Protection for Whistleblowing Bill [HL]

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, and I commend her comprehensive and detailed speech. She gave a lot of examples and good reasons for supporting the Bill in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer. I congratulate her on achieving a Second Reading, and I commend her and the all-party parliamentary group for their tireless work and persisting with this objective. Maybe the noble Baroness will be lucky enough on this occasion to persuade the Government that this path forward is the appropriate one.

My intention in contributing to the debate is not to share a lot of anecdotes from my experiences as both a parliamentarian and a lawyer in whistleblowing cases. On reflection, given that I have been a “relevant person” for a significant part of my life, I am surprised at how little there is on whistleblowing. My concern about the current state of affairs is the irrelevance and ineffectiveness of the processes and the available legislative structure.

Late yesterday evening, I was trying to work out in my head what order I would put the various facts I had collected in anticipation of speaking today. About half past 10, I decided that I had had enough of that, and I put the papers aside and switched on the television. I heard Kirsty Wark say: “A ‘Newsnight’ investigation reveals a culture of fear in one of England’s biggest hospital trusts, where doctors tell us their warnings about patient safety are met with disciplinary action”. I thought to myself, “Well, if I watch this programme, I may get some insight into how this current system works”, but I was disappointed.

The item, the product of a two-month investigation involving a considerable number of BBC journalists, it would appear, took up about 15 minutes of the programme and included parts of interviews with former and current leading clinicians and the local Member of Parliament. The story, I note, led this morning’s BBC News. I have no intention of engaging your Lordships with the detail of the reported investigation or indeed the deeply worrying claim that in the last 10 years the trust has referred 26 of its doctors to the GMC, but in not one of these cases has the GMC taken any further action. I raise it today because of what we can infer about the effectiveness of the current legislative protection, the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998, in providing adequate, never mind comprehensive, protection to whistleblowers and the public.

In last night’s programme, the word “whistleblower” was used only once and that was in the presentation’s peroration. It is more present in today’s reporting, but in neither the written reporting today or the BBC’s reporting night was any reference made to the current legislative protection, the Act or indeed any regulator whose attention was brought to this matter and who caused it to be investigated. In fact, it seems that, as a case study it is compelling evidence of not just the ineffectiveness but the irrelevance of the current law.

On ineffectiveness and irrelevance, when previous iterations of this Bill were brought before your Lordships’ House, the argument was that establishing the office of the whistleblower, as this Bill proposes, would duplicate the work of existing regulators. I understand the importance of clear lines of accountability that are not blurred by a regulatory body with overlapping functions or remits, but I would like to know what the regulators actually do. Surely, the onus is on those who make this argument to produce the data showing that we will be disturbing a system that already works. I cannot find that data anywhere. Probably the only question I will put to the Minister is: does he have the data on the number of cases that pass through the regulatory system, and the impact of that? If that data shows what I suspect it does—from anecdotal evidence only—then this process is ripe for complete restructuring. It does not work at anything like the scale it ought to because of the level of wrongdoing going on in all of the spaces where it should work.

In the few seconds I have left, I want to share one experience with your Lordships. As a former Secretary of State for Defence, I am often approached by people who want me somehow to impact the MoD. I mostly have to tell them that I am unable to do that, but I do still have some contacts there. I want to raise the issue of whistleblowers who have signed the Official Secrets Act. I have heard of cases, which for obvious reasons I will not say very much about, of people in just that position who have repeatedly been warned against taking their concerns outside their employment due to their obligations under that Act. The examples of abuses and corrupt and unethical behaviour reportedly include ones that would be considered serious in other environments, including cases of serious sexual violence. These are entirely inappropriate things to do, but people are being intimidated regularly and warned against taking such cases forward, just because of what they have signed in the past. This should not stop them doing it, but it is being deployed to do so.

Climate Change: Behaviour Change

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, further to the advice that they have received from the Climate Change Committee that 62 per cent of emissions reductions involve some form of human behaviour change, what plans they have to introduce a comprehensive behaviour change strategy.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, the Government recognise that our net-zero target will require people to make changes in how we do things, such as the way that we travel or heat our homes. We want to empower people to make greener choices while maintaining freedom of choice and fairness. As one example of government action, I point out that this summer we launched the “Find Ways to Save Energy in Your Home” page on GOV.UK, which provides homeowners with tailored advice.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for that Answer. He will remember that on 20 October, in the debate on net zero and behaviour change, he said more than once that the heat and buildings strategy is an example of how the Government are providing advice and support to the public to help them to make green choices. The Climate Change Committee’s assessment of the strategy noted that significant challenges remain, particularly about the skills needed to deliver it. Its June 2022 progress report said that the promised action plan for net-zero skills has not yet been published, even though the EAC said a year ago that

“the workforce of the future is being undermined by a lack of evidence-based Government policies on how jobs will be filled in green sectors”,

while the Scottish Government published their skills plan in December 2020. When will the net-zero skills plan be published?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The noble Lord makes a good point: providing the skills necessary for all the future green jobs is extremely important, and we are taking action on that. We have launched a number of different training competitions and, through BEIS alone, provided about £20 million for two sets of training competitions that have provided tens of thousands of new training places. The DfE has a large skills programme as well, and we work closely with it to ensure that we provide the workforce with the skills that they require.

TRIPS Agreement: Vaccines

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2022 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how, and to what extent, the temporary waiver of provisions of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), agreed at the World Trade Organization’s Ministerial Conference on 17 June, will expand access to current and new vaccines, given that it does not include a waiver of trade secrets.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Callanan) (Con)]

My Lords, the consensus-based agreement reached at the WTO’s 12th ministerial conference streamlines compulsory licensing processes for developing countries to manufacture and export Covid-19 vaccines while preserving the incentives to innovation that the international IP system provides. We welcome that the agreement does not undermine the existing IP framework, which has been key to the effective response to the pandemic.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, regrettably, the Minister’s Answer—I do not blame him for this as he was probably following his brief—did not address the issue that, without the inclusion of a waiver of trade secrets, essential access to critical manufacturing know-how and clinical data, and therefore to the ability to manufacture new vaccines, is denied. Why is this our Government’s policy, and why did our negotiators, who spent 18 months resisting this waiver completely, try to weaken the text further by requesting the deletion of the reference to the possibility of expanding the agreement in TRIPS on Covid-19 to include therapeutics and diagnostics in six months’ time? Who on earth instructed them to do that?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I disagree. This is a very good agreement, and the Government have seen no evidence that IP rights, including the protection of undisclosed information or trade secrets, are any barrier to accessing treatments for Covid-19. The problem now is that we are seeing supply effectively outstrip demand, with the current level of vaccine production. There is evidence—reports of a South African Covid-19 vaccine plant being at risk of closure because it has no orders, and the Serum Institute of India halving production of AstraZeneca’s vaccine due to no new orders.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening remarks and his comprehensive repetition of what George Freeman, the Minister, said in the other place. To a degree, I am reassured. My concern is how I will know that the Government live up to the undertakings implied in the words of the Minister. I will come back to him in a moment. I intend to be brief.

I particularly thank the Minister for his generous remarks about me, but they ought to be shared by a significant number of Members in all parts of the House who contributed to the debate we had on the amendment. That the House was minded to support the amendment had more to do with Members’ combined advocacy than the way in which I introduced it. I also thank the Minister and his office for earlier this week drawing my attention to the Government’s recent announcement that Dr Peter Highnam has been appointed as ARIA’s first CEO. This man seems uniquely qualified to do this job; I suppose DARPA is the only place that he could have got the experience. He is also uniquely equipped to negotiate the framework agreement with the Government, which will be important to how ARIA works.

I accept that the Commons reason is not challengeable, and I do not intend to debate that or to divide the House on the noble Lord’s Motion. However, as the Minister and his office helpfully reminded me a week ago, while speaking to my amendment on Report, I set out my wish to hear the Science Minister address at the Dispatch Box the issues that prompted the amendment in the first place. At least I should address what he said, and I will do that for a few minutes, with the leave of the House.

In the other place, George Freeman acknowledged the importance of ARIA having a duty to the taxpayer to ensure that the intellectual property generated by its investment in R&D is commercialised to the advantage of the UK economy primarily, and to ensure that it is not

“haemorrhaging intellectual property of value to the UK.”—[Official Report, Commons, 31/1/22; col. 86.]

That reflects what he said to a number of noble Lords who met him before Report. To paraphrase another member of the Government, he gets it and clearly seems to understand the issue. The question is whether the Government have a plan to address this issue and will be able to share the development of the plan with Parliament properly. That is what I want to concentrate on now.

Turning to what the Science Minister said, he first referred to the terms of the amendment and argued that, as drafted, it added only examples of the conditions that ARIA may attach to financial support and, as it already has a general power to do just that, it represented a drafting change that cannot be accepted. There is no merit in this argument. The fact is that the Bill, as already drafted by the Government, already has examples of conditions that ARIA may attach to financial support in Clause 2. They are almost certainly there because the Government want to highlight those powers, not because those examples need to be there to give those powers to ARIA. Our amendment simply adds to their existing list and has a similar motivation—to emphasise and highlight the importance of this power.

On the specific issue of predatory overseas acquisition of IP through foreign takeover of UK businesses where there has been substantial public investment in R&D—there are many past examples of this, to the detriment of the UK economy—the Minister reassured the other place that the National Security and Investment Act 2021, which fully commenced in January, already provides a relevant and sufficient framework for the Government to scrutinise acquisitions on national security grounds. The Minister also referred to a broader strand of work that is under way to enhance that statutory framework, including other unspecified complementary measures designed to help the Government strengthen our protections. Perhaps the Minister can expand on that. He made some general references to it, but I am not clear as to what work is going on. I think the House would benefit if there was further specification. It may not be appropriate to do it now, but maybe it could be spelled out more clearly at some time in the future.

