promotion by the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher of a reduction in the power of trade unions and a liberalisation of markets was accepted by the subsequent Labour Government. The Labour Government’s introduction of the national minimum wage and regulation against discrimination in the workplace was accepted by the coalition Government. That is how we build consensus, and that is not compatible with the expectation that one can set an industrial strategy that stands for all time. The Minister will be here, I am sure, until he gets promoted, but at some stage—perhaps in 20 years’ time—the Opposition will get ready to take over power, at which point the long-term plan may be picked apart.

To be slightly more helpful to the Minister, I will point to some areas that he and his colleagues might like to look at. Although I would not call these things an industrial strategy, they might be good ideas. If we are to be successful, as my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Mr Mak) mentioned, we have to promote innovation. Innovation is promoted by lowering taxes, ensuring that our markets are flexible, and looking carefully at regulatory sunsets to ensure that incumbents cannot use regulation to defend themselves against insurgents. Corporate governance also needs to be looked at seriously, as we discussed in the previous debate.

I commend my right hon. Friend the Member for Tatton (Mr Osborne) for his productivity plan, not because it was about projects, but because it for the first time concentrated on what the Government can do regarding strategy, which is the implementation of things that are helpful, particularly for infrastructure. We need only look at the difficulties with the expansion of airport capacity in the south-east to see that we are very poor at implementing the decisions we make. I commend the productivity plan to the Minister for him to look at again.

The Prime Minister has rightly said that the United Kingdom is at the forefront of free trade. That is something on which the Minister and I clearly agree. Free trade is what the United Kingdom does best. We need to make sure we have appropriate protection against dumping, but we also need to be on the front foot in lowering our tariffs.

We are leaving the European Union, which is a major event for the whole of our economy. I understand that the Government want to form a view on that and know what actions they should take in the short term to assist us through this transition to a better and stronger future. However, each of these are things that the Government would do anyway. We do not need a Department for industrial strategy to do them; we do not need such a Department to improve our skills. We do not need one to change the law regarding the governance of our boards, although I agree with the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) that the Government should do that. We do not need the phrase “industrial strategy”. I am worried for the Minister in that, as he pursues it, he will set the Government up for a fall. I, for one, want to support the Government in their endeavours so that that does not happen.

Interest Rate Swap Derivatives

Debate between Richard Fuller and Steve Baker

Thursday 24th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller]

My hon. Friend is a defender of a system of true free-market principles. He has identified the twin problem mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest, which is that, in addition to the unfunded liability cause, we have now booked the profits and paid the bankers for going through the process that duped the people. Those involved should face criminal sanction.

[Steve Baker]

My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. I want to live in a free society with a free and commercially successful banking system, but we have to ask ourselves whether the current system has incentivised behaviour that is fraudulent under the law as it stands. The last thing we must do is allow ourselves, in a frenzy of condemnation, to start criticising a system on which our civilisation depends, when that criticism is unjustified. We should be looking at the law as it stands and checking—carefully investigating—whether individuals have broken the law. I am particularly concerned about IFRS. I do not think it complies with UK company law and think it has incentivised behaviour that is probably fraudulent.

Banking ought to be simple. It ought to be about connecting depositors with those who wish to borrow in order to invest for productive purposes, such as buying a house or even going on holiday, but predominantly it should be about investing to create real resources and real wealth, and to increase productive capacity and the balance of capital invested per head, so that real wages increase and the cost of living goes down. Instead, we have ended up with a system in which poor state intervention from one end to the other has created so much moral hazard and so many perverse incentives that it has become abundantly clear that a small number of individuals—far fewer than 1% of the population—have captured the state in order to turn implicit and explicit taxpayer guarantees, or bail-out funds, into personal remuneration. It is a disgrace.

The banking system needs to be made honest, and quickly, and part of that is a system of compensation for people who have been treated extremely badly.

Public Services (Social Enterprise and Social Value) Bill

Debate between Richard Fuller and Steve Baker

Friday 19th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

It is my great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) in supporting my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington (Chris White) and his Bill. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears), who spoke about the Bill with her characteristic upbeat breeziness. She was absolutely right to do so.

The Bill has three merits. First, it is a recognition of the coming of age of an institutional form. Secondly, it is a celebration of entrepreneurship. Thirdly, we must understand that the Bill is an enabler of very positive things that can be done to promote the support and funding of our social goods. It is therefore an absolute pleasure to support my hon. Friend the Member for Warwick and Leamington.

On the point about the history of institutions, I shall avoid too much philosophical musing. [Interruption.] Well, I shall do a little. Each of us as an individual has motivations: things that inspire us and push us to achieve our goals and objectives in life. But most of us are very reliant on institutions to enable us to achieve our goals. That may be our local Church, a programme run by a local council, a trade union that is there to defend us and motivate us in a particular way, a small business that we work for or an entrepreneurial leader whom we follow in order to create our own business. Historically, we have had to give something up in return—our motivations have to be shaped by the motivations of that institutional form. In the military, people cannot make things up as they go along; they have to follow orders to achieve their objectives. Similarly, in corporations, there are certain guidelines intended to achieve shareholder value. I am quite doctrinaire about this. I think that it is important that institutions are clear on their purpose, which is why I welcome and celebrate the growth of social enterprises as a new institutional form.

