My Lords, this may be the only contribution I make to this part of the Bill, but I wish to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and other noble Lords because this business of safety in Clause 2 seems to be the most pivotal thing in the entire Bill. As the noble Lord said, the public are looking to us to make sure that it is enshrined here.
One thing the noble Lord did not mention is the claim that these automated vehicles will be materially safer than the human-driven equivalent. It is therefore right that it is not “no worse than” or even “as good as”; it has to be “materially better than”. Otherwise,
we simply should not go there. As this Bill paves the way for what will have to come through a lot of secondary legislation, that is vital to get across at this juncture. If we do not agree it today, I hope we will at some other stage on the Bill.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, made a really important point about road safety in the debate on the previous group of amendments and elaborated on it in the debate on this group with her Amendment 7. Clause 2(2) says:
“The principles must be framed with a view to securing that road safety in Great Britain will be better as a result of the use of authorised automated vehicles”.
That is a low aspiration. In my view, it needs to be considerably better. The noble Baroness said that she wanted to include private drive entrances, but they were declared out of scope by the clerks. I encourage her to persist. In my profession as a chartered surveyor, over many years I have helped people with their property boundaries, and one point that often comes up is where the private property ends and the highway starts. The customary arrangement is that between the blacktop—the adopted surface—and the front of the property boundary there is usually a verge or sometimes a pavement. Over it, the private driveway has what is known in the cant of the trade as a crossover. It is still part of the public highway, although it may be maintainable by the householder. That is an important distinction. The noble Baroness might go back to the clerks and say, “I want something that deals with crossovers”. I obviously do not wish to make a legal pronouncement, and I certainly defer to the views of the clerks, but that has been my understanding over many years of the principle behind the interface between the highway and private property.
6.45 pm
The Long Title of the Bill is to:
“Regulate the use of automated vehicles on roads … and to make other provision in relation to vehicle automation”.
This is a vehicle-focused Bill, and to that extent the clerks are right. But Clause 2(2) refers to
“securing … road safety in Great Britain”.
The term “road safety” requires further unpicking, because it is an amalgamation of several different constructs. There is vehicle safety—the use and construction of vehicles—driver competence and conscious ability when at the wheel, and highway design and construction, including signage and lighting. If you asked me about road safety, highway infrastructure, signing and lighting would immediately come to mind, but I realise that this Bill is intended to have wider implications. I shall let that rest for the moment, but “road safety” may be a matter of confusion.
In between all those things are non-standard issues of a transitional nature. The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, referred to things such as narrow bridges, winding roads and poor visibility. Having been brought up in west Somerset, I know about all those and many more, including the odd cow in the road around a sharp bend. There are other transient things such as leaves, ice formation because of leaky water mains or road gullies not having been replaced, spillages on highways and objects both animate and inanimate, moving or
stationary, in the road. Are these a danger or not? I think I might recognise and take the chance of driving over a slumped olive-green household waste sack in the road, but I would not take the chance of driving over something that looked like a rubble sack that had fallen off the back of a builder’s lorry. They are much the same size and shape. Whether automated systems can tell the difference will be tested.
I said at Second Reading that I have a reasonably modern car that tends to put on the emergency brakes— I have no control over it—depending on what it happens to see in front of it in the road. When I told the dealers that it was putting on the brakes in circumstances that I considered dangerous, they said there was nothing they could do about it. I asked, “Well, what triggers it?”, and they said, “It could be something like a plastic bag blowing across the road”. That is great. What happens if a plastic bag blows across the road when a vehicle in automated mode is going down the middle lane of a motorway and suddenly puts on the emergency brakes? I do not know, but I wonder about that.
There are other things related to the maintenance of our highways—the potholes, large puddles, illegible road markings and general maintenance issues. If the principle is that “road safety” includes these matters, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, assumed and I suggest has to be part and parcel of all this, we are talking about not just the fitness for purpose of automated vehicles and their systems but a wholesale upgrading of the quality of our road infrastructure at the moment, which I regard as pretty lamentable. It has been lacking in general maintenance, which has led to safety issues, before you get to the visibility obstructions that other noble Lords have referred to. We have to set a high bar to make sure that this is the trigger for compliance for the vehicles on the road, those who are using them and may be asked to step in at a moment’s notice and the basic highway infrastructure.
In the debate on the previous group, the Minister referred to the transition from a safe self-driving situation to a driver-in-charge mode. I hope this is not going to be like the supermarket trolley that suddenly locks its wheels at the perimeter of the car park because you have parked in the next road. We have enough trouble with delivery vehicles and maintenance contractors putting vehicles in strange places where you cannot see beyond them and they obstruct the forward vision. We cannot have vehicles that suddenly die because they have somehow gone out of range. The range may be to do not so much with their geographic situation but with the weather conditions, because it cannot see forward. Perhaps the conditions are such, as happens with my car, that a little light comes on and tells you the forward sensor has been disabled. It is usually to do with drizzle or things like that.
I am sure that, over time, the designers of sensory equipment will solve a lot of these problems. I have every confidence that that will happen but we have to start here, in setting our standards and principles, and that is where we come back to the basic principles of safety. That is why I support the general thrust of these amendments, and in particular Amendment 7 from the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles.