My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 37A. Before I start, I will comment on the noble Baroness’s introduction to her Amendment 25. What she proposes is extremely important. My amendment seeks to go a bit further, rightly or wrongly.
Given the issues we have talked about during the passage of this Bill so far, the issue of changes in technology is really quite serious. Obviously, we do not understand many of them, but we hope that the Government do, and I am sure that they do. I am quite keen to probe the idea of an independent body to keep an eye on safety, health and safety at work and other issues which come up in the course of this Bill. I think the noble Baroness’s Amendment 25 is a good start, but it is a wish to see the Government marking their own homework. That is better than not having any marking at all, but I think there is a long way to go before we can get anything that we can totally trust about what is going on—without getting into the Post Office, Horizon and things like that.
I asked to have a discussion with the Office of Rail and Road, as it has been called for the best part of 10 years. It is an independent body with statutory functions to supervise and comment on the safety and performance of rail and, more recently, it has had a similar but smaller role in respect of roads, in particular monitoring the performance of National Highways. I think most people believe that it performs its regulatory function pretty well. There are many other regulators that we are not going to raise today, but they all have one thing in common: they are all independent of government. Now I know that Ministers can sack the chair of these organisations and do things, but the independence is there.
They have regulatory powers as well. I shall quote one example of what the ORR has been doing on the motorway network. It is quite complicated, but it started off with the Department for Transport asking the ORR to carry out an evidence stocktake to gather the facts on the safety of smart motorways. Then the Secretary of State increased that and said that he wanted some quality assurance of the data and the evidence underpinning the conclusions arrived at with regard to lane rentals. This is the Government asking an independent regulator for its opinion. I think it is really good that the Government have done this. There were then a number of discussions with the House of Commons Transport Committee and the ORR provided its first report, Quality Assurance of All Lane Running Motorway Data. National Highways then used this data to assess smart motorway safety and demonstrate to stakeholders, the public and the Government that the conclusions drawn from the analysis were appropriate and robust.
The Transport Committee in the House of Commons has done quite a lot of work on it. Its conclusion in a report published in December 2023, in a second assessment, was that the ORR’s annual independent reporting
“has provided better transparency in relation to safety on the strategic road network and smart motorways and helped to drive performance improvements”—
which the report then discusses.
Noble Lords will know of the fuss about smart motorways, with lots of debates about their safety and so on. It is interesting that the Transport Committee concluded that, over a number of years, Governments, National Highways and its predecessors had
“underestimated the scale of safety measures needed effectively and reliably to mitigate the risks associated with the permanent removal of the hard shoulder”
from these motorways, and had
“failed to deliver safety improvements … in a timely fashion”.
I do not want to criticise the Government for doing this; they were trying to save money and increase the amount of traffic on the motorway, et cetera. My point is that here were the Government, rightly, asking an independent regulator for its opinion, and then passing it to the Transport Committee, which concluded:
“The Department should make the introduction of changes to the design and operation of the Strategic Road Network depend on a formal health and safety assessment by the Office of Rail and Road”.
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There are many similarities between what we are talking about in this Bill and what has happened on the motorways. It has come out well. I think noble Lords would agree that the ORR work, the Government’s work, and the fact that the Government asked for an independent adviser, are all good.
Will the Minister be prepared to sit down with me, colleagues and the ORR to see whether a similar arrangement could be made for an independent statutory body—maybe the ORR or another body—to investigate on an ongoing basis whether everything that is proposed, especially under secondary regulations that we will not see, is the best and safest? I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response.