Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Willetts
Main Page: Lord Willetts (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Willetts's debates with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
(2 years, 9 months ago)
Grand CommitteeMy Lords, in the absence of my noble friend Lord Stansgate, I should say a couple of words about his amendments. We tackled the issue of climate in some depth when we met last week; I thought that it was a useful discussion. On the name, I think that he was trying to get at why the change had been proposed. Perhaps the Minister, when he responds, can talk us through the Government’s thinking. I do not think that it amounts to a hill of beans, but it was something that my noble friend wanted to explore, to find out what was behind the change of thinking.
My Lords, I will be brief and will refer particularly to Amendment 26A. I repeat that I am a member of the board of UKRI and so have a particular interest in this. The more the Minister can say about ARIA alongside UKRI, the better—it would be very helpful. I do not mind if there is overlap; I am not a purist on this. Indeed, some overlap may be an inevitable result of having ARIA and UKRI. In fact, I would prefer overlap to the alternatives, which are either that UKRI is seen to be unable to do high-risk, high-reward research or that it is somehow seen as second best to ARIA. I hope that the Minister will assure us that UKRI will be able to carry on doing the wide range of activities that it does—including through Innovate UK, in particular—with the application and successful commercialisation of technologies. I see ARIA as supplementing that rather than displacing it, so anything that the Minister can say about that relationship here or in answer to subsequent amendments would be very helpful.
My Lords, my hope for ARIA was that it would look a bit like ARPA. ARPA is not a blue-sky, high-risk research operation; it is a project agency that takes challenges and builds systems to meet them. I think that this is essentially very different. It is not an invention agency and that is the reason behind this consideration. Whether it matters what the name is, I am not sure. ARIA has a nice sort of ring to it. After all, to call it ARPA would mean that we are copying the Americans, which is probably insufferable.