Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Randerson and Lord Campbell-Savours

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Thursday 17th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I want to take us back to Clause 10(2)(a), which states:

“Regulations under subsection (1) may, for example—(a) require large fuel retailers or service area operators to provide public charging points”.


In the real world, can we imagine a motorway service station that would follow this? A stream of cars would come in and get to the forecourt—where there is an existing garage with petrol pumps—and, somewhere in that area, we have to facilitate perhaps hundreds of cars charging at the same time. Some of them might be on rapid charging units for as much as 20 minutes, which is why I say that there will be a lot of vehicles there. There may well not be enough space, so we would be looking at adjacent land. We know that the public interest is served when that adjacent land is made available.

How will we acquire that land? If we want a reservoir, an airport or a railway track, we have compulsory purchase powers; however, some people might argue that using them to aid the financial arrangements of a private operator running a service station is unreasonable. So what will we do to ensure that the additional land, adjacent to these facilities on motorways, is made available for the substantial number of rapid charging units required? I see no requirement to do that in the legislation. We know that it must be introduced by regulations. Departmental officials should be thinking through the consequences of this, to see to what extent the state can intervene to ensure that adjacent land is available. I have referred to service stations, but this could happen for land adjacent to other facilities, such as railway stations—although that is probably different because such land is probably used otherwise for housing development.

It would carry a far higher price than agricultural land surrounding a service station on a motorway, which might be worth only £10,000 of £15,000 an acre. Might Ministers consider asking officials to consider the implications of that provision in this legislation?

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, in response to that, I hope that people who run petrol stations and service stations will have redundant space where the diesel pumps were. We all know that if you own a petrol station and you close it down, that land has to lie vacant for many years because of pollution concerns. Therefore, it is of great interest to those who currently run service stations to make them continually financially viable. That means they will have to adapt. That is my logic on that.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I hesitate to intervene immediately after speaking myself, but the pump area is a very small amount of space. We are talking about a space capable of taking maybe hundreds of vehicles, all on charge for 20 minutes to half an hour.

[Baroness Randerson]

Service stations also have car parks. That is where the charging points are at the moment. There is a possibility there.

That leads very neatly to Amendment 72 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, which I have signed. It seeks to specify once again some general ideas on the sort of facilities that would usefully be used to accommodate charging points. It is important to bear in mind that there is an acknowledgement in proposed new subsection (2)(b) of local authorities’ important co-ordinating role. They have a key part in the chain of strategic provision here.

Proposed new subsection (3) lists a selection of places where we might find charge points. Just to illustrate how subtle this art is, proposed new paragraphs (a) and (b)—“supermarket car parks” and “public car parks”—would be suitable for the provision of only rapid charge points, because no one wants to spend three and a half hours in a supermarket while your car charges, whereas airport or train station car parks could usefully use fast chargers. The Government have to look at this strategically and in detail to make sense of the provision. It needs to be worked out in co-ordination with the industry to make sure the proposals are practical. I am particularly keen on the concept of using supermarket car parks; I have seen this frequently in France. I do not often shop at Waitrose but I do on one particular journey because it has a charger. It is a very useful opportunity.

I will briefly respond to what the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said and put a different point of view on Amendment 75. I am not opposed to the idea of giving additional powers. What concerns me is that the vast majority of people in Britain do not live in mayoral authorities. I come from Wales, where there are no elected mayors as a matter of policy. Therefore, it strikes me that there is a danger of creating second-class citizens in cities, towns and rural areas that do not have elected mayors. They will limp along behind with less provision for people who want to buy electric cars. We should have solutions that benefit everyone and not just people who live in one sort of authority.

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[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, I support the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. I will bring in another issue, which we have hardly referred to. We have talked a lot about fast and rapid charging, and so on, but until now we have not talked about the key issue of interoperability. I take this opportunity, using the excuse of this group of amendments, to make the point to the Minister that the reason why the Committee has not mentioned it is that the Government did, and we agree with them. It may feel as if we have ignored it but it is a really key issue.

At the beginning of today’s debate, I talked about the frustration of getting to a charging point that was not working, as did other noble Lords. However, the same frustration is felt when you get there and it does not fit your make of car. This has also been a major own-goal by the motor industry. I hope that the industry will read the proceedings of this place in Hansard because it is undermining its own efforts with electric vehicles by hanging on to different and distinct forms of charging. There really needs to be a cross-industry meeting to reach an agreement on where it is going. We will otherwise end up with something rather like the VHS versus Betamax situation, which wasted an awful lot of consumers’ and manufacturers’ money. It always amazes me when manufacturers do not realise this pretty early on. It has taken Apple an awfully long time to realise that it just irritates us if every phone or computer we buy needs a different form of charging lead.

