Laser Misuse (Vehicles) Bill [HL]

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 23rd January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to the first group of amendments, Amendments 1, 4, 5 and 7, which are in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh. I fully support the purposes of this short Bill and I thank the Minister for her thoughtful letter of 15 January, copied in the Library, commenting on points that I made at Second Reading. These amendments, and others in my name which come later, have been drafted in an attempt purely to highlight, and as necessary close, any possible legal loopholes in the intended coverage of the Bill.

As I mentioned at Second Reading, I felt that the use of “beam” as a generic description of all lasers was inadequate. There are other lasers that fire bursts or pulses of light. A laser exists that uses infrared bursts, down which a lightning-type bolt will travel to hit a target, rather like an extended Taser shot. On YouTube, you can see demonstrations of so-called laser guns and laser rifles. There are a number of hand-held laser-type devices at prototype stage for use in conflict or riot control. If developed into production, such devices could be acquired and misused in ways featured in this Bill. Laser technology is still developing. A beam is defined in this context by the Oxford English Dictionary as a ray or shaft of light. This does not seem to be sufficiently comprehensive, even when combined with the descriptor “laser”, as in “laser beam”. The Minister’s letter defines “laser” by coherence and as comprising a single frequency of light, and equates that to “beam” in the Bill.

My simple amendment, replacing the word “beam” with “device”, in no way detracts from the beam connotation but seeks to cover all types of laser, existing or in future development, more comprehensively than just using the word “beam”. As I am no expert in electronic engineering, I am grateful for the support of my noble friend Lord Oxburgh, a most respected fellow of the Royal Society and former chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence. His support, and some legally informed support, gave me confidence to pursue this point in Committee and to explore the Minister’s brief dismissal at Second Reading and her subsequent, rather superficial justification for relying on the word “beam” in the Bill. The combination of the words “laser device” and,

“shines or directs a laser device towards a vehicle”,

as would appear in the Bill if this amendment were accepted, seem to deal with a beam and with any other or future type of laser that might be misused.

Finally, I have a query. Should a low-power, clinically safe laser be used, would its low power be an acceptable defence because it could do no more than possibly dazzle or distract the person with control of the vehicle, at worst? A laser’s power is not mentioned in the Bill. Is the Minister satisfied? Perhaps she will let me know at a later date that power is not relevant to the Bill. I beg to move.

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to support my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig. We should be grateful to him for drawing attention to this aspect of the Bill. I apologise to the Committee for not having been free to participate at Second Reading. Fundamentally, what my noble and gallant friend is trying to do is to future-proof and, dare I say, lawyer-proof the Bill. It would not be useful to have counsels who did not really understand what they were about arguing over this in court.

I notice that the last five or six subsections of Clause 1 relate to definitions of words which are in general, commonplace use. I suggest that the Minister adds a subsection to that group defining what the Government mean by laser. In doing so, dare I suggest that she consult the holder of my former office in the MoD, who could give up-to-date advice on appropriate wording for the definition of a laser here? The fact is that there are lasers of different kinds, different definitions of laser and some devices which would be called a laser under one definition but not another. It would be quite useful to add a subsection, duly considered, from an authoritative source that dealt with that.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, it is plain that anyone trying to dazzle or distract someone in control of a vehicle by using any laser device ought to be guilty of a criminal offence. The critical question raised by this group of amendments is whether the dazzling or distracting light produced by every sort of laser device can properly be described as a beam. If it can, there is no need for this amendment. But if, as I understand is being suggested by my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig of Radley, supported by no less distinguished a scientist than my noble friend Lord Oxburgh, other laser devices such as a laser gun or rifle can reasonably be said to produce light not by beam, but in some other way—by pulse, burst or whatever—the Bill as drafted may well not catch these other sorts of laser misuse.

As a lawyer, I thought to remind myself of the cardinal legal principles that apply to the construction of statutes. To this end, I consulted Bennion on Statutory Interpretation, the sixth edition of which runs to no fewer than 1,200-odd pages. The only relevant principles perhaps worth mentioning here are what is called the principle against doubtful penalisation and the principle that ordinary words in the English language should be given their ordinary meaning, understood as they are in common language.

