Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

I would like briefly to intervene on this important group of amendments and should declare an interest as a member of the board of UKRI, which is very relevant to the issues we are currently considering. I am not acting as a spokesman on behalf of UKRI, but drawing on the experience that we have had there.

I welcome any attempt to bring greater diversity and innovation to our funding landscape. We do not want a monolith; we want lots of different ways of getting funding and lots of different requirements. Anything that adds to the diversity of the funding landscape I welcome as a good thing. However, I have two or three questions on which I hope that the Minister will be able to give some assurance.

First, the task of ARIA is often described as high-risk, high-reward research. In a way, Clause 3, to which my noble friend Lord Lansley, has referred, is an attempt at setting out in legal prose “high risk, high return”. It is great that ARIA will have that as its objective, but my one concern when I hear this language is the implication that all other public funding for R&D could not be high risk and high return and that it is in some sort of boring bureaucratic pot where everything is safety first and low return. I would be grateful for the Minister’s assurance that it is also perfectly possible for the agencies of UKRI and indeed other sources of public funding for R&D also to engage in high-risk, high-return research. It would place too much weight on ARIA’s shoulders and eliminate diversity if we said that it is the only agency that can act in that way. Having that authoritative assurance from the Government would be of great value in ensuring that our whole research ecosystem carries on performing in an innovative way.

Secondly, I want to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, to which my noble friend has also referred, and seek another assurance from the Minister. When Theresa May’s Government put substantial funding—over £2 billion—into the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, Innovate UK, the main agency for delivering that programme, travelled to America to look at what ARPA did. It said, “These programme directors at ARPA are fantastic—we should have the ARPA model of programme directors in order to deliver the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund”.

I can remember the debate that took place. The Treasury said “Hang on, how much are these programme directors going to be paid? They can’t possibly be paid more than is set by our pay rules”—the pay limit was, I think, £100,000. The Treasury then also said, “We need a committee to scrutinise that the money is being well spent and, to ensure it is making progress, a monthly report would be about right”. Then BEIS, which I do not think completely trusted the Treasury and saw this as a BEIS operation, said, “BEIS also needs to have a committee that meets to scrutinise the success of this programme director; we have slightly different criteria from the Treasury, so our committee should meet once a month”. It averaged out—at the start; it may have got better—that every fortnight there was some supervisory committee or other checking that this programme director was delivering the objectives.

That is the slow, painful process of bureaucratic accretion. It is marvellous that ARIA is, we are assured, going to be free of all that. It would be quite good, however, if other parts of research funding could also be free of those constraints. Indeed, the Government have several reviews on at the moment that are relevant to this, including the Tickell review of bureaucracy and a new grant review of UKRI.

I also hope that the Minister can assure us that, wherever possible, especially if these proposals emerge from two reviews set up by the Government, freedoms being extended to ARIA will also be enjoyed by agencies working under UKRI or other departmental bodies. The problem of bureaucracy must be solved across the whole swathe of R&D funding, not just by creating one institution outside the constraints that everyone else has to work under. I would like an assurance that lessons are being learned, both for the functioning of ARIA and from these two reviews now under way.

Thirdly and finally, we can already sense—not least from the opening presentation from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the purpose of ARIA—a fascinating debate about missions versus technologies. I have frequently had that debate with my friend Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who has brought the language of missions into public policy, which is excellent. However, I always say to her that the Kennedy moonshot did not arise because a bunch of PPE-ists—speaking as one myself—sat around saying, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we sent someone to the moon? That would really get the media’s attention; let’s do that, Mr President”, but because of prior investment in general-purpose technologies, including rockets. It was a deep understanding of what the technologies might be capable of that led to the formulation of the mission.

One can resolve this by wordplay, by making “backing technologies” one of the missions, but the point made earlier about preventing and creating technological surprise tells us that, really, DARPA was always envisaged as driving American leadership in technology. We have the opportunity to choose missions only because of prior investment in underlying science and technology, which turns those missions from empty fantasies into deliverable objectives.

I very much hope we will have an assurance from the Minister during the course of our scrutiny today that ARIA will strike a happy balance. It should be able to fund general-purpose technologies without knowing exactly how they will prove useful, while suspecting that something of that power and significance will have use. It may also wish to fund specific missions or challenges, but it would be a strategic mistake to put all its eggs in one basket. It is the interaction of technological investment capabilities with missions and challenges that really drives innovation. I very much hope that ARIA will pursue both approaches.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise for not taking part at Second Reading; I was at the COP 26 climate talks, which are of obvious relevance to this group in particular.

