Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Viscount Stansgate Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a totally unexpected pleasure to follow the Minister as I am the first in the list. It is a great honour to take part in this debate, the first Second Reading in which I have taken part, when I consider the range of other speakers who we are going to hear from this evening, all of whom are so very distinguished. I am also mindful of the fact that the president of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee is contributing to the debate. As his vice-president, I cannot remember a time when both officeholders were speaking together.

The relationship between the Government and science is subtle, complex and of critical importance to the future of the country. It goes without saying that we have a tremendous record on science in this country, to which I pay tribute, along with everybody else. Our record on Covid vaccine development and distribution is but the latest example. The UK is world class, but it is a competitive world out there and this Bill matters to our future if we are to be the science superpower we all want us to be.

The problem for successive Governments of all kinds is that they have to try to find a balance between giving researchers the freedom to follow their own instincts and curiosity, while at the same time guiding large sums of public money towards wider societal benefits, such as national prosperity and real improvements in the quality of life for their citizens. This balance is not easy to strike. ARIA represents an attempt to strike a new balance by introducing a new organisation with a relatively small staff and a relatively small amount of money with extreme freedom to decide what to do without the existing constraints that apply elsewhere. There is also a difficult and delicate balance to strike between parliamentary oversight and the intellectual freedom which will be necessary to enable ARIA to generate the creativity required to do things differently.

The Minister made it clear in his opening speech that what is being proposed is something very new because we are dealing with high risk and potentially high reward, as he acknowledged. Therefore, the heart of what the Bill is about is not so much an agency as an idea. We are discussing an experiment never before undertaken in the UK, and we are being invited to approve and establish a new participant in what is called the scientific landscape. If we were having a vote today, I would vote for the Bill because this is broadly a good idea and I support additional funding for science, but it raises lots of questions which is going to make the Committee stage very important, and I will return to that in a bit.

First, I hope the House will allow me a brief moment to consider the wider historical context of the proposals that the Government are inviting us to consider today. More than 100 years ago, I think in 1918, Lord Haldane chaired the committee that led to the establishment of the first research council. The Haldane principle that emerged was, in essence, that research should be decided by researchers and not the Government. This has stood the test of time not least because it is convenient for Ministers. It shields them from bearing the direct responsibility for making individual decisions on individual funding.

ARIA takes this a stage further. It will need to offer real scientific independence at programme level. With regard to peer review, standard processes may not always be appropriate for ARIA, as it aims to empower exceptional scientists to start and stop projects quickly. I do not particularly care for military analogies, but when I think about ARIA it makes me wonder whether in times past Barnes Wallis or Alan Turing might have been funded by ARIA. They were both individually brilliant.

Over the decades the structural organisation of science in government has been through endless changes. For about a quarter of a century science was put in with the Department for Education, to create the DES, and, frankly, that is where science languished. I regard the start of the modem era as being when the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave, launched Realising our Potential in 1993, rearranged the research councils and set up the Office of Science and Technology. Even the current department, BEIS, has over the past 20 or more years been through many changes in emphasis and names from the DTI to the ungainly DIUS, if anybody remembers that, and there may be more name changes on the way. Then there are things such as the Technology Strategy Board, which became Innovate UK until its absorption into UKRI, and even UKRI itself, which was described at the time as the kind of reform that comes along only once in a generation, was formed only in 2018.

Some argue that there is no point in creating ARIA if it is going to be just another entity in the science landscape doing the same things as UKRI but with less money. There is no guaranteed method, and never has been, of successfully identifying commercially successful projects arising out of science research. Too often in this country, as noble Lords will know very well, we have suffered from what is called “the valley of death”—that is, we are good at discovering new things but bad at developing them and exploiting them for commercial success. However, it is hard to legislate for success.

The agency will not automatically succeed. On the contrary, one of its earliest proponents suggested that if ARIA is not failing then it is failing, which is an interesting point. Last weekend, I went to see the latest James Bond film—I recommend it—and it occurred to me that there is a link between those films and this Bill. If the Minister was promoting ARIA as a movie, I can see it now: “ARIA—Licence to Fail.” Whether it does or not is almost impossible to predict because we do not know when a transformational breakthrough will be made, so consistency of funding over the next 10 years will be crucial.