The Minister reassured the House that the Bill already provides the Secretary of State with a broader power of direction over ARIA on issues of national security, but the amendment was never intended to intervene in the Secretary of State’s powers. This is of limited comfort, as my honourable friend Chi Onwurah pointed out, national security in the relevant legislation, the NSI 2021, is narrowly defined, and it does not include economic security, despite attempts by Labour to expand the definition in that Act so that it would include this. It therefore does not address the issue of intellectual property and its economic value.

The Minister then pointed out that the because of the terms of Clause 2(6), ARIA must have regard to economic growth or economic benefit in the UK, and the mechanism for scrutiny by government and Parliament will be in what the Minister refers to as the framework document. This is a weapon which the Government deploy regularly to see off amendments to the Bill. On Report, the Minister used the potential of the framework agreement, and what it could include, five times in debates. The problem is that none of us has seen the outline of the framework document, or even the Government’s bid for the negotiations of what the framework document will include. Until we see that, there is no way that any of us can judge its merit as a mechanism for dealing with the issues that we have raised.

Perhaps during the negotiations that can at least now commence after May, when there is a CEO, the Government will undertake to make regular statements, or at least one statement, to the House about their negotiating position, so that we get some sense of whether the many concerns about this Bill that the House has shared with the Minister can be allayed by the framework agreement or document. There is now a CEO and these negotiations can begin.

Finally, in the debate that took place in the other place, at col. 87, the Minister turned to the question of how ARIA responds to the UK’s strategic interests in science and technology more generally, where these may not fall under national security. I think he played his ace there: drawing attention first to the integrated review, which he did not expand on, and then to the role of the new Office for Science and Technology Strategy and the national science and technology council, and the Government’s ambition to ensure that there is a serious, strategic machinery of government showing a commitment to the strategic industrial advantage of UK science and technology. The Government’s argument is strong: we should be persuaded that this will deal with these issues because the Government have a core to their infrastructure that will drive these ambitions. There is a fundamental difficulty with this, however: it is impossible to find, in any government documents, any information about either the Office for Science and Technology Strategy, or the national science and technology council, which is a sub-committee of the Cabinet, other than that they exist and a very broad outline of the first organisation, which is designed to service the second one. I do not know how we are supposed to evaluate the strategic machinery of government, unless we know what they do.

There is something worrying happening to the accountability in our Government at the moment. There is a proliferation of sub-committees of the Cabinet. We have gone from having about six to having 20 in a matter of months. Almost every area of important public policy now has one or more such sub-committees to deal with it. The pattern appears to be—it certainly is with climate change—a strategic sub-committee and an implementation sub-committee. You can find out nothing about what any of these committees do.

So that we know what the relationship between Parliament and these committees now is, I will quote for the benefit of the House what Alok Sharma, the COP president, said to your Lordships’ Environment and Climate Change Committee in answer to a very reasonable question, in a questionnaire sent by the committee, about these two key pieces of machinery for climate change. The committee asked him:

“Are the two relevant Cabinet Committees”—


that is, the strategy committee and the implementation committee, which he chairs—

“expected to continue in the long-term, and what plans does the Government have to increase transparency around their proceedings?”

The answer to this is in a letter, which is on the committee’s website. I will read it in short, because in the first part Alok Sharma gave the impression that they are intended to continue, but he said:

“With respect to Committee frequency and transparency, it is a long-established precedent that information about the discussions that have taken place in Cabinet and its Committees, and how often they have met, is not normally shared publicly”.


So that is it.

If that is to be it for this infrastructure, which sits at the heart of the development of science and technology and ARIA, we will not find out anything. I honestly have no way of knowing whether I should be reassured by what the Minister said in the other place, if that was his ace card. To paraphrase my honourable friend Chi Onwurah in the other place, the Minister has set out that he shares our concerns, but I am afraid that I cannot really assess whether he has a plan to address them, because there is a whole part of what he intends to do that I will never be allowed to know.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I very much appreciate what my noble friend on the Front Bench has said by way of response to the several debates that we had on the Bill about the centrality of intellectual property, and its protection and exploitation by ARIA. Often in your Lordships’ House, we send amendments to the other place, and occasionally—perhaps often—we find that they are not given the weight of debate at the other end that we think they deserve. On this occasion, it did, and I was much reassured by the Science Minister’s response, and by the appointment of Dr Highnam to the chief executive post.

I want to raise one question. In the midst of the many reassuring things that were said, including that the powers exist for ARIA, or through the NS&I Act, the framework document remains. I raised one issue on that in an amendment, which was whether under the framework document ARIA would be able to retain and reinvest the exploitation of intellectual property arising from its investments so as to create a growing activity in support of its mission of disruptive innovation. I hope that will be incorporated in the framework document. It was not referred to, so I hope that my noble friend will take note of it and that the Treasury will allow this to happen.

Vaccine Patents Waiver

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 24th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

This side!

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

Actually, I give way to the noble Lord, Lord Browne, who has been trying to speak for some time.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I am very much obliged to the noble Lord. What assessment have the Government made of the establishment in Cape Town by Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines of the first Covid mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub for vaccine production in Africa? It benefits from the fact that Moderna has effectively suspended its patent rights during the pandemic. The European Union, the World Health Organization and numerous countries, prominently France, have funded this project in a Commonwealth country. Have the Government thought about a similar initiative with AstraZeneca, given that 97% of the investment in the AstraZeneca vaccine was from the Government or from philanthropy, not from other investors?

[Lord Grimstone of Boscobel (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord is right to put that example before the House, and I shall make sure that I have a look at it and see whether we can follow it up.

Net-zero Test for New Policies

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I agree completely with the noble Lord for a change. He is quite right to make the case for new nuclear. Indeed, the other place passed the nuclear Bill just yesterday, so it will be coming to this House shortly; I look forward to debating it alongside the noble Lord. I already meet with Scottish Ministers, although I fear that my efforts to persuade them of anything are very much in vain.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I take the Minister back to his own reference to the key commitment that the Government made under the heading of “Embedding Net Zero in Government” in the Net Zero Strategy; the commitment that he referred to was to publish an update of progress against a “set of … indicators” for achieving our climate change goals on an annual basis. What progress is being made in taking forward this commitment, and what scrutiny will there be of the agreed indicators?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We are indeed committed to publishing this, exactly as I said, and we are making a considerable commitment towards meeting our targets. We have the most ambitious programme of emissions reductions in the whole of the G7. Let me give an example of how difficult these areas are. It is easy to say that, yes, we must embed net zero in all our policies, but the other place is currently having a debate brought forward by the noble Lord’s party on removing VAT from domestic fuel. Everybody can see why that might be important at the moment but, arguably, such a test would fail the commitment on net zero, since most fuel is still produced by carbon-intensive methods. These are difficult policy areas; we have to balance the overarching aim of net zero with other commitments on fuel poverty, et cetera.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

1: Clause 2, page 2, line 6, at end insert—
“(ba) financial support provided by ARIA may be treated as convertible to equity interest in the business entity which has received such support; (bb) for a period of ten years after ARIA has provided financial support, or made property available, the business entity which has received such support must obtain the consent of ARIA before—(i) transferring specified intellectual property rights from the United Kingdom to any territory outside the United Kingdom, or(ii) selling or otherwise transferring a controlling interest in that entity to another entity not resident in the United Kingdom;”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would enable ARIA to make it a condition of the provision of financial support to a business that it is convertible into an equity interest in the business and that, for 10 years after ARIA has provided financial support, or made property available, the business requires the consent of ARIA either to transfer abroad intellectual property rights or to sell or transfer a controlling interest in that business to another business not resident in the United Kingdom.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 1 would enable ARIA to make it a condition of the provision of financial support to a business that it is convertible to an equity interest in the business and that for 10 years after ARIA has provided that financial support, or made property available, the business requires the consent of ARIA either to transfer abroad intellectual property rights or to sell or transfer a controlling interest in that business to another business not resident in the United Kingdom. I am grateful for the support from my noble friend Lady Chapman of Darlington and the noble Lords, Lord Morse and Lord Clement-Jones, who have added their names as supporters of the amendment. I am especially grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Morse, who prepared the first draft of the amendment—although, anticipating that its drafting may be criticised, I make it clear that I take full responsibility for its revised form.

In moving Amendment 1, I support the other five amendments in the group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and have added my name to Amendments 2 and 8. I am pleased that these amendments have been grouped, as they are a response to the same concern. The House will be pleased to hear that I do not intend to rehearse the arguments that I advanced in Committee. I am grateful for the support that I received then from the noble Lords, Lord Fox, Lord Lansley and Lord Broers, and my noble friends Lady Chapman and Lord Stansgate.

Yesterday, I and other noble Lords received a letter from the Minister, which I will come back to later. First, I will explain exactly what the amendment would do, because it is relevant to the letter, which was extremely welcome; it covers the issues that have been raised and shows that those who have amendments in this group have common concerns with the Government —we are broadly on the same page. The degree to which we differ is marginal now, and much less than it was at the beginning of these issues being raised in Committee. So that is progress, but I do not think we are yet where we want to be.

This amendment is to Clause 2, headed “ARIA’s functions”. It would amend Clause 2(4) to add to the conditions that in particular, in exercising its functions, ARIA may attach to financial support or making property available to other parties. It would do this in the context of a clause which has six subsections, five of which are permissive, including that being amended. They are permissive to the extent that they set out what ARIA may do and are designed to give ARIA the flexibility needed for it to carry out the challenging function it is charged with.

However, Clause 2(6) is instructive. It requires ARIA to have regard in exercising its functions to the desirability of doing so in a way which, as the Minister summarises it in his letter, ensures that

“public investment in research and innovation should drive long-term socioeconomic benefit and deliver overall value to UK taxpayers”.

That is a very good summary of what is required, and it is demanded of ARIA by this section of the Bill.

By going to the permissive elements of ARIA’s function, these amendments go beyond willing the end; they help ARIA by willing the means, specifically in relation to intellectual property. This amendment would do so by ensuring that the successes of ARIA stay for a sufficiently long time in the hands of those who have the UK’s best interests at heart.

