Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Debate between Lord Willetts and Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

I would like briefly to intervene on this important group of amendments and should declare an interest as a member of the board of UKRI, which is very relevant to the issues we are currently considering. I am not acting as a spokesman on behalf of UKRI, but drawing on the experience that we have had there.

I welcome any attempt to bring greater diversity and innovation to our funding landscape. We do not want a monolith; we want lots of different ways of getting funding and lots of different requirements. Anything that adds to the diversity of the funding landscape I welcome as a good thing. However, I have two or three questions on which I hope that the Minister will be able to give some assurance.

First, the task of ARIA is often described as high-risk, high-reward research. In a way, Clause 3, to which my noble friend Lord Lansley, has referred, is an attempt at setting out in legal prose “high risk, high return”. It is great that ARIA will have that as its objective, but my one concern when I hear this language is the implication that all other public funding for R&D could not be high risk and high return and that it is in some sort of boring bureaucratic pot where everything is safety first and low return. I would be grateful for the Minister’s assurance that it is also perfectly possible for the agencies of UKRI and indeed other sources of public funding for R&D also to engage in high-risk, high-return research. It would place too much weight on ARIA’s shoulders and eliminate diversity if we said that it is the only agency that can act in that way. Having that authoritative assurance from the Government would be of great value in ensuring that our whole research ecosystem carries on performing in an innovative way.

Secondly, I want to reflect on the lessons that can be learned from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, to which my noble friend has also referred, and seek another assurance from the Minister. When Theresa May’s Government put substantial funding—over £2 billion—into the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, Innovate UK, the main agency for delivering that programme, travelled to America to look at what ARPA did. It said, “These programme directors at ARPA are fantastic—we should have the ARPA model of programme directors in order to deliver the Government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund”.

I can remember the debate that took place. The Treasury said “Hang on, how much are these programme directors going to be paid? They can’t possibly be paid more than is set by our pay rules”—the pay limit was, I think, £100,000. The Treasury then also said, “We need a committee to scrutinise that the money is being well spent and, to ensure it is making progress, a monthly report would be about right”. Then BEIS, which I do not think completely trusted the Treasury and saw this as a BEIS operation, said, “BEIS also needs to have a committee that meets to scrutinise the success of this programme director; we have slightly different criteria from the Treasury, so our committee should meet once a month”. It averaged out—at the start; it may have got better—that every fortnight there was some supervisory committee or other checking that this programme director was delivering the objectives.

That is the slow, painful process of bureaucratic accretion. It is marvellous that ARIA is, we are assured, going to be free of all that. It would be quite good, however, if other parts of research funding could also be free of those constraints. Indeed, the Government have several reviews on at the moment that are relevant to this, including the Tickell review of bureaucracy and a new grant review of UKRI.

I also hope that the Minister can assure us that, wherever possible, especially if these proposals emerge from two reviews set up by the Government, freedoms being extended to ARIA will also be enjoyed by agencies working under UKRI or other departmental bodies. The problem of bureaucracy must be solved across the whole swathe of R&D funding, not just by creating one institution outside the constraints that everyone else has to work under. I would like an assurance that lessons are being learned, both for the functioning of ARIA and from these two reviews now under way.

Thirdly and finally, we can already sense—not least from the opening presentation from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, on the purpose of ARIA—a fascinating debate about missions versus technologies. I have frequently had that debate with my friend Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who has brought the language of missions into public policy, which is excellent. However, I always say to her that the Kennedy moonshot did not arise because a bunch of PPE-ists—speaking as one myself—sat around saying, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we sent someone to the moon? That would really get the media’s attention; let’s do that, Mr President”, but because of prior investment in general-purpose technologies, including rockets. It was a deep understanding of what the technologies might be capable of that led to the formulation of the mission.

One can resolve this by wordplay, by making “backing technologies” one of the missions, but the point made earlier about preventing and creating technological surprise tells us that, really, DARPA was always envisaged as driving American leadership in technology. We have the opportunity to choose missions only because of prior investment in underlying science and technology, which turns those missions from empty fantasies into deliverable objectives.

I very much hope we will have an assurance from the Minister during the course of our scrutiny today that ARIA will strike a happy balance. It should be able to fund general-purpose technologies without knowing exactly how they will prove useful, while suspecting that something of that power and significance will have use. It may also wish to fund specific missions or challenges, but it would be a strategic mistake to put all its eggs in one basket. It is the interaction of technological investment capabilities with missions and challenges that really drives innovation. I very much hope that ARIA will pursue both approaches.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I apologise for not taking part at Second Reading; I was at the COP 26 climate talks, which are of obvious relevance to this group in particular.

I begin by reflecting on the model for ARIA—DARPA, which was of course military. We have talked a lot about risk-taking, which is usually interpreted as the risk of failure to achieve your objectives. When we think about the origins of this—the child very often showing some characteristics of its parent—we can also think about the risks attached to achieving your outcomes but causing unintended effects. With DARPA, there was Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the drone warfare of the Gulf War, and it is now working on killer drones and robot warriors.

Looking at the model of DARPA, researcher Annie Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, talked about how it very much became embedded in what has been described, including by US Presidents, as the military-industrial complex. Giving a mission is very important, in order to avoid institutional capture. That is one of the reasons why I speak in favour of Amendments 1, 21 and 26. We have not yet had the chance to hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, but I think her Amendment 21 is in a sense similar to Amendments 1 and 26, except that it provides a more regular review mechanism.

If we think about what ARIA is for and look at some of the proposals put forward, we see that the CBI described it as

“an international lynchpin for business investment”

that is to “ultimately deliver new products”. McKernan said that it was

“a public sector, new technology seed fund”

whereas, by contrast, the Russell Group described it as

“multidisciplinary research teams with the capacity to take a holistic approach”.

That brings us to the debate that the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, was just addressing, which was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley—and why I would express opposition to his Amendment 25. There is a danger in focusing on technology rather than on mission. We want to focus on mission and on the problems that we need to solve—and Amendment 1 very much focuses on the great problem that we need to solve. Discussion thus far has focused very much on the climate emergency, but it also talks about a “sustainable … society”.