UK DfT/CCaV Consultation on Draft Statement of Safety Principles for Automated Vehicles Under the AV Act 2024

Headline Finding

On 17 June 2026, the UK Department for Transport (DfT) and Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCaV) launched a public consultation on a draft Statement of Safety Principles (SoSP) for automated vehicles — a statutory requirement under Section 2 of the Automated Vehicles Act 2024. The consultation, open until 9 September 2026, proposes ten principles defining the baseline safety standard any AV must meet before being authorised for UK roads, anchored to the benchmark of a ‘careful and competent’ human driver. This is a pivotal legitimacy lever: it is the first formal attempt under the AV Act to answer the foundational governance question of how safe is safe enough, and it will shape both pre-deployment authorisation and ongoing fleet performance assessment.

Detail

The DfT and CCaV announced the consultation on 17 June 2026, inviting responses from road users, road safety groups, self-driving vehicle businesses, local authorities, and the general public. The consultation closes on 9 September 2026. The draft SoSP is a statutory requirement under Section 2 of the AV Act 2024 and follows a prior call for evidence. It sets out ten proposed principles that self-driving vehicles must satisfy: (1) use the road in accordance with traffic laws and the Highway Code; (2) always maintain control over the vehicle; (3) predict, detect and respond to hazards proactively; (4) adapt driving to road and weather conditions; (5) behave in a predictable manner; (6) improve road safety in Great Britain for all; (7) interact safely with all road users, particularly vulnerable road users; (8) interact safely with emergency services; (9) only operate autonomously within the limits under which they are specifically designed to function; and (10) be designed to take account of the specificities of the territory where they will operate.

The principles are explicitly framed as a ‘safety-first’ approach and are intended to define the standard for pre-deployment authorisation as well as to inform how the performance of the self-driving fleet is assessed over time once vehicles are deployed. The consultation document notes that associated principles identified in the call for evidence — covering cyber resilience and explainability, managing passenger safety risks and wellbeing, software updating, and investigations and incident sharing and learning — are to be addressed elsewhere in the emerging regulatory framework, indicating that the SoSP is one component of a broader, multi-instrument architecture.

Governance Implication

1. The SoSP directly moves the legitimacy lever: by anchoring the safety standard to the ‘careful and competent human driver’ benchmark and opening it to structured public consultation, the DfT is building the public-trust foundation without which commercial AV deployment cannot achieve social licence in Great Britain.
2. The ten principles function as a nascent performance-based permitting instrument — they define outcome standards (hazard response, predictability, vulnerable road user interaction) rather than prescriptive technical specifications, which is the correct architecture for a fast-moving technology frontier but requires robust post-deployment monitoring to be credible.
3. The explicit limitation of principle 9 — that AVs must only operate autonomously within their specifically designed operational limits — embeds the concept of operational design domain directly into the statutory safety framework, giving regulators a lever to constrain geographic or environmental scope of deployment permits.
4. The carve-out of cyber resilience, software updating, and incident-sharing to other parts of the framework signals a modular regulatory architecture; cities and local authorities responding to the consultation should press for clarity on how these modules interact, particularly on data-sharing mandates and incident reporting obligations that bear on spatial-allocation and accountability.
5. The pacing-problem dimension is acute: the consultation closes 9 September 2026, and the SoSP must then be finalised before authorised self-driving entities can be licensed — meaning the governance clock is still running well behind the technology and commercial deployment clock, with no AV authorisation framework yet in force in Great Britain despite the AV Act receiving Royal Assent in 2024.

Sources

https://www.burges-salmon.com/articles/102n4rk/automated-vehicles-act-2024-driverless-but-not-directionless-the-dft-consulta/ https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/automated-vehicles-safety-principles https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/automated-vehicles