I thank the Minister for his letter, and I welcome the invitation to a meeting with the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, George Freeman, and himself to discuss further the concerns that underlie these amendments. I accept, as the letter says, that these concerns are broader than just this Bill, but we only have this Bill to deal with today and they are very significant in the context of what we are asking ARIA to do.

I thank the Minister not only for that invitation but for the all-Peers session that he arranged on 1 December to brief noble Lords on the devolved Administration agreement and ARIA’s governance. Those who attended were delighted that George Freeman turned up unexpectedly and generously shared with us, candidly, his views about several matters relevant to the establishment of ARIA and the policy implications of setting it up.

I was very pleased that, in response to a question about ownership of intellectual property posed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, the Science Minister shared his concern about the risk that publicly funded research and innovation may lead to foreign, as opposed to British, private or public gain—the issue at the heart of these amendments and mine in particular. We all now know that the Science Minister shares the concern that lies behind this problem. In fact, he shares it so much that he deflected the specific question about intellectual property and said, “I am much more worried about a very successful ARIA development falling into the hands of foreigners”.

In Committee, I pointed out that twice before the Committee stage I had tried to engage the Minister on this very issue—what is happening in the United Kingdom and has been happening for some time to some of our best and brightest businesses, and the effect it is having on our ability to apply these developments to the benefit of the United Kingdom. I even quoted on one occasion the concerns of the Bank of England about the way in which those businesses are funded and the damage this leveraged debt might do to the UK economy in the long term, but I could not engage the Minister on these issues. I was repeatedly told that we are an open economy that welcomes this investment, when in fact, in most cases, it is not investment at all

--- Later in debate ---

I apologise for the length of my contribution, but it brings me to the end of this very important group. I hope that the detailed explanations of the Government’s approach, the further assurances on the robustness of the existing drafting in permitting the full suite of options that ARIA might need, and my offer of a meeting with the Science Minister for the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and others will be sufficient to enable the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the care he has taken in responding to this debate and I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to it. I find myself in the position—other than in the Minister’s case—of saying that I agree with everything everyone else said, and I include in that the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe. I agree with everything that she said, other than that she has, with respect to both her and the Minister, made the same mistake in that they characterise this amendment as imposing or mandating behaviour on the part of ARIA. With respect to both of them—I pointed this out in my opening remarks to the Minister—this is a misreading of the Bill.

The amendment is placed in a position which does not mandate or impose anything. It enables ARIA to choose what it wants to do but directs its attention to what all contributors to this debate have made clear is an issue of necessity as far as they are concerned if we are to achieve what this letter I have received from the Minister expresses as our common objective—that is, to generate the greatest public value from ARIA’s exploitation activities which will be publicly funded. There is a common understanding that if these exploitation activities fall into the hands of businesses that are based abroad, large amounts of money and great improvements in our society and our socioeconomic affairs will be denied to the people of the United Kingdom. There is no doubt about that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I thank noble Lords who have contributed on this group of amendments. Turning to Amendment 6 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, I start by thanking my noble friends Lady Noakes and Lord Patten for their supportive statements in general as the Bill has progressed through this House.

ARIA will be a lean, streamlined agency which we expect to employ people in the tens. It will recruit a small team of exceptional individuals with both technical expertise and scientific vision. I contend that it is appropriate that we consider how their time, focus and energy is best applied.

We have designed this new, unique agency to operate and behave in a way we do not usually see in the public sector—with leanness, agility and efficiency being core to its function. We have also tasked it with embracing risk and failure. As noted by my noble friend Lady Noakes during consideration in Grand Committee and again this evening, these exceptional scientists should not be fearful of or driven to risk-aversion by the prospect of FoI disclosures, nor should they be distracted or bogged down by the bureaucracy of fulfilling such requests.

The issue of the volume of FoI requests we expect ARIA to be subject to has been raised throughout the passage of this Bill, and comparisons have been drawn between the number of requests received by smaller public bodies such as parish councils, and other research organisations such as UKRI. Pursuing this exemption reflects our expectation that, given ARIA’s profile, its focus on high-risk research and the speculation on its activity so far, it would indeed be subject to a disproportionately high number of FoI requests. It is not accurate to suggest that ARIA would get the same number as a single UKRI research council or other small organisations. It is already clear that its activities will generate a much higher degree of interest and, therefore, corresponding requests.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, made a comparison to the number of FoI requests to DARPA. Let me remind the noble Lord that when making an FoI request in the US, requesters are required to consider paying applicable fees up to $25. If requests are expected to exceed this cost, the requester is notified to agree additional payment. While fee waivers or reductions can be granted in certain circumstances, it is not a like-for-like comparison to the FoI process in the UK. Therefore, in my view it is not right to assume that ARIA will receive a similar number of FoI requests to DARPA.

I also reassure noble Lords that our reasons for placing ARIA outside FoI legislation are specific and do not extend to other new public bodies, which will not have the same requirement for flexibility and agility and therefore will not require the same exemption.

However, to suggest that the agency will therefore be operating under a veil of secrecy is, in my view, not accurate. We expect ARIA to be an outward-facing and transparent body, which will proactively provide information about its activities to encourage collaboration around its programme goals, increase public understanding of its work and build public trust. Alongside this, it will be held to account by robust transparency arrangements. Let me remind noble Lords about them. It will publish its annual report and a statement of accounts, which will be laid before Parliament. It will be subject to annual audits by the National Audit Office. It will appear before and be accountable to Parliament through its chief executive officer and it will remain, of course, an arm’s-length body of my department in BEIS.

That said, I have also taken into account the opinions of noble Lords on this matter. To reflect the considered debate in Grand Committee on the balance of ARIA’s transparency and accountability arrangements with this unique freedom, I am happy to provide further assurances to noble Lords on ARIA’s reporting requirements. Annually, ARIA will proactively publish information on its regional funding and will make information publicly available on all delivery partners supported through the full range of its funding mechanisms. Taken alongside and together with ARIA’s annual report and accounts, these are significant and robust transparency arrangements which will ensure Parliament and the general public are informed of ARIA’s activities, the projects it funds and where it funds them.

I hope that, given these reassurances, noble Lords are satisfied that the FoI exemption serves an important function for ARIA and that we have struck the right balance here. I thank them for their input.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

Before the Minister moves on to the next amendment and off the FoI amendment, has he read the Department of Defense information handout? That makes it clear that the vast majority of those who request information from DARPA would not have to pay any fee at all. Can the Minister share—either now or at some point—with noble Lords the genesis of his belief, which he has now repeated a number of times, that everyone who asks for information from DARPA has to pay a fee in the United States? If that is not true, then the comparison that we all make is a relevant comparison and is the only data; the only other thing we have is the Minister’s animus against freedom of information requests. And is he aware of the provisions of Section 19 of the Freedom of Information Act?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I think the noble Lord will find, if he looks at my remarks, that I did not say that every applicant will pay fees but that there is a general expectation that a fee of $25 will be charged, or even more in some cases if more information is required. However, there are exemptions to that, which can be exercised. If the noble Lord looks back at Hansard, he will see that I did not say that everyone would be charged a fee. In most cases, a fee would be applicable, but there are certain exemptions.

I turn to Amendment 7, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Fox, and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, which relates to procurement regulations. I note that the noble Lords did not address this, but it is worth while setting out the Government’s position on that amendment. I believe there are clear reasons why this exemption is beneficial to ARIA and why it will be integral to the agency’s effective operation. First, unlike other R&D funders, ARIA will be commissioning and contracting others to do research for it in pursuit of its own technological visions or research goals. The process of contracting and commissioning means ARIA will be operating in fundamentally different ways from traditional R&D grant making, where procurement rules already do not apply. Placing ARIA outside the existing public procurement rules will mean that the agency can freely procure expert investment and consultancy advice, which will be important given the highly varied and technical nature of the agency’s work.

While we imagine that the bulk of ARIA’s research activities will be carried out by its partners and funders, it remains possible that ARIA may wish to procure and own a piece of research equipment to crowd-in interest from other research partners, or to accelerate the progress of a project. Freedom from traditional procurement rules will facilitate ARIA making those investments quickly and with ease. In my view, it is appropriate for ARIA to have greater flexibility than the R&D exemption would afford it so that it can design and tailor its contractual arrangements to precisely suit its research endeavour.

Secondly, in designing ARIA, we have put a premium on the agency investing and acting quickly. In our view, this agility would be incompatible with the public tendering process mandated in the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, which can require contracting authorities to put contracts out to open tender for up to two to three months. Such a delay could prevent critical investments being made with sufficient speed or, indeed, at all. In choosing to exempt ARIA from standard procurement rules, we have learnt from the successful approach taken by DARPA, which benefits from “other transactions” authority, giving the agency the flexibility to operate outside traditional US government contracting standards. It is our belief that ARIA should benefit from similar flexibilities.

I also dispute the notion that taking ARIA outside traditional procurement rules will leave the agency vulnerable to cronyism. I think this was a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, in Committee. This exemption will ensure ARIA’s leadership and programme managers—who have been recruited for their technical expertise and scientific vision—can take decisions on ARIA’s procurement with autonomy, as they will have the freedom to procure at arm’s length from government and Ministers.

As I have already detailed, ARIA has clear lines of accountability, transparency and scrutiny in the preparation of its an annual report, scrutiny by the NAO and an annual independent audit to report on its procurement activities. As I have already alluded to, to reflect the constructive and considered debate in Grand Committee, ARIA will publish information on its delivery partners, and this expectation will be detailed in ARIA’s framework document. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, for tabling an amendment to that effect previously. I hope she and other noble Lords welcome this principled commitment to transparency, which would extend to delivery partners supported through the full range of ARIA’s funding mechanism.

