Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Second sitting) Debate
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Steve Baker
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Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Second sitting)
Steve Baker Excerpts(7 years, 9 months ago)
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Drew Hendry
Q Can I press you for some thoughts on other charging technologies? That was the last part of my question.
Edward Woodall: I do not have a great deal to add on that.
Mr Steve Baker (Wycombe) (Con)
Q Mr Woodall, if I understood correctly—I listened very carefully to the answer about business models, because the same question occurred to me—you said you do not wish to be forced, but you would be happy to be paid one way or another to take charging stations. I am not surprised, but you did not mention profit as an incentive to provide this service to consumers. Can you elaborate? Why did you not mention the potential to make a profit out of charging?
Edward Woodall: Obviously there is a benefit to having charging on a site. I suppose I am focusing, in the context of the Bill, on how it will work in retailers’ thinking about investing in something that is developing in the long term.
Mr Baker
Q Is it just not profitable to provide charging to people?
Edward Woodall: Petrol forecourt sites make their money out of the shop. They do not make their money out of the fuel or the electric charging. That is a very low-margin part of their business. That is why you are seeing so much investment in the sector.
Mr Baker
Q That is what I imagined. To make a profit, you need to get people through as swiftly as possible, get them in the shop spending as much money as possible, and then on they go. Hopefully, they are happy and have had the service they want.
Edward Woodall: It is not quite that simple, but yes.
Mr Baker
Q Suppose you had an energy source that could be changed quickly, instead of over half an hour, would your current business model work? If, for example, we used hydrogen, as we were discussing this morning, your business model would continue to work in the same way, would it not?
Edward Woodall: Yes, but obviously the investment for putting hydrogen on fuel sites is significant. We asked fuel retailers about the cost of putting on electric vehicle charging points, and the estimate was between £50,000 and £60,000 per site, depending on the site. That increases significantly for hydrogen sites, because the infrastructure behind that is much bigger and more expensive, and it is a harder case to make because fewer consumers use that type of fuel source.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Q Earlier, in the discussion with Rob, there was discussion about phraseology—about large fuel retailers or just retailers—and an issue with forecourts. I want to clarify something. I am not sure if forecourts are mentioned in the Bill, so is that a red herring? Is it not going to be up to the retailers to site the charging points where they are most convenient?
Following on from the previous question, if you are not blocking the forecourt, a rapid charger may take 30 minutes, but is that not an opportunity for sales if it is the shops that make all the money? I would have thought that for somebody who is travelling, if it is an intermediate store, it would be an ideal opportunity to park and charge their car, go into the shop, buy a newspaper or a magazine and a few snacks, sit in their car, then move on. Is there not a business opportunity there?
Edward Woodall: Yes, there is. As we said in our submission, only 11% of sites have seating areas for customers, so there might not be the capacity to manage all that. Equally, how big is a forecourt site? Think about your local forecourt site—how many cars can it fit? For some of these electric vehicle charging areas, they will not consider it unless it is an acre or an acre-and-a-half-sized site.
Teresa Sayers: Certainly, the charging sites would have to be on the periphery of a forecourt. The current configuration of estates has very limited space to accommodate any parked vehicles. As was previously mentioned, the business model is a very high throughput of vehicles. The maximum duration on the forecourt is usually below five minutes—they fill up, pay and leave. It is just not built and configured to have additional cars there for a very long period of time.
Drew Hendry
Q Just to press that point about the end-to-end availability, is enough being done to ensure that you get truly wide coverage to allow people from outlying areas to get out and back again in the new technology?
Iain Forbes: It is an important bit of work that will need to be done as we develop out the technology. We are investing in connected vehicle test-beds to understand what the requirement is, and certainly one aim of that work is to try to understand how it can benefit everyone, not just people in cities.
Mr Baker
Q I would like to turn to clause 4, which relates to accidents resulting from unauthorised alterations or failure to update software. Hopefully, you have had a chance to look at this section of the Bill. It is all couched in terms of the operating system—interference with and failure to update the operating system. I am concerned that there are other aspects of software in a car that are relevant. Are you satisfied that the Bill is in the right shape, referring to the operating system, or would you prefer to see some other definition, in which case, what?
Iain Forbes: I guess it is my team that has been looking at the Bill, so I will ask Mr Howarth to comment first.
Ben Howarth: From our perspective, my initial reading of it was that it covered what we thought it was, and I am thinking it is the technology. I have to say, I am not a software expert, so if the wording could be clearer—the clause basically says you are not liable if a stupid individual mucks around with the car’s systems and does things that the manufacturer would not permit.
Mr Baker
Q We have a shared understanding of the purpose of this clause. I should say that I am a software engineer—or at least I was before I first came here—and I am slightly concerned that if this was tested in court and somebody had interfered or failed to update their firmware—a low level software—or if the driving was done by application software sitting on top of the operating system, the purpose of the Bill, of which we have a shared understanding, could be defeated. You are saying that you have not formed a view on whether “operating system” is the right definition.
Ben Howarth: To be fair, I do not think we have looked into the wording in that much detail. If the wording needs to be clearer, we would support that. We definitely want the same thing.
Rob Marris
Q I have three quick points for Mr Howarth. First, the Bill talks about the vehicle being insured as opposed to what currently happens, from my understanding, which is that driver is insured. So I have policy motor insurance that enables me to drive certain vehicles, including my principal one. Is the insurance industry happy with what appears to be a change in focus—that is it now on the vehicle rather than the driver?
