My Lords, I have a number of amendments in this group. I begin by asking my noble friend the Minister to encourage his team to get me a reply to what I call my Eastbourne email. I hope to use that as a means of understanding exactly where the Government find themselves with a practical example of an early-stage project. It would be helpful to have that by the second day in Committee. If I have already received it, I have missed it, so I would be grateful to him for pointing that out to me.
What binds the amendments in this group together is, first, that I do not expect these things to appear in the Bill because I think that they are covered. But they are covered in a way that does not make it clear what the Government will actually do, so I hope to draw out of them some information on what their intentions are.
Secondly, the amendments encourage the Government to take the standards-setting process seriously. I have some long experience observing the telecommunications industry. That has faded from my early days in the City, when we were one of the dominant world players, to now, when we are nothing. Part of that decay has been because we let standards-setting slip. If you want to be a place where a new technology is establishing itself and where companies want to come and be part of what you are doing, being part of the standards-setting is absolutely key. You have to assign good people to it—people who will be internationally respected for their views and insights in the industry—and give them the time to make a really serious contribution to the process. It is then independent of what is happening in the UK; they become part of the wavefront of what is happening, because the whole standards-setting process involves understanding the way things are going, what is happening and who is doing what. That information then flows back into the structures in the UK, and you get a local understanding of where the opportunities are and how the UK might take advantage of them.
If we had had that with telecommunications, we would not be in the dire state we are in now. We started with huge advantages, but they have all gone. Here we are with a new industry and a very clear need for international standards, so we absolutely must take that seriously and put our backs into being part of that process.
I will pick up on the individual amendments. The vehicle identification system—the way in which vehicles will say, “Hi, this is me”—will clearly be electronic. The whole business of using number plates has broken down, and there are 10 million or so unauthorised vehicles on British roads, for all sorts of reasons—vehicles that are just not known to the DVLA, are not taxed and have strings of outstanding parking tickets. Nobody knows whether a number plate they see is real or cloned. We do not need this happening in a new industry, where it will be really important to establish exactly which vehicle was doing what and at which
time. It has to be an electronic system, it has to be something that is embedded in hardware, and it absolutely has to be consistent internationally. A vehicle coming over from the continent has to use the same system. This is an example of something that we have to develop and a direction we have to go in, and we absolutely have to be part of setting that standard.
Amendment 15 looks at the question of a passenger alarm. If you are in a vehicle that is travelling totally autonomously and something is wrong and you want to raise the alarm, how do you do it? What is the system? What should you expect to find in the vehicle? Are we going to restrict travelling to people who happen to have mobile phones on them at the time? I hope not. What is the system to be? Again, we ought to be part of establishing international standards, because we want to be able to admit vehicles to the UK. This should be about not just our own domestic expectations; there should be something running internationally.
We want vehicles to be able to communicate where they are and, if they are part of some kind of lending, taxi or other scheme, whether they are available. Again, this needs to be done in a standard way, so that different owners and manufacturers are all sending this information out in a consistent way, and on the back of it can be built the sort of systems consumers will need to know whether or not an autonomous vehicle is available to them. We should not reach a block or allow this to become balkanised, with different companies owning little bits; the information available to consumers ought to be clearly available to everybody.
Amendment 17 looks at the process of reporting on the condition of vehicles, as there are various bits of the Bill that make it clear that automated vehicles are expected to be well maintained. If a vehicle detects that it is not in the state that it ought to be in, that needs to be reported. It needs to be reported not just internally to the system but in a way that makes that information, and the fact that it was reported, available to investigating authorities. Again, we need a standard for that, and it needs to be an international one.
Amendment 18 looks at the question of waymarkers: how a vehicle knows exactly where it is in a relatively autonomous landscape. Are we going to be totally reliant on the navigation satellites working or are we going to have a more ground-based reference system? Some manufacturers clearly think that they will have within their vehicles an image of the routes that they are taking and that the vehicles will recognise where they are. That is a darned hard thing to do on some motorways—you just do not know which bit you are on, or indeed which country you are in: “Am I in Germany or am I still in the UK?” There is a system on motorways where, in the physical sense, you can look at the waymarkers—if you are not travelling too fast—and see where you are; if you break down, it allows you to read the sign and say what distance from it you are. Are we thinking of building that into automated vehicles?
Lastly, how will vehicles communicate with the emergency services, whether it is a fire engine coming up from behind asking the vehicle to pull over and let it through or a policeman standing at the edge of the
road, waving down the vehicle to stop? How will that be achieved? Again, we will want there to be an international standard; we do not want to find that vehicles coming in from abroad are unable to speak English. There has to be a common system in there somewhere. However, we absolutely want it to happen—we do not want our police to be powerless and for the automated vehicles to sail past them because they do not understand a hand wave. There has to be some communication system. There are lots of options, but we have to specify it.
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In all these areas, I am really asking that the Government get their thinking cap on as to what will need to be standard—universal across the fleet of automated vehicles—and how we can get involved in making sure that we are one of the leading group in setting these international standards.