In conclusion, I hope noble Lords have been assured that exempting ARIA from traditional procurement rules will be integral to the agency’s effective operation. The package of accountability, conflict of interest procedures and governance provisions that sit within this Bill are an appropriate counterbalance to that. Taken in the round, this represents an essential, proportionate and balanced freedom, placed in the hands of ARIA’s incoming leadership and programme managers. Taken together, I hope that the assurances and explanations I have been able to provide for noble Lords will allow the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

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[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendments 12 and 14 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Browne of Ladyton and Lord Clement-Jones, the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, and myself. Noble Lords will be aware that a number of fields of modern technology and research are coming to rely more and more on mathematical sciences. When I gained my degree in pure maths at Oxford over 70 years ago, and for many years since, maths was seen largely as an adjunct to other fields of science and technology, but the world of digital—particularly of AI, machine learning, 5G and quantum computing—is now becoming mainstream. These diverse technologies rely very greatly on mathematics for help to find solutions and answers.

Mathematical sciences today are employed in many ways: from risk analysis of the use of driverless cars to the likelihood of collisions and how best to avoid them in space; from sifting with AI through large quantities of medical data to spot treatments for illness, to the best ways of introducing superfast broadband nationwide; contributing to security risk analyses, or delving into the more esoteric problems of known and unknown unknowns. Mathematical sciences feature in improvements that will benefit the lifestyle and health of wide cohorts of citizens and the esoteric work of astronomers unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. Analysing and predicting trends in the Covid-19 epidemic is another active field in which mathematical sciences play an important part.

The marginalisation and exclusion of mathematical sciences in government legislation prompts this amendment. For example, the 2004 guidelines on research and development limit the definition of mathematical contributions in research and development to the “physical and material universe”. Far from sticking to current definitions in this new legislation, is it not time to recognise the unique and growing contributions of mathematical sciences in the new digital age of AI, quantum computing and much, much more? The ARIA Bill is an ideal opportunity to do so and move on. The focus and capacity of the Bill’s provisions should explicitly embrace the mathematical sciences. These now include “blue skies” maths, which is sometimes referred to as a new form of “pure” maths.

My amendment is thus not a probing amendment; it is a simple and straightforward proposal to reflect the advances being made by mathematical sciences in the digital age. I challenge anyone to assert that this new agency will not be making use of mathematical sciences in its work. This Bill is an excellent opportunity to give the rightful recognition in statute to the key role of mathematical sciences in advanced research and inventions. I beg to move.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble and gallant Lord’s amendments and have added my name to them. More broadly, I support the work of the London Mathematical Society and the Protect Pure Maths Campaign to emphasise the importance of mathematics alongside science and technology, not only to the whole STEM ecosystem but to the UK economy overall. The briefing that I have received from them estimates—I am sure this is correct—that mathematics adds more than £200 billion to the UK economy, which is nearly 10% of our GDP; and it is one of the top three subjects for graduate earnings. As the noble and gallant Lord explained, mathematics enables most of today’s exciting and urgent technological developments, including artificial intelligence, driverless cars, and the development of quantum computers and superfast broadband, as well as the modelling of the Covid-19 outbreak, underpinning national security, the finance sector and the rollout of vaccinations.

Mathematics is a British success story. If it gets recognition at this level from Parliament, I am certain that it will send a powerful and supportive message to young people across the country to consider mathematics as a career or for further study—and that can only be a good thing.

[Viscount Hanworth (Lab)]

My Lords, my Amendment 13 does not differ greatly from the previous amendment. Indeed, it differs in only one word: “pure”. In proposing my amendment, I have been mindful that mathematics is in danger in universities from an attempt by administrators to reduce its presence. At the University of Leicester, where I am an emeritus professor, a considerable number of staff described either as “pure mathematicians” or “managerial sociologists” have been sacked. The so-called pure mathematicians have been sacked on account of the unpopularity of maths, as revealed in perennial student surveys. Mathematical subjects tend to be unpopular with students because they are challenging. Nevertheless, they are the backbone of degrees in science, engineering and other subjects. I suspect that the managerial sociologists have been sacked because administrators are loath to recognise the expertise of others in a subject in which they believe they have significant experience. Be that as it may, my present concern is with mathematics.

Very few mathematicians would call themselves “pure” mathematicians. They describe themselves as mathematicians without qualification. Pure maths is concerned with giving order and clarity to the subject of mathematics, of which the exposition stands in constant need of reform. Applied mathematics, as the name suggests, is concerned with applying mathematics to substantive issues. We cannot have the one without the other. Legislation that declares that mathematical advances are not science unless they are advances in representing the nature and behaviour of the physical and material universe speaks of a wrong-headed attitude on the part of administrators who may have little understanding of the nature of science. In derogating the role of mathematics, this attitude could have dire consequences. I hope that the acknowledgement of the importance of mathematics to science will serve to counteract the wave of intellectual vandalism occasioned by the insurgency of administrators that is sweeping through British universities. I beg to move the amendment standing in my name, but I propose that it should stand or fall with the other amendments in this group.

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[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I speak principally to support Amendment 17 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Morse, to which I added my name, but having heard the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, twice—in Committee and today—on Amendments 15, 16 and 18, I am persuaded by her simple, accessible and convincing explanation that changing the Bill in this way would be to its benefit. Hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Morse, that the amendments reflect current practice, I am even more convinced, so I have corroboration and I support them.

I have had the benefit of having had the noble Lord, Lord Morse, explain his amendment to me on a number of occasions. If I was going to be partisan about this, I could think of a lot of contemporary examples of behaviour which the existing ACOBA system has manifestly failed to deal with. Apart from anything else, recent history has damaged significantly the reputation of politics and politicians as a group, and it has bled into civil servants because of the apparent practice of senior civil servants taking positions in private industry while continuing to work in the Civil Service. I have no intention of going through all of them. I am just convinced by the argument made by the noble Lord, whom I have known for a long period, that if we do not recognise that this could become a problem, and if it does become a problem, it will seriously damage ARIA and we should protect it—at the very least by including these provisions in the Bill and indicating that Parliament decided that people who have had those experiences should not move to other positions where it looks as though they are exploiting the information that they had for their own personal gain, and therefore operating in a way that most people in the country would think unethical. If in these circumstances we do not have a narrative that says, “We in Parliament are concerned that this may happen and took the steps that we could to prevent it from happening”, we will be complicit in the damage that will inevitably be done not only to ARIA but, yet again, to those who work in the public service as officials, civil servants, Ministers or just politicians.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

My Lords, I recognise the expertise of noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on issues of corporate governance and, like my noble friend Lord Browne, I have enjoyed listening to her in Committee and again today. I will be interested to hear what assurances the Minister is able to give as a consequence of her amendments. I have learned a lot from her through this process and I look forward to learning more in the future.

I welcome Amendment 17 from the noble Lord, Lord Morse, whose case is no doubt bolstered by his experience over many years. It is a real joy to me that we have come to this House at more or less the same time. This is our first Bill together, and I am very pleased to add my name to his amendment.

There have long been concerns about “revolving doors” in politics—it is not something that started with this Government—but my noble friend Lord Browne was correct to observe that concern about issues such as those dealt with by Amendment 17 is growing, and frankly the Government have brought it on themselves. There is deep concern in the public mind about these issues and we shall see on Thursday what the people of North Shropshire make of it all.

I am struck by the fact that the Minister has taken the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Morse—a very good amendment which we support—and has directed us to look at paragraph 11 of Schedule 1, which states:

“The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision about the procedures to be adopted for dealing with conflicts of interest.”


They may, but “may” is doing a lot of lifting there, and obviously they may not as well, so there is nothing to give us any assurance that the danger of which the noble Lord, Lord Morse, is correct to warn us could be averted by that provision. We are just not buying it. Although the Minister has, for illustrative purposes, provided a suggestion of how the regulations might look, that does not provide us any assurance whatever.

Given the Minister’s reluctance to accept any of the suggestions that we have made—none of the suggestions, from FoI to reporting, have been taken up by the Government—he is somewhat leaving ARIA exposed, in the way that the noble Lord, Lord Morse, explained so well. We want this organisation to succeed, but because of the Government’s rigidity on these issues, the fear is that we are setting it up with a weakness: this lack of transparency and ability to challenge.

The Minister is kidding himself if he thinks that these issues will not be scrutinised and that some of the problems that may emerge will not somehow get out. I am sure that the Public Accounts Committee will enjoy crawling all over this when it gets the opportunity to do so. We want this to work, but I am afraid that the Government’s approach is not doing ARIA any favours.

I want to hear what the Minister has to say and whether something can be done to provide us with the assurance we are looking for that ARIA will not be characterised—or mischaracterised, I hope—as some sort of secret agency. That would only cause this fascination and determination to probe into its activities to grow.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 39 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones. It is on something also asserted in Amendment 24 by the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and, in the late runner, Amendment 32A, by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. We all seek essentially the same outcome, targeting different parts of the Bill to avoid the avoidance of freedom of information.

It is always good to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and strangely my opening assertion very much follows on from hers. Without our amendments, ARIA would follow in the footsteps of a very small number of institutions that currently do not have Freedom of Information Act obligations: the Royal Family; security and intelligence bodies such as MI5, MI6 and GCHQ; Special Forces; and the National Crime Agency. I think that is the list. There may be others, but I am pretty sure that is it. It gives noble Lords an idea of the sort of organisations. They do not seem to be natural paradigms to ARIA.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, will correct me, but the obstacles to innovation for funding bodies are many and various. Nowhere have I seen obligations to freedom of information as one of the things listed by those bodies as a barrier to innovation, or indeed invention. Indeed, as far as I can see, most if not all of ARIA’s client organisations—those it will fund—will be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, so where is the point in excluding ARIA itself?

In refuting me and others on this at Second Reading, the Minister said that

“robust arrangements are in place that will provide a clear picture to Parliament and taxpayers about how ARIA’s activities are funded and where it spends its money.”—[Official Report, 2/11/21; col. 1202.]

That is indeed the point, because ARIA will be holding the brush painting that picture. We will get to see what ARIA chooses to tell and show us about what it is doing. FoIs look at things from the opposite direction.