I hope that the Government will keep interoperability at the top of their requirements in these regulations. I simply want to underline the key message in these amendments, which is that we have to have sufficiently speedy and robust charging points for them to be useful in many circumstances.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I think I heard everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, said when she set out the various levels of equipment and the capacity of each level to charge. I am sure she will know the answer to this but I do not, and I am sure that the public outside who might follow our debate do not know the answer. When commercial operators apply to fit this equipment, who is to determine the capacity of the equipment that they are going to fit? If it is left to the market, those in the market might say, “I’m not going to pay £40,000 for a rapid charger. I’m going to put in a slower charger that might take three hours. I can still make as much profit as I want out of that facility”. However, that might not serve the public interest. It might be that the public interest is served only when a rapid charger, or a series of rapid chargers, is put into a location. What is the framework within which these decisions will be taken? I wonder that because they cannot be taken by the market, and there must be some intervention by a public authority in taking them.

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[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, we have just heard a very earnest plea from the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. I noticed during our proceedings today that the Ministers at the Dispatch Box, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, indicated that they might be prepared to take things back to the department for further consideration. I express the hope that, when we get to Report, there will be some government amendments that reflect the concerns expressed in the debate today.

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 106, I want to agree with what has been said by the noble Lord and the noble Baroness. This is a missed opportunity in that, until the last six months or so, transport Bills have been few and far between. I realise that they are falling like confetti now, but each one is so tiny that, between each Bill, there are great gaps in the strategic action that needs to be taken. Ironically, we have been concentrating a lot on the cutting edge of technology—we have looked at space travel in the Space Industry Bill and at lasers. The pace of technology in those areas is very fast, and this is the same. There is a need for strategic thinking, because the detailed stuff is in danger of becoming out of date. The result is that the Government, being aware of that, have written not just narrow Bills but very vague Bills, giving them lots of power to dream up regulations but no guarantee on the direction in which they are going.

The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, addresses in her amendment the need to be accurate about what the Bill is. Turning that on its head, in various speeches in our proceedings I have referred to the fact that the part of the Bill dealing with automated vehicles ignores the street scene changes and the changes to the structure of road safety law that will be needed. In Amendment 106, I have drawn attention to hydrogen. That is another specific example of other sorts of developing technology that are lower emission and deserve to be part of an overall strategy.

My final thought on this is that the Government need to do a great deal of connected thinking on all these little bits of effort. We are in danger of leading people to think that we have a strategy fit for the future. I do not believe that we have.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Baroness Randerson and Lord Campbell-Savours

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 17th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Randerson]

I am pleased to move Amendment 44. The dinner that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, referred to was indeed a lively occasion—much livelier than the average dinner in this place, I believe, in its conversation and opinions. The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, is correct to say that the Bill lacks a spine. It is a collection of good ideas, probably, but it is not a strategy.

Addressing range anxiety among electric car owners is fundamental to the Government having a flawless strategy for encouraging people to buy these vehicles, and therefore for them to be manufactured. The whole population benefits from some of us buying electric vehicles. The amendments in this group relate to the availability of charging points and their ease of use, which is really the crux of the issue. Where they are placed is something we will come to in other groups of amendments, but this is a simple provision.

When you drive along and see on your in-car computer screen that there will be a charge point in 10 miles, it is at the very least supremely frustrating to find when you get there that it is not working. It can be a huge issue if you go on a long journey. I have told before in this House of the occasion when I went from one motorway services to another and another before I found a rapid charge point. I got a fast charge in the second and third ones, which was enough to send me to the next motorway services, but that is not the way to encourage people to own electric cars. It can be worse than really annoying. It can be a fairly dangerous situation to find yourself without any electricity in a lonely public car park, where there should be a charge point but it is not working. Charge points are almost always somewhere quite lonely. They are usually badly lit and, unlike getting petrol or diesel, you do not have a nice warm roof over your head. Standing out there in the rain and wind can be a pretty dispiriting process. When you get there, you therefore need the confidence that it will work.

This matter is easily addressed and I urge the Government to take these amendments seriously. I hope the Minister will accept them, or accept their principle and bring forward her own amendments. It is stating the blindingly obvious to say that you need some kind of measure in place so that when contracts are let, there is an obligation for these charge points to be working for a certain specified percentage of time, so that there is a commitment to repair them when they break.

The other side of trying to use a charge point is that almost all of them require you to have an app or be a member of a group. I think I have six or seven such apps on my phone, to be ready for all eventualities. If there are that number of apps on your phone, you do not use any one of them that often. This means that often, you turn up somewhere, only for the phone to tell you that you need to renew the app because you have not updated it and it will not work. My Amendment 46, which deals with,

“the use of contactless payment”,

seems the simple way to ensure that you have a straightforward way of paying that would be available to virtually everyone. We all know the effectiveness of contactless payment, which has worked brilliantly in beginning to replace Oyster cards in London. It has a simplicity about it.

