Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Lord Oates and Lord Broers

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 1, 21 and 26. While the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, made a compelling case for his Amendment 27, I would probably part from him on the wider issue of mission. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who set out quite a few of the issues, and particularly for his underlining once again that the Treasury is at the heart of undermining almost every single good idea that ever occurs to government.

I regret that I was not present for the Second Reading of this Bill as I was on a train en route to the COP conference, but I had a chance to read the record of the debate. Much of it has been reflected in today’s debate, particularly the point, made by a number of noble Lords, that ARIA lacks the clear purpose which they feel will be necessary if it is be successful. Noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, pointed out again today that that purpose was at the heart of the success of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Davies of Brixton, and my noble friend Lord Fox, all gave some guide as to what such a purpose might be in playing a key role in addressing issues of sustainability and climate change.

Amendment 1, as we have heard, would establish a broad sustainability purpose for ARIA. Amendment 21 would set the core mission in a slightly different way, very much focused on net-zero emissions, and Amendment 26 is again different, focusing on ARIA having to give due consideration to the net-zero target and other environmental goals. As this debate has indicated, there are essentially two questions to be determined. The first is whether there should be a specific purpose or mission for this body, and whether such a purpose or mission would help or hinder it in delivering the sort of transformative success that we all hope it will deliver. The second question is, of course, that if we conclude that a sense of mission would assist, what that mission should be.

On the first question, although the Secretary of State and others in the other place were happy to cite DARPA and its successes as the model when extolling the virtues of this proposal, the reluctance to give it the clear focus that DARPA had seems a mistake. DARPA had a clear mission, a purpose: not to be surprised by technology and, hopefully, to surprise others with it. It had a clear focus, which was the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the need to maintain the competitive scientific and research advantage over it that Sputnik and other programmes had caused the US to worry it was losing. That sense of purpose was critical in driving that early success. I fear that without a clear focus for our advanced research agency, it will lack the direction and urgency that DARPA had, and which is required to achieve transformational change.

It is clear to me that a purpose, a mission, will be very important to ARIA’s success. If so, surely there is no more compelling case than to focus the work and energy on the climate and ecological emergency that we face. That is a long-term issue, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, pointed out. Tackling those challenges will require massive innovation and ingenuity, and the development of practical applications from that.

If the purpose of DARPA was to protect the national security of the United States by retaining its scientific edge against the threat of the Soviet Union, today, the threat from climate change, although very different, is some orders of magnitude greater. It is an existential threat to all humanity, and to bring a halt to climate change or stop it running completely out of control will test us to our utmost—it will test our ingenuity, our practical application and our ability to deploy all our resources. If we do not harness our advanced research agency to that task, future generations will surely look back on such a decision with a real sense of astonishment.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said that DARPA was really about shaping the future. This agency should be about shaping the future, but we must ensure that there is a future to shape. Unless we tackle the climate and ecological emergency, there will not be.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

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

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

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

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

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