The Minister also points to the need for ARIA to be lean, and I absolutely agree with him on that, but I remind him and those who speak against these amendments why we are seeing growing evidence of huge levels of very worrying financial mismanagement across government contracting. It is because of the crony-type issues which the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, raised in her speech, which have a corrosive effect on institutions that need to be protected from any stain of impropriety. Transparency is very much that protection. By maintaining proper scrutiny, everybody can see that there are no problems and there is no favouritism going on. This will absolutely protect ARIA’s reputation.

ARIA will be substantially larger that many bodies already subject to freedom of information legislation. ARIA has no greater claim to avoiding complying with FoI legislation than any other public authority. Indeed, given its budget, there are compelling grounds for its inclusion. It is clear, through these three amendments, that we on this side find the current plan to exclude ARIA from the Freedom of Information Act’s provisions unacceptable. I feel sure that, between us, we can coalesce around a single amendment for Report. In the meantime, I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make two points. The first is in response to a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the other is in anticipation of a point that I think the Minister will make in his response to the debate.

The noble Baroness argued that the unique nature of this organisation should make it free from this burden. It will be unique here in the United Kingdom, but it is not a unique organisation. In fact, it is modelled on an organisation that has a history, and that is ARPA, which is now DARPA.

I will come shortly to the Minister’s rejection of that comparison at Second Reading, but I am moved to intervene because of data I have been given by the Campaign for Freedom of Information about the burden that freedom of information has been on ARPA and DARPA in the United States. Granted, the United States is a much more open society than ours, but ARPA and DARPA have been subject to the US Freedom of Information Act. It is incontrovertible that the need to answer FoI requests has not prevented them achieving successes that the Government here now wish to emulate. In fact, in the 11 years from 2009 to 2019, an average of 47 requests a year referring to DARPA were made to the US Department of Defense. It lived with that burden and has been the success that we all know and are seeking to emulate.

The Minister rejected this comparison, saying that there is a different freedom of information system in the United States of America. He referred to fees, and suggested that somehow the experience we have had of freedom of information thus far made it probable that ARIA would be prevented from being the lean machine focused on innovation that we all want to see if it was subjected to the burden of freedom of information.

Interestingly, 47 FoI requests per year is almost exactly the number of requests received by individual UK research councils before they were incorporated into UKRI. In 2017-18, the six research councils for which data was available to those who provided it to me received an average of 48 requests each. By comparison, in 2019 the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice each received nearly 5,000 requests. Maybe that is why the Government have this impression that everything they do is overburdened by FoI. It is not. Some things are, and there is a different politics about them than there will be about this.

I think that it is perfectly legitimate to make the comparison with the success of DARPA and ARPA, which have lived in an environment of openness and freedom of information. That is much more likely, on the data, to be the experience of ARIA, were it to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, than the perception of any burden that a Minister may have from their own experience of FoI in another department.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

I would like to respond to that, which I find very interesting. I would like to know whether ARPA and DARPA have restraints on certain types of information. Having operated in industry in an R&D environment, I am familiar with the problems of what you have to keep secret and what you do not. In the American economy, by far the largest fraction of the vast amount of progress that is made is made in industry with private funds—and industry invests those private funds in R&D only if it can be assured that the products of that R&D will remain exclusive to it. I have been in situations where there has been industrial espionage and design manuals have been stolen for products that took billions to develop. Those thefts in the United States were of course prosecuted and those who obtained the information were fined large sums of money.

ARPA is going to be in that situation. It has to work with industry, using the results of its most advanced R&D, perhaps in new ways, to come up with new systems. It must be able to sign some memorandum of understanding, or in some way say to industry that it will protect from public knowledge that information. In an industry where you are relying primarily on novel processes, you do not tend to patent things, because patenting them puts them in the public domain. You rely on trade secrets and, to have a trade secret validated as a trade secret, you have to show that you have done enough due diligence to make sure that the information is not generally available to your competitors.

It has been a problem internationally for the past several decades that there has been international espionage on a large scale to obtain information from inside industries in the West. I ask the Minister whether that is being taken into account. Clearly, what the noble Lord, Lord Fox, and others have been saying is incontrovertible: we do not want the agency at risk because people are wasting vast sums of public money. On the other hand, you have to take into account that, if ARIA is to be successful and produce new capabilities that can be commercially exploited for the benefit of the UK, there must be adequate protection of what in industry is normally commercially sensitive and secret.

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[Lord Callanan (Con)]

Because it is a fairly new and exciting agency doing new things. I suppose we will have to disagree on that. There is no point and nothing to be gained by doing otherwise. In designing ARIA, we are envisaging a lean agency that will employ people in the tens. I do not know how many people across government are currently employed to respond to the hundreds if not thousands of FoI requests that we get, but given the bundles of documentation that sometimes pass my desk, there must be many hundreds of civil servants engaged in doing nothing other than responding to these fishing expeditions. As I said, ARIA will be an agency employing people in the tens, with around 1% of the R&D budget.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I invite him to reread what he said at Second Reading. He virtually invited people who are being refused the opportunity to ask ARIA questions to ask them of his department. Then it will be a true comparison. I invited him to compare an organisation of the nature of a research council with one such as DARPA, not to compare DARPA with a government department. At Second Reading, he himself listed a whole number of organisations, including government departments, that are subject to FoI. It is an invitation to people who are refused the discipline of talking to a smaller organisation in a proportionate way to flood a department with requests and take up even more time. With respect to the Minister, I think this is verging on an irresponsible attitude towards this argument, even in his own interests.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I can assure the noble Lord that people need no invitation from me to table FoI requests to my department. They are well capable of doing it. I think some people already have forms set up on their word processors to submit some of these things with gay abandon.

Anyway, in designing ARIA we are envisaging an agency that will be lean and streamlined. It will employ people in the tens, and we strongly believe that it needs to be agile and efficient. “Lean”, “streamlined” and “efficient” are not always words that are used to describe nominal usual public bodies. However, as my noble friend Lady Noakes has attested to, this context has always been at the forefront of our minds in bringing forward this Bill.

We have carefully considered which procedures are conducive to ARIA’s success. I recognise here that part of ARIA’s success depends on it gaining public trust and being transparent and accountable for its activities, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, called for. I believe that we have found the right balance in freeing this small agency to fund high-risk, critical research but to do it differently, with appropriate visibility to Parliament and taxpayers.

The noble Lord, Lord Broers, raised some concerns about the protection of technological gains in sensitive projects. I note at this point that there are, of course, existing commercial confidentiality exemptions to the FoI Act, as referenced by the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones. All requests still require processing and we are conscious of this in making the decisions to exclude ARIA.

Much has also been said on transparency today in the contributions from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. I maintain that the right provisions to hold ARIA to account are the ones that I outlined at Second Reading. They are the publishing of an annual report and statement of accounts, which will be laid before Parliament, as set out in the Bill; being subject to annual audits by the National Audit Office; and being accountable to Parliament through the CEO, who will be the agency’s accounting officer.

In addition, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, has pointed out, ARIA will remain a BEIS arm’s-length body, and my department will work with ARIA’s leadership to agree the appropriate arrangements for its scrutiny and oversight in the interests of good governance.

We expect ARIA, as far as possible, to have a culture of transparency, and we hope that will be championed by its incoming leadership. Working across the R&D community, and indeed with Parliament and the public, to communicate ARIA’s activities will be critical to ARIA’s commercial and research success. Given that, I hope the Committee will understand that I cannot accept or agree with this amendment. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has a different opinion.

I turn now to the exemption the Bill affords ARIA from the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, and to Amendments 24 and 42 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman. I think she omitted to speak in favour of her amendment, but I will respond to it anyway.

Our decision to exempt ARIA from the contracting authority obligations in the Public Contracts Regulations hinges on two critical expectations: first, that ARIA will be commissioning and contracting others to do research for it; and, secondly, that ARIA’s programme managers should be acting and investing with agility and speed. When ARIA is commissioning and contracting others to do research for it, it will be operating in a fundamentally different way from traditional R&D grant-making where procurement rules do not apply.

In my view, it is therefore appropriate for ARIA to be given freedom from procurement rules to ensure that the agency has greater flexibility in its contractual arrangements. However, to counterbalance that and to provide the assurance that this freedom will be used properly, we have provided a non-legislative commitment for an independent auditor to report annually on ARIA’s procurement activity. This measure, alongside ARIA’s robust conflict of interest procedures, the wider accountability I just talked about, and governance provisions, are an appropriate set of arrangements. I hope that reassures the Committee that we have taken all these matters into consideration and that this exemption is both essential to ARIA’s effective function and proportionate to the tasks it faces. Therefore, I invite noble Lords not to press their amendments.

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Moved by

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

30: Clause 4, page 2, line 26, at end insert—
“(4) If ARIA gives a grant, or part of grant, made to it under this section to another entity, the giving of the grant must be subject to the condition that a person or entity may not gain control of that entity for 5 years after the date on which the grant is given.(5) If ARIA gives a grant, or part of grant, made to it under this section for the purposes of supporting a specific asset, the giving of the grant must be subject to the condition that a person or entity may not gain control of that asset for 5 years after the date on which the grant is given.(6) In this section, “entity” means any entity, whether or not a legal person, that is not an individual, and includes a company, a limited liability partnership, any other body corporate, a partnership, an unincorporated association and a trust.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that any grant made by ARIA is subject to the condition that the entity or asset supported may not be subject to a takeover for 5 years.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 30 seeks to ensure that any grant made by ARIA is subject to the condition that the entity or asset supported may not be subject to a takeover for five years. I confess that, on reflection, this may more felicitously have been an amendment to Clause 2, which deals with the conditions of grants made by ARIA. As its tabling is for exploratory purposes, at least today, I do not think that matters, but if it comes back it will probably come back in a different form and as an amendment to a different clause.