Social enterprises overcome some of the concerns about trying to make for-profit companies adhere to non-commercial principles. I remember many years ago arguing with Professor Amitai Etzioni about the role of corporate and other organisations. I have not changed my opinion on that over the years. Subsequently we saw the growth of cause-related marketing and other factors that were trying to find a more creative way for for-profit companies to pursue their social objectives other than through traditional donations and sponsorships. Although those have their place, there has always been a gap for a new form of institution to play a role—one that social enterprises have come to play most forcefully over the last 20 or so years. That has helped in that our motivations can now have a different set of stabilisers rather than the straightforward ones of the past.

The Bill is important because it recognises that role. Those of us who were here in the debate about growth last week will remember listening to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) talking about how we can recognise different manifestations of growth and get beyond a pure statistic of GDP growth. That is another reason why these new forms are very important.

I said that this was a coming of age—kind of a 21st birthday—mainly because it was about 21 years ago that I was trying to understand what we could do after the changes wrought both in this country under a Conservative Government and in the United States under President Reagan’s Administration which had identified, certainly for Conservatives, the weakness in government, as an institution, in providing the social goods that many of us as individuals want. I am a firm believer that each of us has a view of fairness, and that we aggregate those views to come up with a collective view of what is fair, or what fairness represents for us as a society. We saw in the 1980s that people had misgivings about the weaknesses of the state and government in delivering, effectively and efficiently, those social goods and services that we wanted.

For a period, for many of us there was a lack of balance. We were not enabling the provision of a sufficient number of social goods and services, not because we did not want them, but because we did not believe in the ability of the government structure to provide them on our behalf. That institutional failure has been addressed over the intervening 20 years, and I again pay tribute to the work of the last Labour Government in identifying that weakness and looking to stimulate alternative ways of providing those goods and services.

Entrepreneurship is, to me, one of the most wonderful motivations that someone can have in life: one has a vision, a mission and an idea, and one wants to create and do something for society. That is extremely important. I am a firm believer in small businesses. I know that in my own community of Bedford and Kempston we rely on small businesses to create prosperity and jobs for the future. But entrepreneurship does not have to come from a profit motive; it can come from a social motive. The inspiration for a doctor is not making a lot of money; it is making people better. The inspiration for many entrepreneurs may not be a desire to maximise their personal wealth; it may well be that they want to have an impact in their local community. For organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses we need to embrace that sense of different motivations that enable people to say, “Here’s my creativity. Here’s my inspiration.” I believe that the Bill will enable us to do that.

[Steve Baker]

I associate myself closely with my hon. Friend’s comments, but I remain confused about why we need to encode this creative search to produce value for others in national and local plans.

[Richard Fuller]

I will try to address my hon. Friend’s point, which I heard earlier and think is a good one, but let us be clear that this is not a doctrinaire or Stalinist interpretation—“Thou shalt do this”. Rather it would provide different measures that local authorities can take into account. There is a prevailing assumption that local authorities and others look only at least cost, but that partly works against what motivates Government Members, who want to promote entrepreneurship. It is not what we want to see. I will talk later about a couple of those things. I hope that he understands that this is not—I would not support such a thing—some fearful rolling forward of the state. It is a new and better way of providing social goods and services that will not rely on the state and is in part a rolling back of state bureaucracy.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) made a point about social value and profit. It is worth recognising one of the severe, if not unintended, consequences of current procurement processes—the focus on lowest cost. We should always try to do better for less, but as the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and others mentioned, that is not necessarily the same thing as the pursuit of lowest cost. As we know from our constituencies, local services matter to local people. It is quite hard always to motivate people on the issue of lowering their council tax, but we can motivate them if we decide to close a local service.

There is a boundary here. If we are honest and true to our constituents, we should wish for something more than price-only considerations in the procurement of our local services. That matters, because if we pursue, as we have done, a low-cost approach, the surplus in local communities will get exported, and we will see the growth of national organisations that will take that surplus, which could go to a local small business or local social enterprise, and export it to national shareholders. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we need to get back some balance, and the Bill would do a good job in providing that balance to local commissioners in the procurement of local services.

The Bill is extremely timely. Many Members have mentioned some of the impacts of the reductions in public expenditure that are necessary in order to get it back in line with our ability to raise money. It is timely because there are a lot of good local services and local assets that could be transferred to social enterprises. All Members, on both sides of the House, have a vested interest in ensuring that we do that as rapidly as possible, and the passage of the Bill today would assist in doing that.