Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and Lord Broers

Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to give the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, the very strongest support. We have talked around the issue of how we can solve the problem of losing our brilliant companies, because it is stunningly serious—and it is not just Arm and Nvidia. I am very pleased because I wrote to the Government about six months to a year ago to plead that the competitive agency should look at that, and it is at least looking at it now. The company Solexa was taken over by Illumina, having pioneered the successful way to decode DNA, and Illumina’s revenue flowed into the many billions—after the key technology had come entirely from the UK. These things should not have happened.

I ask whether we can add to the requirements on ARIA that incentives should somehow be given to our City, which has an appalling record of missing opportunities to invest in UK industries—creative industries in particular. It is all very well to talk about the scale of American venture capital: that is a very good point, but we can be very selective. Then perhaps we would not need a very big scale to look after companies such as Arm and Solexa—there was Verata before them, and several others that have left here almost with the certainty of being successful, and yet somehow we could not find our own funds to support them.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 31 in my name. It is a probing amendment to find whether the Minister would say a few words about how ARIA grants will interact with national security and our established defence industry. We have a very well-developed defence research capability in the UK. It is successful and world leading. I would like to understand how ARIA will relate to it.

I also fully support the amendment from my noble friend Lord Browne. I do not know anywhere near as much as he or many other noble Lords in this Committee do about the topic, but I was familiar with Cobham, which was based very close to Darlington: most people who worked there seemed to live in Darlington. Its substantial contribution in this field stretched over decades. I agree that we need to do whatever the Government think would work to deal with this problem. It seems to be a concern on all sides. If the amendment from my noble friend Lord Browne, is not the right one, or it this not the right clause, or perhaps not even the right Bill, there remains a concern that has been expressed that the Government would do well to respond to and let us know, if this is not the way they will deal with it, how they intend to tackle something that is clearly a concern of many noble Lords.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Baroness Chapman of Darlington and Lord Broers

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I shall make just a few comments. I declare my interests, as I did on Second Reading. I spent most of my active life, 40 or 50 years, doing things that ARPA was doing—that we were doing in IBM in the United States—and I have spent more recent years working with the Queen Elizabeth prize and now with the Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. I declare my membership of that academy, the Chinese academy and the Australian academy, as well as the royal academy here.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, raised a lot of cogent points, but the mission of ARIA—I wish “Invention” was replaced by “Innovation”, but that is a small point —must be, to distinguish it from UKRI, to take projects all the way through until they are fully implemented, fully available for people to use, commercially sensible and affordable, and to solve an important problem. A lot of what UKRI does is the essential discovery and understanding of how the world works, and these things should be different.

One thing is very much in common: you need creative people. In ARIA you probably need creative engineers—there will be scientists as well; most of these things are mixed—and creative engineers are no different to creative musicians or creative artists. They do not like being told what to paint, what to compose, how to compose or how to paint. That would turn them all away.

I test my credibility by quoting Donald Rumsfeld. ARIA is all about “unknown unknowns”. I have been sitting down for the last two hours reading all these amendments; we are trying to tie down ARIA so that we understand what it will do, when it will do it, how often it will report on doing it and everything else. That is not what we are trying to create. We will destroy the thing before we ever give birth to it.

I support these amendments, because the challenge that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has come up with, and others have supported, is the climate problem. That is huge and wide. I do not think it is a constraint that will really trouble creative people at the moment. In fact, I have met a lot of people who are very successful in one field of research and have abandoned that and moved into the field of climate and what they can do about it, because they feel that is the best place to apply their creativity and intellect. I urge the Minister and everybody who will take this through: let us not strangle the poor thing before it begins.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord. He is completely right when he says that climate is a broad enough canvas on which people can paint. Broadly speaking, I do not mind painters and artists painting whatever they like, whenever they like, on whatever they like—if I am not paying for it. But we are paying for this, and it is not unreasonable for us to say that we would like ARIA to turn its attention primarily to the climate emergency, the very thing that is threatening our existence on this planet. That is a sufficiently exciting challenge to set ARIA.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, was very persuasive and I understand the attraction of allowing maximum freedom, but the risk is that it becomes directionless. For a quite small organisation, as ARIA is, that is a risk, so my view is that ARIA needs a core mission.

The Government want ARIA to have maximum flexibility and be able to back projects as it sees fit, free of any political interference or unnecessary bureaucracy. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, explained very well how deadening that could be. We certainly have no wish to enter into the kind of situation he described, but a research focus or a mission could be achieved without that risk. He said that no one could have set out to achieve the moon landings without being able to look back and build on existing technology. That is completely right, but we do not have the luxury of that at this moment. We have a very real, immediate risk that we need to address, which is why we favour making the mission one of climate.

We all want ARIA to succeed. This is quite a good Bill from a cross-party working point of view because we all want it to work, but asking the board to come up with its own mission—or, even worse, not having a mission at all—would not assist ARIA and could set it up with a weakness, or even to fail. We all need direction, purpose and a sense that what we are doing is contributing to a greater good, so telling ARIA to back any scientific research and to do what it sees fit would be a mistake. The board will anyway spend its first few months deciding how it is going to make decisions. We are not attempting to tell it how to do that, but it would have no framework or sense of the UK’s priorities, and I just do not think that is necessary. It would be a mistake and, if we corrected it, that would not diminish ARIA in any way; in fact, it would be strengthened.