My Lords, as has already been mentioned, this group relates to the standard of safety to which we will hold self-driving vehicles. Clause 1 establishes the concept of the self-driving test: the basic principle that a vehicle must be capable of travelling safely and legally to be authorised as self-driving. With Clause 2, we then establish that the application of the self-driving test is to be informed by a statement of safety principles. The Government will be obliged to develop those principles in consultation with relevant stakeholders and to lay the statement before Parliament before any self-driving vehicles can be authorised. Noble Lords will recall that this approach—in which the safety standard is established in statutory guidance—was recommended by the Law Commission. I also recognise the desire to see a standard articulated in the Bill. That is the rationale behind the safety backstop in Clause 2(2), which states that the safety principles
“must be framed with a view to securing that road safety in Great Britain will be better”
due to the use of self-driving vehicles.
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I turn now to the specifics of each amendment. Amendments 3, 4 and 5 all look to amend the definitions of “safely” and “legally” as applied to the self-driving test. Naturally, I do not disagree with the intention; our desire to see vehicles operate to a very high standard of safety, with very low risk of committing a traffic infraction, is already implicit in the “careful and competent driver” standard set out in our non-statutory safety ambition. However, I do not believe that these amendments are necessary, nor that they would have the desired effect. The phrases “very high” and “very low” are open to wide interpretation. By contrast, what is acceptable to the public can be established through consultation. That is the role of the statement of safety principles: to allow for public consultation and scrutiny, in a meaningful degree of detail, on how the self-driving test should be interpreted in practice. The same process would still be required if the amendments were accepted, and it is not immediately clear that its outcome would be any different.
Further, it is possible that Amendments 4 and 5 could make the courts responsible for interpreting the meaning of “very low” and “very high”, and hence determining the legality of self-driving vehicle authorisations. In our view, it is for the Government—in consultation with stakeholders and with scrutiny by Parliament—to take ongoing responsibility for determining what is acceptable. Indeed, the Law Commission reached that same conclusion. For those reasons, I believe that the current wording is the most appropriate.
The same rationale applies to Amendment 9, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, which looks to incorporate the Government’s stated safety ambition into the Bill’s text. Naturally, I believe our ambition is the right one. As the noble Lord himself touched on, it is the highest of the three standards consulted on by the Law Commission. It gives a straightforward, publicly understandable indication of the level of safety that the Government are looking to achieve through the more formal mechanisms we are establishing in the Bill.