I begin by reflecting on the model for ARIA—DARPA, which was of course military. We have talked a lot about risk-taking, which is usually interpreted as the risk of failure to achieve your objectives. When we think about the origins of this—the child very often showing some characteristics of its parent—we can also think about the risks attached to achieving your outcomes but causing unintended effects. With DARPA, there was Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the drone warfare of the Gulf War, and it is now working on killer drones and robot warriors.

Looking at the model of DARPA, researcher Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, talked about how it very much became embedded in what has been described, including by US Presidents, as the military-industrial complex. Giving a mission is very important, in order to avoid institutional capture. That is one of the reasons why I speak in favour of Amendments 1, 21 and 26. We have not yet had the chance to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, but I think her Amendment 21 is in a sense similar to Amendments 1 and 26, except that it provides a more regular review mechanism.

If we think about what ARIA is for and look at some of the proposals put forward, we see that the CBI described it as

“an international lynchpin for business investment”

that is to “ultimately deliver new products”. McKernan said that it was

“a public sector, new technology seed fund”

whereas, by contrast, the Russell Group described it as

“multidisciplinary research teams with the capacity to take a holistic approach”.

That brings us to the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was just addressing, which was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and why I would express opposition to his Amendment 25. There is a danger in focusing on technology rather than on mission. We want to focus on mission and on the problems that we need to solve—and Amendment 1 very much focuses on the great problem that we need to solve. Discussion thus far has focused very much on the climate emergency, but it also talks about a “sustainable … society”.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I offer Green support for the intention of all these amendments, although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, that “representative” is not quite the right approach. Ideally, we would see the devolved Administrations and Westminster getting together to ensure that there was representation from the nations that fitted together in terms of making a cohesive board with the right set and range of skills, and it would be a co-operative process that ensured that we had those nations involved.

I was very taken with the comment by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about the “magic inner circle”. That is something that we absolutely have to break up when it comes to innovation and new thinking in the UK. Just because it seems to fit here, we need to make sure that we are drawing on not just a handful of the most well-funded and well-resourced higher education institutions but on all our higher education institutions. We also need to think about what further education institutions, of which there are many around the country, may be able to offer.

On that issue, I want to reinforce the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, about where this will be based. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to do this now or possibly at some point in future, but I think the Committee would be greatly reassured if she could tell us that it will not be in the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle but somewhere else.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to express the hope that the Minister is going to tell the Committee that consultations have taken place with the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government and whoever the appropriate people are presently to represent the people of Northern Ireland about the issues raised by Amendment 4, and that she can satisfy the Committee that this has all been agreed. If not, I can tell her that it has the potential to be quite a serious issue in Scotland.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

5: At end insert—
“(d) meeting Sustainable Development Goals 1 (no poverty), 2 (zero hunger) and 3 (good health and wellbeing).”

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

In moving Amendment 5 in my name, I will briefly comment on Amendments 4 and 19. Had there been space in our procedures, I would have attached my name to Amendment 4; I note that it has broad cross-party support. It addresses the Climate Change Act and imposes a legal requirement to comply with the duty of Section 1 of that Act, which concerns net-zero emissions. That is an important and good way of expressing it, and I hope that we will see that eventual outcome.

Amendment 19 talks about ARIA having an ESG strategy. This would not be my preferred way forward. In a way, it is better than nothing, and I see the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, about lining up with other vaguely similar institutions. However, we have seen a great deal of criticism of ESG as not always being a very strong or effective tool.

My Amendment 5 calls for ARIA to include sustainable development goals 1, on poverty, 2, on zero hunger, and 3, on health and well-being. These are internationally recognised and accepted goals, with targets within them to which the UK, like every country on this earth, is signed up. Surely these should be the goals of every element of the Government, both direct and arm’s-length parts.

I thank the Minister and his staff for engaging with me in discussions on this, but before I get to that I want to address why it is so important to talk about poverty, health and hunger in this ARIA Bill. When people talk about what ARIA will achieve, very often it sounds as if we are talking about Silicon Fen, often known as the “Cambridge cluster”—the region around Cambridge which has so many high-tech business, including software, electronics and biotechnology. But if you look at the reality of life in Cambridge, the top 6% of earners take home 19% of the wealth generated in the city, and the bottom 20% of earners get 2% of the wealth generated in the city.