On the first day of Grand Committee, the debate on the group of amendments led by Amendment 18 in the name of and moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, took about 20 minutes, and the phrase “intellectual property” was used 37 times. Introducing the debate, the noble Lord described the group as being

“about the way in which ARIA acquires, creates, disposes of, retains and shares intellectual property”,—[Official Report, 17/11/21; col. GC 127.]

so it is not really a surprise that the phrase was picked up.

In some senses, it is a pity that this amendment was not grouped with the noble Lord’s amendments, because the concerns that have given rise to the need for this amendment were to some extent aired in that debate. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, shared with us the extent to which there was concern in the United States that

“some of the public funding which has led to”

DARPA

“research has led to private as opposed to public gain.”—[Official Report, 17/11/21; col. GC 128.]

I share his concern about the extent to which we are creating such an opportunity, but more so about the extent to which such publicly funded research may lead to foreign, mainly US, private as opposed to British private or public gain.

Refinitiv data shows that, in the first half of 2021, buyout groups spent $45 billion snapping up companies in Britain—more than double the next-best first six months on record and almost 10% of the total $547 billion spent across the world. Am I to understand that British stocks’ discount to global peers is the deepest in more than three decades and that Brexit is one reason? I do not want to divert us into another debate, but Brexit is for good, not just for Christmas, so that situation may persist for a period.

On 17 November, reporting the Culture Secretary’s decision to announce a competition and national security investigation into the planned takeover of the British chip business Arm Holdings by the American multinational tech giant Nvidia, and coupling this with the recent news that Kwasi Kwarteng is investigating the proposed sales of defence suppliers Ultra Electronics and Meggitt to American suppliers on similar grounds, Ben Marlow, the chief City commentator of the Telegraph, wrote:

“For too long Britain has adopted a naive and unquestioning ‘help yourself’ approach to foreign takeovers. For a while it looked as though the … government would take an even more extreme laissez-faire approach as it sought to live up to its ‘Global Britain’ credentials but perhaps the penny has dropped in Westminster … It is a welcome shift in tone. Ministers routinely greet the sale of British companies to overseas buyers as a vote of confidence in this country’s prospects when it is nothing of the sort. It simply means foreign firms see the UK as easy pickings and an opportunity to make a quick buck. Hoisting a giant ‘for sale’ sign over your best and brightest companies is not sound industrial policy, it is an act of … self-harm.”


It will not be a surprise to anybody in your Lordships’ Committee that I am not used to quoting the Telegraph in debates or in support of my arguments. I do so because, in a sense, it may be a bit of an instruction to the Minister as to the attitude he ought to adopt to this issue. I do it because it may have more impact on the Minister.

I have tried twice now, in supplementaries to Questions in your Lordships’ House on these issues, to engage the Minister on what is actually happening in the United Kingdom to some of our best and brightest businesses and the effect it is having. I even quoted on one occasion the concerns of the Bank of England about the way these businesses are funded and the damage that this leveraged debt potentially poses to the economy of the United Kingdom in the long term, but he did not respond.

On another occasion, in relation to both the companies referred to in addition to Arm—Ultra Electronics and Meggitt—I pointed out that 85% of R&D in the defence industries in the United Kingdom is public money, and that the intellectual property of these businesses was in danger of leaving the United Kingdom, having been paid for by public money. That is exactly the issue that the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raised, although he did so in a slightly different context, and exactly the concern I have.

On none of these previous occasions did the Minister bite. With respect to him, he deployed a slightly less complacent version of the words the Telegraph’s city correspondent pointed out, but he deployed them nevertheless.

I close my remarks in support of this amendment by thanking the Minister for his gracious invitation to me over the last few days to indicate to him what lay behind it so that he could, if possible, give me the reassurance I sought. I responded with an even shorter version of what I have said to your Lordships’ Committee today. I hope he has the reassurance that I and others seek about how we will protect the product of this new initiative from being raided by the predators of venture capital funds in particular. I conclude with the words the Telegraph uses, that

“the Americans wouldn’t allow it to happen so why should we?”

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I am not as opposed to foreign takeovers as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, but I accept that there are some instances where this country is not well served by the ability of organisations outside the UK to cherry pick some of our best assets. The broad thrust is that foreign investment in the UK has been good for our economy—indeed, large amounts of our productive economy are owned by foreign businesses and they are an important part of the success of the UK economy—but I concede that there is a potential issue, especially when we deal with the kind of things we expect ARIA to fund.

However, I do not think the amendment works. It says that if ARIA gives a grant to an entity, it has to be subject to the condition that that entity cannot be taken over. That entity cannot give an undertaking that it cannot be taken over, because the people who will control who takes over an entity are the people who own the entity, which is not the same as the entity itself. While in some cases it might be a private company with two or three shareholders, which would probably be quite easy to deal with, if the shareholdings were much more dispersed it would probably be impossible to operationalise that sort of requirement. If there is a case, it needs another solution.

I also note that this is a bit of a sledgehammer. There could be very good reasons for an entity having the control over it changed. It could need greater access to capital to scale up whatever it has been looking at; it could have liquidity issues in taking its research and development to the next stage, before it even gets to scale up, and need the involvement of other partners; or it could just be that it makes sense to continue with whatever it has been looking at only if it is part of a larger organisation and subject to a merger or joint venture, where control would be ceded. If there is a problem, I do not think it can be met by this amendment.

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[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response and particularly for engaging with the reasons behind the amendment more than its technical perfection, which I accept it lacks. However, I will have to read carefully what she has actually said to see whether it is the reassurance that a number of noble Lords are seeking—from listening carefully to their contributions—about protecting the jewel in the crown, as it were, which is at the heart of what the Government and everybody are trying to achieve in the current environment. I will come back to that in a moment.

I also correct the omission of not thanking the noble Lord, Lord Morse—who is a good supporter to have in these sorts of issues—for adding his name to my amendment. I also tender on his behalf his apologies that because of timing he could not be here to speak to the amendment. He may get another opportunity to speak to the issues that lie behind it at some other point in the consideration of this legislation.

I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. They all added something to my knowledge and understanding of the issues I am trying to raise before the Committee in the context of this Bill. I hope there will be a collective, maybe holistic, solution to the different elements of this problem that have been identified.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, for pointing out to me the complexity of the area that I am in because of the different forms of organisations that will be involved. I am familiar with some of this, but clearly not as familiar as she is. However, I encourage her not just to assume that every takeover is a foreign investment. It appears to me that the more I go into this, the more that I discover that it is a not a foreign investment. I go back to the article in the Telegraph, which I quoted liberally. Ben Marlow, the chief City commentator of the Telegraph—to whom I am deeply indebted—says:

“Moreover, ministers repeatedly conflate real investment with opportunistic takeovers when they couldn’t be more different.”


He then goes on to give examples of what he thinks are real investment, and Nissan is right up there, as you would imagine.

I am impressed by that and think I understand it. However, I understand it even better when I read the Financial Stability Report of the Bank of England in October 2021, when it points out that there is a developing danger to our economy in the leveraged loan markets with:

“the trend of increased prevalence of looser underwriting standards has continued, which increases risks to end-investors.”

It goes on to say:

“Recent UK leveraged lending flows have in part been driven by a surge in private equity investment in UK businesses: 2021 private equity investment is on track to exceed its 2019 level, which itself was a strong year.”


In a broader discussion of the indebtedness of this country, it highlights this in particular, which suggests to me that these takeovers have been funded by leveraged loans.

Because I have an interest in sport, I have followed carefully certain takeovers that got a lot of coverage in the sporting media, and I can see how that could work. I am not totally convinced that these are all properly foreign investment. I agree that they have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, but if the Bank of England is worried, I am worried.

I thank the noble Lords, Lord Fox, Lord Lansley and Lord Broers, for their helpful and supportive contributions, and my noble friends Lord Stansgate and Lady Chapman for their support. All speakers came at this issue from a different perspective, as did the Minister. This issue is worth taking away to see whether there is a holistic way to deal with it in this complex context.

Before I withdraw my amendment, I conclude by apologising to the noble Baroness, Lady Bloomfield, for anticipating that her male colleague would answer. That is not because I am inclined to look for men before I look for women in any context; it was simply because he was the Minister who wrote to me about this and the one to whom I responded. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 30 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

It was slightly surprising to get this agreement so late in the day. Although I have seen that it exists, I cannot pretend that I have properly digested it or discussed it with colleagues in, for example, the Welsh Assembly. I would have been very keen to do that. It is very clear that a legislative consent Motion was not going to be forthcoming as things stood and that if the Government wanted ARIA to embark with support from the devolved Administrations they had to do something. There is now this agreement.

I would accept the Minister’s assurance, but can he clearly confirm that this agreement is not just his but has been reached with the devolved Administrations and that they are all fully signed up to it, before we allow this to go through? My life will not be worth living if I go back to my office and find that we have agreed to something that has not secured the full support of—to pick one at random—the Welsh Assembly. I would really appreciate it if the Minister could confirm that. Can he also speak to this issue of Barnett consequentials, which I had not considered would be part of the debate? How do the Government think this would or would not have any consequentials for funding for the devolved Administrations?

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to be genuinely helpful to the Minister. It appears that I am the most privileged Member of this Committee; everyone’s correspondence seems to be copied to me, although I am not sure if in this case it was a privilege, as I got it exactly one hour and five minutes before the Committee was due to sit. It has a draft agreement of 19 clauses, one of which refers to other agreements—too many for me to count in the small print I have on my phone—so I have not given it any serious consideration.

I think it was copied to me because I raised a question in an intervention to seek assurance that all aspects of this legislation that engaged with devolution issues had been agreed with the devolved Administrations. It turns out that there were at least aspects still under discussion. I understand that that can happen. I suggest that, because of the complexity of this, the Government arrange a meeting, between now and the next time most of us meet again at the next stage of this Bill, with interested parties to explain the situation with devolution. If the Government agree that there are Barnett consequentials—even if they do not, but can be persuaded that, in not agreeing, they are wrong—they can then say how they will deal with that significant complexity.

