Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Lord Browne of Ladyton and Lord Broers

Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Grand Committee

[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.