As to the principle against doubtful penalisation, the court’s approach will be that a person should not be penalised except under clear law, so that penal enactments require a strict construction. As to the principle that words should bear their ordinary meaning, it could perhaps be argued that a pulse or a burst of light is not, in the ordinary use of the English language, properly to be described as a beam.

I am certainly not saying that if this issue were to reach the courts, it is likely that the Bill as drafted would be found wanting. Indeed, I strongly suspect that it would be held to encompass all laser misuse, as so plainly it is intended and right that it should. But if there is any scintilla of doubt about that, and if that doubt can be quite simply removed by adopting this amendment, then why on earth not do that? That surely is the sensible question the Minister should ask herself today.

I add only that if the Bill team is wedded to the word “beam”, then why not simply add to that, “or device”? Alternatively, we could go down the road suggested by my noble friend Lord Oxburgh and in the definition provisions at the end explicitly put the matter as he has suggested, which would take it beyond the reach of any lawyer, however imaginative.

Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (Science and Technology Report)

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, because it gives me an opportunity to thank him for his leadership of the committee, which he did with his customary firmness, urbanity and unfailing courtesy. He had to deal with some fairly unruly committee members at times, which he did with great dexterity.

As the noble Earl has already pointed out, the public interest in autonomous vehicles focuses largely on road vehicles and surface transport. This is understandable, but in many ways this is probably not the main area of change in the immediate future: seaways and the air tend to be less congested and more firmly under external traffic management control. I suspect that in both those areas we will see seriously autonomous vehicles in the not too distant future: this looks like an opportunity for air freight and sea freight in particular.

As the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, pointed out, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders produced the rather useful table, which we reproduce in our report, with the levels 1 to 5, and level 0 being zero automation. In fact, as far as surface vehicles and motor vehicles are concerned, we have been living with what I would describe as creeping automation for quite a long time. With the first vehicle that I ever owned, as a student, one had to adjust by hand not only the fuel mixture but the timing, and of course double declutching was standard. These are things which have moved into our vehicles and made them easier to drive—almost imperceptibly—and we simply take them for granted.

Anyone who has had the opportunity to drive one of the relatively modern vehicles that are around today will find themselves with all sorts of driver-assisting technologies which we did not dream of 10 years ago. We have already mentioned automatic parking; there is also automatic switching on of your lights when the external light drops to a particular level and automatic switching on of the windscreen wipers—a whole range of activities which make driving easier. Particularly valuable, I think, is the so-called lane assist, where sensors sense the track and alert the driver if he drives out of a marked lane on the road. These things are coming. Levels 1, 2 and 3 of the series that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, described represent increasing levels of automation, using these and probably other devices and assists that we have not yet thought of or certainly are not aware of, with less and less driver involvement.

It is worth pointing out that modern passenger aircraft are probably somewhere between levels 2 and 3. It is well known that passenger aircraft travel on autopilot for long distances. Indeed, it is perfectly possible for modern aircraft to land automatically; take-off has a few more complications. But we are very much in those areas.

The existence of these levels perhaps suggests that the differences between them are more or less equidistant, of similar length, and we just progress from one to the other. But in fact when one moves from level 3 to level 4 there is a big jump in the technology requirement, and certainly an even bigger one when one moves to level 5. Level 4 allows a vehicle to travel under a certain degree of direction. Fundamentally, this means that its application on the surface will be in the automated control of shuttle vehicles or public transport vehicles travelling along well-defined routes—trams and light rail are the obvious easy applications. It would be perfectly possible for there to be movement on marked highways where there were clear lines or electronic markers of other kinds, but these would be limited and the vehicles would not be able to move outside them.

Level 5—default full autonomy—is another kettle of fish. There you are talking about the vehicle taking full responsibility for everything—in so far as a vehicle can be responsible for anything, and that raises some interesting legal and insurance questions. Here I think we have prodigious challenges of data processing and data management. I was discussing this recently with a friend who works in artificial intelligence and he said that, for full autonomy in one of these vehicles, you have to have the ability to process images and interpret those images in real time, like a human being can do, which means exceedingly quickly. He said that if we look at the computational capabilities that are available today, you would need about as much power to drive a computer that can do that as you would need to propel the vehicle. That is not to say that this is not going to happen, but it emphasises that it will not happen tomorrow.