Ben Howarth: I think it is not a huge change in focus. In practice, the enforcement that industry currently does—via the motor insurance bureau—to check that you have insurance is done via the vehicle. It is done by checking licence plates. The responsibility is on the human driver, but the practical enforcement is to check whether that car, on the road, at that time, is covered by insurance. This Bill is primarily designed for vehicles that will be manually driven some of the time and automated some of the time. It is just the practicality that, once you are switching to an automated car, you need to be thinking about the car rather than the driver.
Drew Hendry
I should say that justice is devolved to Scotland, but I was curious about your views. Thank you.
Mr Baker
Q I want to pick up remarks that I made on Second Reading about the seriousness of the offence. As the Bill is framed, it is an offence only if the person shines or directs a laser beam at a vehicle that is in the course of a journey. As police officers, do you have adequate powers if a person is assaulted with a laser when not in a vehicle? You are nodding.
Richard Goodwin: If we are talking about retinal damage, we are talking about grievous bodily harm.
Mr Baker
Q Could you be clear on why those powers would not be adequate in the case of an aircraft in flight?
Richard Goodwin: It is difficult to prove, over that distance, the person’s intent. They are arguably shining the laser at an object. It is very difficult to be accurate at that point. It may be a reckless consequence, so there is potential for that, but there are various scientific opinions on what damage can be done at certain distances and angles, and depending on the strength of the laser—bits and pieces like that. Having said that, if somebody shines a laser and a plane crashes, there is a lot of injury to a lot of people; the consequences at that end are obviously catastrophic.
Mr Baker
Q You have pre-empted what I was going to ask. Can I ask BALPA whether it is possible that an attack with a laser could cause the loss of an aeroplane?
Martin Drake: Oh yes, absolutely. Most laser strikes happen within 3 miles of the threshold of the runway, when most aircraft are busy completing the due diligence checks that we do: “Are the wheels down? Are the flaps in the right place? Am I lined up with the runway?”—the things that pilots do all the time subconsciously. You approach at about 150 knots at that stage, so you are doing 2.5 miles a minute and are somewhere around the 1,000-foot mark. You are using all the visual cues that you get from the runway. The vast majority of these strikes happen at night, and you are using all lights. Your instruments are lit up. We have mostly cathode ray tube or LED instrumentation on the flight deck; there are very few aircraft still flying around with the old-fashioned dial-type instruments. The potential for a pilot to confuse whether he is looking at the centre line or a side set of lights—particularly in a crosswind, when you are canted over to deal with that—is huge. It is quite conceivable that if both pilots were affected by the dazzle effect at a critical stage of flight, they could attempt to land down the side of the runway, rather than down the centre of it.
Mr Baker
Q With that factor in mind, I have tabled an amendment to probe the Government’s position. It would double the term of imprisonment. The Bill sets out a term not exceeding five years; my amendment would take that to 10 years, because I had this point in mind. I should say that it is a probing amendment to provoke this conversation. What do you think the appropriate term of imprisonment should be for a deliberate attempt to dazzle at that point in the flight?
Martin Drake: You are very much into a catastrophic eventuality. Might I draw your attention to the aircraft that crashed on the threshold of Heathrow during the hours of daylight—the 777 that had the fuel issue? Had that occurred at night, the pilots would have really struggled to make the decisions that they made, and to get the aeroplane where they did. Had the pilots been dazzled or distracted by a laser, I very much doubt that that would have been successful as it was.
Mr Baker
Q In the circumstances—I ask this to the police officers—what is the appropriate maximum punishment?
Simon Bray: I would be reluctant to comment on what an appropriate sentence would be. We would recognise that it is being treated seriously and it is obviously a matter for the courts to determine how sentences given by Parliament should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. We would not want to put a figure on it, to be honest—[Interruption.] My colleague mentioned that you are potentially talking about something in the region of manslaughter for that type of offence.
Richard Burden
Q Commander Bray, you mentioned that you have written looking for a defined power for stop and search relating to lasers.
Simon Bray: Yes.
Kit Malthouse
Q Yes, hovercraft are covered as a vessel.
Martin Drake: Yes. These are not in the scope of the Bill, but we have come across goalkeepers being lasered when an important penalty is to be taken, and we have heard of referees being lasered. It is a transport Bill, so it is not within the scope of that, and I know the police have powers to deal with it, but it is a growing problem.
Mr Baker
Q Captain Drake, you mentioned that you have got windows in your office from which you have had spectacular effects when you have shone lasers at them. For the purposes of public education, have you considered letting some videos go out there to wherever to show us what happens?
Martin Drake: We have, yes. There is some nervousness about publicising what happens because countries where that has been done have seen a spike in events. That may be a cost we have to bear: we may have to see a spike in events then to see a contraction. We could do that—it is a very sensible idea.
The Chair
There are no further questions from members of the Committee. I thank the witnesses for their evidence, time and co-operation. That has been most helpful. I ask you to remain seated for just a moment while I invite the Whip to move the Adjournment. Line-by-line consideration of the Bill will begin at 11.30 am on Thursday in Committee Room 10.
Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned.—(Jackie Doyle-Price.)