Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill (Third sitting)

Steve Baker Excerpts

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?

--- Later in debate ---

[Rob Marris]

Of course, the hon. Gentleman is right; we will deal with negligence later when debating clause 3. However, that is precisely why I referred to the vagaries of human behaviour. I will give him an example of language, how we use it and how it can be misunderstood. There is a well-known incident involving someone who was maintaining an aircraft. It said in the manual, when inspecting a piece of the aircraft, to remove that piece, to inspect it, and, if faulty, to replace it. That is what the individual did; they took it out, inspected it, found it was faulty and replaced it back into the aircraft. That is the language and those are the vagaries of human behaviour. In terms of the legal technicalities, the hon. Gentleman is quite right, but I am talking about human behaviour, which is sometimes different. Fortunately for me, though not the individuals involved, I made a living out of that, because I was a personal injury lawyer and people did strange things.

[Mr Baker]

I do not doubt that the hon. Gentleman is relating a tale from his direct experience that is therefore true. I just say, as a chartered aerospace engineer, that the terminology was always very clear—taking a component out and placing it back where it had been was refitting, not replacing. Replacing was taking a component out and putting another back.

[The Chair]

Order. I am reasonably content to allow something of a stand part debate, but you must refer to the clause itself or amendment 17. We are drifting rather wide of the topic under discussion.