We must thank the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and the noble Lord, Lord Fox, for raising in some detail last time we met where we stand on all these issues. None of us was comfortable with any of this and none of us was as sited as the Government were of everything that is going on. At the very least, there should be the offer of some engagement with Members of this Committee who are interested in these issues and would raise them in some context on Report. This should happen in sufficient time before Report for it to be meaningful, so that some of these matters, which may lend themselves to simple enough explanations, can be put to bed.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, this has obviously been an unsatisfactory semi-debate. That dissatisfaction has rung out in various corners of the Room. The advice of the noble Lord, Lord Browne, seems good; if we continue on our current trajectory, Wednesday afternoon will have some time in it. I will not repeat the questions which have been raised, but I add another which we would like to address on Wednesday afternoon when the Minister calls us together to explain. Is this outwith the framework agreement process? Is there a separate process going on? I add that to the list of unanswered questions.

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[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

Committees go in cycles: they can get very serious, but we are now getting towards the end, where consideration can descend into banter, if we are not careful. That is not something that I thought I would experience at this end of the building, but it is quite welcome.

I understand exactly where the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Clement-Jones, are coming from with this, taking into account what the noble Baroness said. The framework document has been referred to so many times during our consideration; it has done a lot of heavy lifting, yet we have not been able to see a draft of it. That is something that I regret, because it would have been useful to know about it. We got lots of assurances about what it will and will not do, but we have not seen a draft that will enable us to test that or tease it out. That is a shame, and I think that is what is behind the amendment.

It is not great when the Government do this and ask a Committee to take these things on trust, or to take the intention. It is not how it is best for us to work. We take these things and our role in this process seriously, and we want to know how ARIA will operate in relation to the departments and bodies outlined in the amendment.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I remind the Minister that, not so long ago, he secured Amendments 37 and 40 on the basis of the sight, by a limited number of us, of a draft agreement. It is not unreasonable to ask him to at least consider reciprocating.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I thank Members who have contributed to this brief debate. I am disappointed that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, did not exercise us again with his Daily Telegraph subscription, which I was very impressed by. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fox, on saving the best to last with his bravura amendment. He has obviously been searching his thesaurus over the weekend for appropriate analogies. It was well moved and I do understand the seriousness of the issue and the noble Lord’s intention, which relates to the desire, as we have heard, to understand more details of how ARIA will work in practice.

As I mentioned at Second Reading, ARIA’s framework document is a governance document. It is a standard requirement for public bodies—which, of course, ARIA will be. As suggested in the noble Lord’s amendment, it will set the parameters for ARIA’s relationship with BEIS, as its sponsoring department. That is indeed its very purpose.

The noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, referred to the guidance published by Her Majesty’s Treasury, and I reassure him that, by drawing on the Treasury’s guidance, ARIA’s framework document will ensure that the agency and BEIS work effectively together. It will outline ARIA’s accountability, its decision-making and its financial management structures, along with some broader reporting requirements. However, it is not the appropriate place to codify ARIA’s relationship with other government departments. Other departments have no accountability relationship with ARIA, so its terms of engagement with them are a question of strategy rather than governance. The framework document will not contain any information relating to ARIA’s strategy in terms of collaboration, its project portfolio or indeed, its areas of research interest, all of which, I know, are of great interest to noble Lords.

On the sequencing of publication and commencement, given that both ARIA and the department need to be in agreement on the framework document, I reiterate, as I said at Second Reading, that it is therefore not possible to finalise it before ARIA’s senior leadership is in place, as my noble friend Lady Noakes, pointed out. It is not possible for the framework document to be published in advance of ARIA coming into legal existence. Similarly, the framework document for UKRI, for example, was finalised and published after that body came into legal existence.

Finally, it is worth noting that framework documents are live publications and are amended regularly to reflect any changes in the sponsor department or indeed the arm’s-length body itself, and they are all thoroughly reviewed every three years.

On the point raised by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, on whether the framework document will outline the role of the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser on ARIA, it is likely to. I will be happy to write to the noble Viscount with any more detail that I can on that.

I hope therefore that noble Lords understand that, in our view, there is a logical process to follow in the establishment of a public body and therefore that they will accept my assurance that we will publish the finalised framework document as soon as practicably possible.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

Having listened to the noble Lord, I can see why he is suggesting that. Clearly, I prefer my amendment, but I wonder whether the Minister thinks the noble Lord’s amendment might in some way assist the agency.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendments 1 and 26—to which I have added my name—and Amendment 21. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and the noble Lord, Lord Oates, I have to tender my apologies for not contributing to the Second Reading debate. I was not at COP 26 or on my way there, I was actually in this Room in the Committee on the Armed Forces Bill and speaking to amendments in my name and which I had supported. I regret that I was unable to be there.

I agree with the arguments put forward by a number of noble Lords and I do not intend to rehearse them. Because I was not at Second Reading, I read the debate very carefully and a number of Peers raised the issue of lack of purpose of ARIA and suggested a climate change purpose, which I support. The Minister pushed back on this. He said that solving particular national challenges falls

“very much within the UKRI remit”

and a programme to develop these challenges would be decided by the national science and technology council in due course. He may be in a position to tell us how long that “due course” will be today. It would be interesting if he was.

Finally, he commented that:

“It would clearly be inappropriate to create another new body to do essentially the same thing.”


He said that ARIA’s leadership would be responsible for setting its strategy and—here I quote the issue I am really interested in—upholding

“the autonomy which is at the heart of this new agency”.—[Official Report, 2/11/21; col. 1200.]

That is what I want to explore. I hope I have not misrepresented the noble Lord’s response but if I have, he will have the opportunity to correct me.

It is clear that ARIA enjoys some autonomy but it is not unlimited. In fact, in exercising its functions as set out in Clause 2(6), it “must have regard to” a number of things and they are very broad. I will read them in short:

“contributing to economic growth, or an economic benefit, in the United Kingdom … promoting scientific innovation and invention in the United Kingdom”—

there is the word “innovation”—and

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

That is pretty broad. So, it is constrained to do that.

Clause 5 states:

“The Secretary of State may give ARIA directions … in the interests of national security.”


These directions must be complied with and I fully appreciate why that is there. I understand it and I think it is necessary, and I do not expect the Minister to expand on that.

However, I do expect him to expand on the potential significant restriction that is in Clause 4. Clause 4 grants the power by which the Secretary of State may make grants to ARIA. Clause 4(2) states:

“Grants under subsection (1) may be subject to conditions.”


Clause 4(3) refers to one particular condition, for some reason, in the absence of any others: that the grant may need

“to be repaid (with or without payment of interest).”

I was intrigued by that and thought there was bound to be an explanation of what the Government have in mind. What limitations on the autonomy of ARIA are going be put in these conditions? Why do the Government think they need this restriction?

As always, I reached for the Explanatory Notes. I will quote them because they make very clear the purpose of this:

“This Clause provides the Secretary of State with a grant funding power in relation to ARIA.”


I had worked that out. They then state:

“The Secretary of State can make grants subject to conditions. In particular, the conditions may require the repayment of financial support with or without payment of interest.”


They simply restate the clause.

I am still at a loss to understand. I hope that if the Minister chooses to reject any of these amendments on the basis of the restriction of autonomy, he will give the Grand Committee the opportunity to understand what restrictions the Government intend to put on the autonomy of ARIA. That will help us, at the appropriate time, to decide whether these restrictions—I do not believe they are restrictions; I will come to that in a moment—are actually restricting any autonomy which it is likely to have. If that is the issue on which these amendments stumble, it needs to be described in a wee bit more detail.

However, my argument is that these provisions do not seek to create a new body to do essentially the same thing as the national science and technology council, but of course we will not know what that is until we see what the national science and technology council does under the leadership of the Prime Minister. In the context of a world in which we have clear national priorities, we are told that we cannot allow an autonomy for this institution that we would not allow for any other institution; that is, to act against the national interest. I remind the Minister that the pursuit of a sustainable and resilient society is one of the four overarching objectives set by the strategic framework set out in the integrated review. That framework, in the Government’s own words,

“establishes the Government’s overarching national security and international policy objectives … to 2025.”

The provision to constrain ARIA from acting against that is clearly in the stated agreed national interest.

In relation to the Climate Change Act, that is a national obligation. Surely, we cannot anticipate that ARIA would act against that national obligation of net zero by 2050, or the imperative of adaptation to climate change, or the environmental goals which have been, and are being, developed in this Parliament. In a sense, red lines are being put around ARIA but they are about national imperatives, which are shared by everyone, including the Government. They are desirable for all the reasons that noble Lords have set out but, I have one question for the Minister, which I would like him to answer either now or at some point before Report: what do the Government expect the CEO and the board of ARIA to want to do which would be inconsistent with these provisions? I guarantee noble Lords that should it wish to do any such things, the Government would seek to restrict its autonomy because it would be acting in an undesirable way.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions. I was delighted to hear the defence of basic research made by the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, and the point he made about bureaucracy in the rest—it should be said, the larger part—of research funding was well made and echoed many of the Second Reading comments.

However, there is a danger that we are taking the DARPA bait a little too seriously. The Government have played this into all their communications. Let us look at what we are comparing. DARPA has a huge budget, many times bigger than even the best budget we could expect for ARIA. It has been there for decades. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, mentioned Mariana Mazzucato. What she is very good at is pointing out how the technologies developed in DARPA have then been picked up by technology businesses within the United States, some of them part of the “military-industrial complex”, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, put it, but of course Apple is one of her best examples and even the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, might have one of those to hand. The mobilisation of this technology is absolutely key, which is why what the noble Lord, Lord Broers, had to say was so important and why the project management part is such a central point.

I refer back to the points that started to be made through Amendment 25, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley. At Second Reading, the Minister deployed the words of Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, the chief executive of UKRI. He quoted her telling the Public Bill Committee in the other place that

“the priorities that the Government and Ministers set to solve particular challenges for the nation … fall very much within the UKRI remit”.—[Official Report, Commons, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill Committee, 14/4/21; col. 8]

The implication—and almost the stated point—was that because UKRI is covering this, there is no need for ARIA to cover it.

