Martin Wrigley

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I congratulate the hon. Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes) not only on securing this debate, but on her positive and optimistic vision of the future, which I really like. I think many of us have long had a vision of autonomous vehicles based on science fiction. Reality is not quite there yet, but it is moving fast towards it. We have seen the progress on autonomous cars, and the various pilot sites in the USA—and closer to home, as we have heard. Fully autonomous cars in Newton Abbot are, I suspect, quite some way off. Drivers who have not grown up with our Devon lanes find them hard enough, and we can only dream of having white lines on the edge of the road. In well-defined urban environments, it is quite another matter, largely dependent on the legal and insurance issues that we heard about earlier. We could easily see AVs soon beyond the trial stages that we have today. However, we have some issues in running trials of uncrewed maritime and air connected and autonomous vehicles. I recently met with a retired navy air traffic controller, who told me of his latest work using aerial drones to deliver test samples from Scottish islands to mainland hospital labs, Project CAELUS, which had excellent success. We could use that sort of technology to get samples between our hospitals in Devon, which would be good—it would avoid the summer traffic. However, it took eight months to get the flight path agreed and approved, and it required a special use airspace application for beyond visual line of sight uncrewed air system operations under civil air publication 1616. I ask the Minister, or perhaps his colleagues, to seek speed from the Civil Aviation Authority in reforming CAP1616, including a more proportionate approach to BVLOS airspace, to improve clarity, efficiency and transparency while maintaining safety. Additionally, a couple of weeks ago, as part of the armed forces parliamentary scheme, we visited the Royal Navy in Portsmouth and saw a connected uncrewed boat doing tests in the harbour. It was being controlled by a team on land—essentially, it is a standard 5-metre rigid inflatable boat with a remote skipper. Following it was a crewed Navy boat, which is required by maritime regulations to constantly escort uncrewed 5-metre RIBs. The Navy fleet of the future described in the strategic defence review is highly dependent on the use of uncrewed vessels to supplement and complement the existing Navy ships. We must be able to develop them and test them in a more effective way, as we are doing with cars on land. I urge the Minister, or perhaps his team, to see what exemptions and exceptions may be made. Marine guidance note 705(M) exemptions are limited to boats less than 4.5 metres and at 6 knots or slower. That does not cover what the Navy needs to do. Unless we can find a way to rapidly and safely regulate, and not prevent, tests of remote air and marine craft, we will struggle to get to where we need to be. The Chair of the Ukrainian Parliament, on his recent visit, stated that their drone technology lasted about three months, by which time they had developed a whole new set-up. We need to speed up.