I encourage noble Lords, if they have not yet seen it, to have a look at an article in the Guardian by Aditya Chakrabarti, who visited a foodbank in Cambridge recently. In his reflections there, he noted that this is a tiny city with a population half the size of a single London borough, yet in one postcode in Cambridge you can expect to live until 87. In a postcode just down the road, it is 78. This is the kind of development that has delivered a miserable life for many, many people. This is why I tabled this amendment.

In the discussions that I mentioned with the Minister and his staff, which raised some very interesting issues, they pointed me to Clause 2(6) of the Bill, which states that, in exercising its functions,

“ARIA must have regard to the desirability”

of various things. Clause 2(6)(c) states that one of those is

“improving the quality of life in the United Kingdom”.

I would be very interested to hear from any noble and learned Lords who might be able to assist me. I am not a lawyer and I am not quite sure what the legal definition is of “quality of life”. I suggest that it is open to political contention and discussion. More than that, in the context of what I was saying about Cambridge, whose quality of life are we talking about? That is a very important question to ask. In your Lordships’ House, I often comment on the Government’s pursuit of GDP as a goal in itself, but here we are talking about quality of life, which surely has to include a distributional element.

That was my purpose in tabling this amendment. I was asked whether I intended to put it to a vote. Given that I called a Division yesterday, and given that I have not had as much time as I would have liked to devote to thinking it through and finding a form of words that really works, it is not my intention to put it to a vote. However, I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government mean by “quality of life” in Clause 2(6)(c). Do the Government acknowledge that that has to address distribution as well as GDP growth? I cannot see any way that it could not. If the Minister is looking for a way of measuring this, I point him to the Living Standards Framework used in New Zealand, which directs the New Zealand Treasury and the actions of the New Zealand Government. That is a good measure of the quality of life. I beg to move.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 4 and 19 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Browne of Ladyton, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and myself. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, in particular for his tireless work on this issue. I too join in the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Broers, and wish him well in his retirement. I also have some sympathy with the intention behind the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which raises very important and wider questions, but I am going to focus on Amendment 4.

As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has said, a number of Acts of Parliament that have gone through this House have had “have regard” amendments relating to climate change made to them. I was pleased to be a signatory to the cross-party amendment to the Financial Services Bill, which the Government substantially accepted in this regard. This point of consistency is extremely important. However, I would have preferred it if the Government had been willing to accept a stronger amendment on the purpose of the organisation, but I recognise that political pragmatism is wise on occasion.

In Committee, we had a very useful discussion about whether the agency would benefit from the sort of mission and focus that helped the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States—mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale—achieve its success. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, told us that DARPA’s mission had been to not be taken by surprise by new technology and, perhaps by implication, to surprise others with the advanced technology of the United States. That may well have been the mission, but the purpose of the mission was surely what drove DARPA’s success: to maintain the national security of the United States against the threat of Soviet communism. It is that purpose which provided DARPA with its edge, its sense of urgency and an understanding of the stakes of the mission on which it was engaged.

While Soviet communism posed an existential threat to our freedom then, today the threat we face from climate change and ecological destruction is even more acute: an existential threat to life itself. Surely, there can be no more profound purpose to drive our new advanced research agency, no greater focus to inspire research, innovation and the practical application of science, than that of tackling a threat to humanity itself.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I apologise; the procedure is a little different and more complicated because I put down an amendment to an amendment. It is not my intention to respond substantively to the Minister’s response to Amendment 4. The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has consistently championed Amendment 4 and variations of it, so it is most appropriate that he responds on that one. I should just say that I failed to declare earlier that I am a member of the committee for Peers for the Planet. On Amendment 5 and my side of this, I do not think the Minister responded to my question about defining quality of life. I realise this may be a legally complicated matter, so will he commit to write to me about this and lay a copy of the correspondence in the Library?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Regarding the noble Baroness’s question on the definition of the quality of life—we are getting into a very esoteric debate for this time of night—I do not think there is a technical definition specific to her suggestions that I can point towards. It is not in such common usage but, if I can find an appropriate definition, I will of course send it to her.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I thank the Minister for his answer. I want to make one other point very quickly. He talked a lot about the hard sciences. It is interesting that, when we had a private discussion with a number of his colleagues, there was also a lot of focus on what might be described as the softer biological sciences and issues such as plant health and the human microbiome. I hope those will be considered within ARIA’s remit. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 5 (to Amendment 4) withdrawn.