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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.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. I fully associate myself with the words of my noble friend Lady Randerson. To put it plainly, we have heard around the Committee a strong feeling that the nations of the United Kingdom have to be fully engaged in this agency in some way, although, to echo the last speaker, the way in which that can be worked through is something we can all be flexible about. I think we all look forward to the debate on Amendments 37 and 40 to hear what the Government's thinking is about those.

On Amendment 9, having some eyes and ears around the regions as well as the nations is essential. Regarding most of the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, she is right to stress that inequality is a central issue and it should be a focus of what we do. However, I would point out that while a lot of people have mentioned London in the context of being rich and well funded, it is not just a matter of region because within a region there can be huge variation. I shall use the example of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which I declare I have a home in. There we have some of the richest people and some of the most deprived living a few yards apart.

The noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, raised the issue of HQ locations. Some noble Lords may know that the European Medicines Agency was due to go into Tower Hamlets but now, for reasons they will all know, it is not. So I will mention that I am supporting the campaign by my colleague in Tower Hamlets, councillor Rabina Khan, to locate ARIA in Tower Hamlets and take the place of the European Medicines Agency. It would be a good development around there and something that I think would be very constructive.

Although I do not fully agree with the wording of the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, I think there is a sense in there that we need to get a hold of. How does this agency engage? How does it not become isolated in the golden triangle or somewhere else? That is the question to which we seek some response from the Minister. That is the issue we will take to Report, whether in amendments such as this or in a new version that seeks to make sure we have engagement across the whole country, national or regional.

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[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 16 in my name. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for his support with this amendment and the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, for the support she indicated.

This amendment is closely related to the sustainability amendments that I discussed in the first group. The arguments made there on alignment of ARIA with these objectives apply, so I shall not repeat them here. It simply calls for ARIA to develop its own environmental, social and governance strategy to consider the impacts of the exercise of its functions and the projects that it funds. It is another means of embedding climate and sustainability considerations in the organisation, alongside my Amendments 1 and 26 and Amendment 21. It would allow the board of ARIA to consider its own strategy for alignment with environmental and climate goals, so it is consistent with the other amendments.

Embedding sustainability goals in the governance structures of organisations is increasingly important to ensure that organisations consider the impact of their operations and set clear and measurable goals. That ties into a point that I made earlier about considering environment and net zero as a system: there is a need to embed climate considerations across all companies and all public bodies to ensure that our overall goals are met.

ESG strategies are increasingly common across public and private companies, as noble Lords will be aware. I note that other government-created bodies are developing ESG strategies. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority has recently published an ESG strategy, and the national infrastructure bank has a requirement to develop an ESG strategy in its framework documents. Bringing ARIA in line with other government organisations would again ensure consistency and its playing its part in the principal strategic goal of the nation.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall talk to Amendment 16, which I am hopeful that the Minister will tell us is unnecessary. I also strongly support my noble friend Lady Chapman in the amendments she has tabled, and I shall speak to that shortly.

I support Amendment 16 simply because, in today’s global arena, setting an environmental, social and governance strategy is seen as an important benchmark for how responsible organisations operate. This will be a responsible organisation and should comply with the norm that is increasingly being imposed on all organisations that operate in the economic environment.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

The noble Lord was chastising the Explanatory Notes earlier for not explaining. On this occasion, I think the Explanatory Notes explain that the purpose of paragraph 11 of Schedule 3 is to exclude ARIA from the application of the Public Contracts Regulations. It does not include them.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I apologise for wasting the Grand Committee’s time. I go back to the simple argument I made in relation to Amendment 16; in today’s global arena, setting an environmental, social and governance strategy is seen as an important benchmark of how a responsible organisation operates. This will be a responsible organisation, so it should therefore have that obligation. I do not understand why it should be excluded from passing that obligation on to people to whom it gives public money.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Chapman’s Amendment 11 in particular, as well as others such as Amendment 15.

On value for money, I would like the Grand Committee to imagine the circumstances in 2026 when there is a massive row about something that ARIA has done, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee holds an evidence session and the National Audit Office is brought in, as it would be, to look at what went wrong. I am drawn to refer to this potential future situation because of advice that the NAO itself gave to the Select Committee in the House of Commons when it was first considering what, by the way, the Government then called ARPA.

I shall refer briefly to some of the areas that the National Audit Office says it would consider when it comes to considering the value for money in an organisation like ARIA. Its briefing says:

“Based on our experience, we would normally look for … a clear statement of the ultimate policy objectives – readily understandable to those charged with running the organisation and to those holding the organisation to account … a statement of what success will look like into the future – short, medium and longer term – which is particularly important for programmes where ultimate success may take years to realise … a roadmap which sets out the steps to deliver success along with a realistic assessment of the resources required and their timing – our work frequently points to a risk of optimism bias at the start of new programmes … a clear agreed sense of how risk should be managed, including the organisation’s and sponsoring department’s appetite to tolerate failure in pursuit of the objectives; and … an agreed approach to considering progress towards meeting the objectives.”


My point in raising this is to ask the Minister whether he will make some comment in his reply on the role of the National Audit Office in the running of ARIA and whether indeed it is expected to produce a value-for-money report.

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[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, the more I look at this and listen to the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and, previously, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, the more curious paragraph 17(2) of Schedule 1 becomes, because of both what is in it and what is not. I am prepared to accept the thesis of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that “and other property” would add some copper plating to it.

I hark back to the end of the response of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, at Second Reading, where I popped up and asked a question about property. The Minister was clear that this would include ARIA purchasing pieces of research equipment. Research equipment can run to many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds—at least as much as property—yet, somehow, that does not appear to be on this list either. There is perhaps work to be done to understand the objective of this list. I am sure that the Minister will say that it is to afford ARIA the amount of freedom that it needs, but it seems to be quite a selective list, and I wonder what it was based on in the first place.

I turn to the other amendments before us and suggest that perhaps the most important is Amendment 28. It is a great shame that, because of a prior appointment, my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones was not able to be here for this section at least because, when it comes to intellectual property, most of us know that he has a strong expertise. I know that he will read very closely the Hansard report of this and, far from marking the homework of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I am sure that it will be the Minister’s homework that he will be marking. I hope that we can return to it.

Looking at Amendment 28, it seems eminently sensible to legislate for success, because we want this to succeed. If this succeeds, there should be a flow of revenue coming back into ARIA. We need to understand that this will not then become a cash cow for other parts of BEIS or indeed the Treasury. What this amendment therefore seeks to do—and, I think, would achieve—is to put that ring-fence in place; for that, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, should be congratulated.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, for the second time today I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—the first was for saving me before the Minister had to expose my misunderstanding of a part of the Bill. He revealed, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, pointed out, an even more fruitful argument for later in the consideration of this Bill, which I will look at more carefully.

I am grateful to the noble Lord for drawing my attention to the specific provisions of paragraph 17 of Schedule 1. When I read it, I honestly do not understand the purpose of paragraph 17(2) at all, unless these powers are not included in what is I think the most expansive and limitless description of powers that I have ever seen anywhere. In paragraph 17(1), ARIA is given powers to do

“anything which appears to it to be necessary or expedient for the purpose of, or in connection with, the exercise of its functions.”

There does not seem to be any point in trying to list anything. I tried to see if there was anything in common with these particular powers that required them to be expressly described, and I may find out that that is right when the Minister responds.

I am also grateful to the noble Lord for opening up this issue of intellectual property, because it was my concerns about where the intellectual property may end up that caused me to table Amendment 30. It is against the recent experience of practice that has developed in this country of businesses with intellectual property that has been developed by public funds disappearing off, principally into the United States; this is sometimes because a business is stripped apart and the prize piece is taken out because it is of greater value in another marketplace than it is in ours.

This is an issue on which I hope to have an opportunity to expand when we get to Amendment 30, which is causing great concern to the Bank of England about its effect on the economy of the United Kingdom. I am sure we will get an opportunity to debate that next time we meet in Committee. I have nothing further to add, but I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, including for encouraging the noble Lord, Lord Broers, to explain why the freedom of intellectual property management is crucial to getting the best of ARIA.

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[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

We will take this point away and clarify it.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I may have misinterpreted something earlier, but I do not think I have misinterpreted this. Paragraph 17(1) allows ARIA to do anything as long as it meets the test. It is judge and jury of its own testing. It allows it to do anything. What I do not understand is why there is a list below it because the list is just confusing. It misleads people into thinking that unless it is on the list ARIA cannot do it. It can do anything, almost, as long as it meets the test.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I think, given the concerns raised, we will take it back and discuss this in the department.

Private Equity Takeovers

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

The UK’s merger regime, which I remind the noble Lord was put in place by the last Labour Government, recognises that overseas investors play a major and positive role in the UK economy, and that many UK sectors have benefited substantially from takeovers and mergers. Such transactions can help to boost UK jobs, increase management efficiency and support businesses to grow on the world stage. We benefit from being an open and accessible economy.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am sure that the Minister is aware of the latest Bank of England financial stability summary, which specifically warns that the current level of debt-fuelled US equity takeovers poses a growing threat to the UK economy. Bearing that in mind, what assessment has he made of the US National Bureau of Economic Research’s academic study, which found that when private equity firms buy up public companies, employment shrinks 13% in two years after the acquisition, and the fact that that has prompted senior Democrats to introduce the Stop Wall Street Looting Act to prevent private equity funds forcing companies they purchase to take on new loans to extract dividends they could not otherwise afford? Does he appreciate the irony of the potential of that Act becoming law in the US?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, of course we look at all transactions closely and there are specific grounds to intervene, set out by the Government that the noble Lord was actually a member of, as I said. We recognise the need for greater accountability for large private companies, including those owned by private equity. We published plans to do just that in our proposals on restoring audit and governance.