I am not suggesting that these groups we join up to should not exist or that the apps could not be used. There could even be a financial or some other incentive for joining these groups, rather than having contactless payment. However, I am suggesting that there should be an obligation to make the charging points easy to use by ensuring that you have the fallback position, at the very least, of contactless payment. I will leave it there for now, and I beg to move.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I listened carefully to the Minister’s previous response. His argument seemed essentially to be based on the need to ensure that we do not move too fast because there may be technological developments, which would mean that we had perhaps taken the wrong decision in the regulations. This is in the event that they were—in his view, obviously—prematurely introduced.

Let us go through the amendment. It mentions:

“performance standards for public charging points”.

Why can we not set those minimum standards on the basis of the technology that applies now—not what may apply in future, but what applies now? Standards will not go down in future; they will go up. The next thing the amendment requires is,

“procedures to be put in place to repair faulty public charging points”.

What is wrong with that? We have charging points, and there is a problem with repair. Why can we not have regulations requiring the suppliers of such equipment to ensure that it is maintained properly? That does not require technological developments.

Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Randerson and Lord Campbell-Savours

Report stage (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 17th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I spoke at length in Committee on this matter. I do not intend to do so today. This is a very good compromise arrangement. The Government would ultimately take the decision. We would simply establish a framework on which basis a Government can take the decision. I hope the Government will accept the amendment.

[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, safety has to be taken extremely seriously in this context. Along with the Minister and, I suspect, most of the people here, I rather wish that there had been no need for this legislation, but since we have it we might as well use it in this situation to draw attention to, and give the Government the opportunity to draw some conclusions on, the issue of safety.

The National Caravan Council believes that the number of accidents connected to caravans and similar trailers are mainly not due to the design or condition of the caravan or trailer itself. Most are caused by bad driving, bad loading or bad hitching of the trailer. Therefore, there is a huge need for public education on this. I very much hope that the Government will use the opportunity of providing the report suggested in the amendment by looking at the need for widespread public education on this.

I do not know whether any noble Lords have witnessed an accident of this nature. I did, driving behind a caravan on a motorway. A small wobble rapidly becomes magnified until it becomes a huge sweep of the caravan. Eventually, it cuts back on itself. That motorway was closed for six hours and very serious injuries were sustained. It was a frightening experience which brought home to me how important it is that driving with a trailer is done moderately. In that case—there may have been other factors—it was clear to me that the driver with the caravan was going much too fast, hence the need for public education.

Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Randerson and Lord Campbell-Savours

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 22nd March 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 15 would require the Secretary of State to provide for compulsory registration of certain trailers. These requirements were suggested in the impact assessment by the Government as a possible registration scheme. We are simply suggesting that those requirements should be in the Bill. There is a number of reasons: first, as a general principle, this is an opportunity to flesh out this very thin Bill a bit in a meaningful way. It is, after all, a trailer registration scheme, and that is one of the two purposes of the Bill. If this amendment were on the face of the Bill, the Government would not be able to provide for a compulsory registration scheme for all trailers; in other words, this would narrow the scope.

The amendment would also give more clarity about the status of certain vehicles. On Second Reading and in our previous Committee sitting, several examples were raised regarding the uncertainty surrounding what categories would be applied to which trailers.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

The amendment refers to trailers weighing over 750 kilograms. Is that gross weight or net weight?

[Baroness Randerson]

It is, I gather, but that is the instruction from the Minister. We are working to the Government’s definitions.

This is a good opportunity to raise the issue of the voluntary registration scheme currently provided by the National Caravan Council, not to be confused with the Caravan Club. The council is an industry body which operates a very well-established scheme of registration. It is concerned that the Bill should not muddy the waters on registration. I am sure that it would like its own scheme to continue, but I am concerned that we do not end up with two different registration schemes with slightly different requirements and criteria. This will already add complexity to the existing situation, and we need to be careful that it does not become confusing as well as slightly more bureaucratic. How will the Government’s proposed scheme fit with the National Caravan Council scheme? Have she or her officials had discussions with the council, because it remains concerned about the issue?

Our other amendment in this group, Amendment 17, was drafted simply to help provide clarity to travellers who may, as a result of us not being a party to the community licence any more, be subject to different trailer registration requirements in different EU countries. The point has been made in debate here that Germany, for example, is quite stringent in its requirements on trailers. We are seeking to take the opportunity of this Bill to raise public awareness of the variation in the attitude between different EU member states to trailer registration. I very much hope that the Minister can give us some information to allay concerns.

