My Lords, I will also speak to the rest of the amendments in this group. I think someone suggested that this was the safety group; I agree and see it as pivotal to the Bill. Although we all support the idea of this being a vigorous and enthusiastic area of activity, it is not the role of this legislation to tell us how to do it. What is important is what we are seeking to achieve. I will in this group mostly be talking about how and what should be achieved rather more than how one achieves it.
First, Amendment 2 could not be more purely probing, because it reveals that neither my noble friend Lord Liddle nor I are able to understand the particular subsection that this refers to. The whole issue of whether there is a driver and what that driver does is complex. It is perfectly easy to understand the situation, and where the quality of design and management of the vehicle do not need human intervention under any circumstances. It is easy to understand a situation in which the level of intervention by the driver is not as comprehensive as in a conventional vehicle by the extent of automation. However, we have this difficult concept whereby for periods of an operation, the human being in the vehicle is a pure passenger and does not have to be alert to the environment. Then we envisage a situation in which that is no longer possible—there is in the legislation something about an interim period where the person is notified that they now have to become the driver. We have difficulty identifying the specifications as to where that person is—whether they should be in the driving seat. The concept of the driving seat needs clarifying—presumably there would be a concept called controls. I am sorry that we have
not understood it but I should be grateful if the Minister could explain that, and I should be happy if he cannot do so now and can send a letter. I am sure that he has it right; it is just that we have been unable to understand it.
I now move, broadly speaking, into the safety part of the Bill. Amendments 3, 4, 5 and 7 say that the target should be safer than the target in the Bill. Do not lose sight of the fact that there is a target in the Bill, which is no worse than where we are now. In other words, the new vehicles being introduced to the fleet must be safer by 1% or 2%, or 70%; it is not defined. I share the enthusiasm to have the target safer than that, and I will come back to that.
Amendment 6 touches on an area that is referred to in many places in the paperwork and so on as diversity and equity. It is touched upon in the report from the law commissions. They say it better than I could, so I will quote paragraph 4.59 in the Law Commission and Scottish Law Commission’s report:
“Many consultees stressed to us that AVs should not cause greater risks to particular groups of road users, even if they were to save lives overall. During the course of this project, we have received responses from those representing vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and horse riders. They emphasised that AVs must be trained to be safe around all current road users: existing groups should not be subject to greater risks than they are now. We would expect this to be reflected within the published safety standard”.
That is an extremely important concept. It is, curiously enough, a concept we rarely follow in transport. We are usually willing to disadvantage part of our society for the greater benefit of the rest. We can have no greater example than that of HS2, but virtually any transport scheme or introduction of innovation will have winners and losers. This principle says there should be no losers. I should be interested as to the extent to which the Government accept the concept of no losers.
Amendment 7 touches on the wider issue of the importance of where can these vehicles operate and where do the rules relating to them operate? As far as I know, one has driverless vehicles called farm machinery these days—or they seem to be from the pictures on “Countryfile”, because people are reading Farmers Weekly and not looking where the harvester is going. There has to be a clear definition of where these rules apply. However, both issues need to be addressed.
I turn to the crucial issue of safety itself, which is in my Amendment 9. I did not find the structure of the Bill particularly convenient. I read the Bill the first time as saying in Clause 1 that there shall be a safety standard—it says other things as well but it introduces “safety” at some point—and that Clause 2 sets out what that standard should be. It is confusing, but we would like to particularly centre on my Amendment 9 on this issue. That works on the basis that you read Clause 1 to say there should be a standard, and you use Clause 2 as the mechanism by which you come to that standard. The whole issue of standard is discussed by the law commissions—I cannot get used to saying it in the plural but it was two commissions working together, the English and Scottish commissions. Their report at page 56, paragraph 4.10, sets out the three options as to what the standards should be:
“Option A: as safe as a competent and careful human driver; … Option B: as safe as a human driver who does not cause a fault accident; … Option C: overall, safer than the average human driver”.
