Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill — House of Commons, 2017-10-23
Topic: Transportation
Oliver Letwin (Conservative, Centre-right): I draw the attention of the House to a potential interest of mine: I am discussing a possible role with the Faraday Institute, which promotes battery development in this country I want to make two points about two aspects of the Bill that will need further discussion in Committee. I would have raised them in proceedings on the earlier incarnation of the Bill if it had not become so evident that it was going to disappear from view due to the election The first relates to clauses 2 and 6. It is clear that the Bill intends to do what my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Legislation and Maritime said, which is to make the situation clear for the insurance industry. Unfortunately, it does not quite succeed in that in its current draft. He slipped into pointing out the problem himself when he inadvertently spoke of the driver not handing over control to the automated system, but, as Hansard will show, legitimately handing over control If one looks at the articulation of clauses 2 and 6, one sees that what determines whether the insurer or the person is liable—apart from the question of whether the vehicle is insured—is whether the vehicle was being run by the machinery rather than by the person. Unfortunately, that is not quite a complete explanation of what we need to have explained in order to make this work in terms of liability. It will not be a complete explanation of what we will need to treat this in the criminal law—clause 6 comes very close to a piece of criminal law. It will be very important that the criminal law does reflect the liability structure in the civil law. The reason why none of these questions is completely answered is that the question arises, "Was it, under these circumstances, appropriate or not appropriate for the person who was or might have been the driver to hand over control to the machine, which had become the driver?" In case anybody thinks that that is an academic point, let me point out that it is extraordinarily likely that, as the technology develops and as artificial intelligence more and more becomes a part of that technology, we will find that, under these clauses, the Minister has to distinguish between different moments when it is appropriate to hand over control, and moments when it is not. For example, it may be that, for the sake of our motorways running much more efficiently, much more accident-free and much more intensively, it would be appropriate and, at some point, even mandatory for a motorist to hand over control of the vehicle when they are on a motorway in a way that might not be appropriate when they are on a single track road in my constituency on a rainy day. It may take a lot longer for the machinery to be able to handle the single track road in West Dorset than for it to be able to handle steady progress along the M4. As that is a likely situation, the moment of handover is a crucial element of getting the liability structure sorted out. If we do not get that sorted out now at this early stage, the insurance companies, when they come to consider the legislation, will discover that they do not have the framework that they thought they had, and we will not get the benefits that my right hon. Friend rightly seeks from that part of the Bill I also welcome part 2 of the Bill. When I was in government, I was involved in considerable efforts to improve the charging structure. It is the right thing to do. Much that needs to be done is dealt with in this part of the Bill. The regulation-making powers enable Ministers to deal with many of the points that have been raised in the preceding parts of this debate. Unfortunately, the regulation-making power in clause 9 and even in clauses 10, 11 and 12 is not only incomplete, but very materially incomplete. It will miss out the single biggest part of what needs to be regulated Reference has been made in this debate to off-street charging and to free-phase charging. These are the crucial elements because for that half of car users who do not have off-street parking—typically that is urban dwellers, particularly those who live in flats and terraced houses in urban settings—charging overnight, or at any time when they are not at work, will typically have to take place on urban streets. The people who will deal with urban streets are not local authorities, which was mentioned in the debate, or any of the objects of regulation here, but the public utilities that service our streets with the electric cables that run through them.