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[Baroness Randerson]

My Lords, I will be brief on this amendment. The DPRRC report mentioned that the Government have given no examples of the regulations that they intend to make under the Bill. Given the wide-ranging consequences these could have—not just for industry but also for hobbies and leisure; indeed, for the whole of life—it is essential that there is full consultation before regulations are put before Parliament. We have suggested a range of organisations; some are obvious and some are less obvious, but I am absolutely sure that it is not a comprehensive list. However, it is presented here as an opportunity to ask the Minister about the details of how the consultation will take place, the nature of the consultation and which organisations will be consulted. I can see immediately that the list we have put forward—apologies come from my noble friend Lord Teverson who is at Defra discussing the marine safety audit—does not include, for example, trade unions, given that there are obviously employee interests in this as well as employer interests.

I do not need to delay the Committee any further. It is simply a question of whether we can have some details on the consultation process. I beg to move.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, to cut my contribution short, I shall quote from page 8 of the Explanatory Memorandum:

“A consequence of ratification is that unregistered trailers could be turned away at the borders of other countries who have ratified the 1968 Convention. Therefore, for operational reasons, a trailer registration scheme needs to be implemented”.


I would have thought that critical to the process of consultation was the AA, because at our borders that organisation is the last port of call for people who need advice on what is going to happen when they go abroad. The leaflets that it circulates are about subjects such as travelling abroad, insurance arrangements and health arrangements. You can pick them up in its kiosks at Dover, or I suppose at any port where you have a roll-on, roll-off ferry system. They should be made available. That is my case, and I hope the AA is consulted.

Haulage Permits and Trailer Registration Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Randerson and Lord Campbell-Savours

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 13th March 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, “first come, first served” implies immediately a limited number of permits, a shortage of permits and problems in the industry. I want to read the general conditions from one such permit issued nearly 35 years ago, which civil servants may find useful during the negotiations. It is quite short, but raises a number of issues. Under “General Conditions”, it states:

“This authorisation, together with the journey record mentioned below, must be carried on the vehicle and be produced at the request of any authorised inspecting officer. It authorises only the number of journeys indicated. It is not valid for national transport. It is not transferable. The carrier is required to comply, in the territory of each Member State, with the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of that State, and in particular with those concerning transport and traffic. This authorisation must be returned to the issuing agency within fifteen days of date of expiry. Before each transport operation, the holder of this authorisation is required to prepare any journey record provided for in bilateral agreements. Such journey record must be returned at the same time as this authorisation”.


So it is a fairly complicated process for the hauliers.

If it is not used within 15 days of the date of expiry, it is returned, but that permit has already been allocated to a specific journey—if that is what it says in the terms and conditions. Is that permit then written off? Does it affect the total number or permits that are allocated, or can we simply allocate a substitute permit, having declared that permit to be written off? I am asking this because, if a limited number of permits are allocated, there is going to be some argument about where they are going. I am trying to establish how we calculate the total numbers that are allocated.

I have been thinking about the earlier intervention by my noble friend Lord Snape. He talked about it being of benefit, in certain circumstances, to our haulage industry. There is a problem there, because we want to avoid that. If we are going into these negotiations on the basis that we want enough permits to supply all the demand, the last thing we want to do is starve the Irish of permits. If they need them, they should be given them, because that helps our case in the negotiations with the European Union.

[Baroness Randerson]

In her reply, will the Minister clarify exactly what these permits will be? The background briefing that her department issued referred to single-journey permits and multiple-journey permits. It referred to the European Conference of Ministers of Transport permit system. Having researched this, I believe that the number of permits available under that system would be absolutely tiny. Where are these permits going to come from? What is going to regulate them? Are we going to dream it up ourselves or base it on the international system? We need a bit of clarity on this.

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[Baroness Randerson]

Can the Minister clarify something? In their examples of existing permits where there are bilateral agreements, the Government refer to both single-journey and multiple-journey permits. Multiple-journey permits are clearly a lot less bureaucratic, but single-journey permits are a lot less expensive. Do the Government have an image of which way they are going on this or whether they are going to have single and multiple-journey permits if required?

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I am flying blind now—I should really know the answer to this question. When a British haulier travels in France now, I presume they pay a fee on the motorway. French motorways are very expensive. When a French haulier arrives in the United Kingdom, do they pay any charges for the use of our roads? I think not. If that is the case then we might like to raise this issue if we have any trouble with the French—particularly with the hauliers—in the course of the negotiations. It might not only be France; it might be that some other countries in Europe like to charge for the use of their motorways, such as the Italians, and I am sure that there are others as well. The Swiss get their share too—whenever I go through Switzerland they take me for a ride for 40 francs for my car alone.