One would have hoped that, after three rounds of consultation between November 2018 and March 2021, involving 350 meetings with individuals and organisations, and analysis of over 400 written responses, we would have an answer.
In fact, the answer is in paragraph 4.55, where, after three years’ consultation, it says:
“Ultimately, the decision over how safe an AV should be while it is driving itself depends on whether the remaining risks are acceptable to the public. This is essentially a political question, best taken by ministers. Ministers need to set a policy which can then be interpreted and applied by regulators with the support of experts, as part of the authorisation and monitoring processes”.
So it is down to Ministers, and I hope that by implication means politicians. Which are we going to pick? If you pick one of those standards, the rest is a matter of process. They might sound vague, but they are not that vague.
The most successful safety legislation in this country, the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, has a very simple objective: to reduce risk to as low as is reasonably practicable. In areas where it has been applied it has worked very well. It has had a tremendous impact on safety in construction, manufacture and so on. What is the golden objective that we should seek here?
We have option B, which was
“as safe as a human driver who does not cause a fault accident”.
I find that very difficult to interpret anyway. The Government in this Bill have chosen option C:
“overall, safer than the average human driver”.
That in my view means that there is no aspiration to improve road safety. It says that it must be greater than but the hard line, with people spending lots of money, doing the development and making the software and so on, would look for the hard point, and the hard point is that it merely has to be better than the average human driver.
As is pointed out elsewhere in the literature, the average human driver is not necessarily careful and may not be that competent. We are hopeful that the driving test makes sure that every driver is competent but, from our personal experience, are we sure that is universal? What is particularly important, which is brought out somewhere in the commission’s report, is that the average driver includes the
“distracted, drowsy, drunk … or disqualified”.
That is average—it includes all those people. There are the competent and careful human drivers, but that is but part of the universe out of which you take the average.
Therefore, I strongly recommend, as my amendment says, that we should go for the
“careful and competent human driver”.
That would be a significant improvement on today’s standards. It would be a real road safety improvement, and it would be capable of developing tests from that objective. Every proposal that the Government brought forward would be subject to that general test.
It also passes what I call the “toddler test”. We should not lose sight of the fact that these vehicles are going to kill people, not because they are intrinsically dangerous, but moving about on roads is dangerous. It is not very dangerous in the United Kingdom, thank God, but we want to improve it, and there will be deaths. When the first toddler dies by being run down by one of these vehicles, in this modern age you have to have a process about what you say to the mother. I believe that if you say that it would have occurred even with a careful and competent driver, you could at least say that it is not because of the automation. It is because it was a genuine accident, as far as there is such a concept to any extent.
I have knowledge of what it is like to kill people, because I ran a railway. It was quite a big railway, and it used to kill two or three people a year. It was actually a one in billion chance because we carried that many passengers, but you still have to be able to face the public, the television cameras and so on and say, “This is what we spent on it. This is how our safety plans work, and so on. These were our targets, and this is how we set about them”. I believe that that test
“competent and careful human driver”
is the right test, and we should put it in the Bill.
6.15 pm
The remaining amendment would turn the secondary legislation from negative to affirmative. I am pleased that there seems to be space in the legislation as drafted for an amendment process; this is something that we have been looking for in secondary legislation for years. I hope that the Government hold their nerve and that it is a good way, but the problem with negative statutory instruments is that nobody ever notices them; they get debated only if they are chosen or picked out by the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee—and you have to be pretty committed to read through all its stuff—or a special interest group actually lobbies on one. It is nothing like the involvement implied in all the paperwork that we have been sent, particularly from the Government, who have said that the underlying way in which standards would be achieved is by active parliamentary involvement. Negative SIs will not achieve that. At least affirmative SIs, despite how we are all virtually committed to voting for them all the time, have to come in front of the House and appear on the Order Paper.
When we come to Report we will almost certainly pursue these two points—the careful and competent driver as the test, and having affirmative secondary legislation so we can be fully involved.