One thought that comes to mind at the start of the many questions I want to put is about the agency’s proposed name. We know that much of the inspiration for ARIA comes from America. When this idea was first mooted by the Government in March 2020, they called it ARPA. They have now chosen the letter “I” for “invention” rather than “P” for “projects”, and that is an interesting distinction worth exploring. “Invention” conveys more of an individual exercise, whereas “projects” suggests a more collaborative approach with many more people involved, so we may discuss in Committee whether we should reconsider the title.

I am grateful to all those organisations that have been in touch to offer advice on ARIA, and I am sure there will be a lot more as we go through Committee. They include the Royal Society of Biology, the Biochemical Society, the Physiological Society, the Campaign for Science and Engineering, the Royal Society of Chemistry and others.

My own list of questions is not exclusive; I am sure that other noble Lords tonight will have many more. But they include the following: what will the relationship be between ARIA and the existing parts of the research landscape, such as UKRI, in particular? What will it be with the new science and technology council, recently established by the Prime Minister, and the new Office for Science and Technology Strategy? What about its relationship with the Council for Science and Technology, currently co-chaired by the chief scientific adviser and the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Madingley?

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I gently remind the noble Viscount that there is an advisory speaking time limit of seven minutes. If we go on from the first speech, we get rapidly out of control.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

It is kind of the noble Baroness to mention it. If I had a pair of scissors, I should have to cut this speech in half, and noble Lords would no doubt be only too grateful. I will do so verbally.

One area where I think we will divide in Committee is that the Government are determined to exempt ARIA from freedom of information. Like other noble Lords, I received a briefing from the Information Commissioner’s Office, which strongly advocates that FoI requests should be allowed. The News Media Association has also taken the trouble to write to us on the same issue. I am sure that is something we will explore.

In drawing my remarks to a close, I will mention the famous questions that DARPA used to identify projects which were worth funding. First, what are you trying to do, and can you explain it in jargon-free language? Secondly, how is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice? Thirdly, what is new in your approach, and why do you think it will be successful? Fourthly, who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make? Fifthly, what are the risks? Sixthly, how much will it cost? Seventhly, how long will it take?

Finally, the Bill proposes that the Government must wait 10 years before taking any action to close ARIA down, so I look forward to taking part in the Second Reading of the “ARIA (Continuation) (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill 2031”, when we will at least have the experience of 10 years to guide us in our debates.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I thank all noble Lords who contributed for their engaging and, I thought, in general, very constructive contributions to the debate today. Many noble Lords made excellent points, and I will attempt to answer as many of their questions as possible.

Today’s debate, on a tripartite basis, demonstrates a shared passion to foster the UK’s world-class research base. Ensuring that the UK is the best place in the world for scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs to live and work is at the heart of the R&D road map. Despite the small criticisms raised by the Opposition Front Bench, there was generally commitment from all three main parties and from the Cross Benches to those objectives. It is central to the Government’s plan to build back better, and an integral commitment which last week’s spending review and Budget showed.

It is thanks to our dynamic research landscape that we have responded so robustly to the Covid pandemic, as my noble friend Lord Bethell so helpfully reminded us. The challenges that we have faced show just how important it is that we always remain on the front foot of research and development. And, as set out in the UK Innovation Strategy this summer, this can only be achieved through a rich and diverse research and innovation ecosystem.

I now turn to the specific points raised by noble Lords in some of their very good speeches. My noble friend Lord Bethell, and the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, asked good questions about why the Government will not be setting a research focus for ARIA’s activities. At her appearance during this Bill’s Committee stage in the other place, the chief executive officer of UKRI, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, spoke about how

“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, 14/4/21; col. 8]

The Government’s innovation strategy also set out our commitment to establish a new missions programme to tackle some of the most pressing challenges confronting the UK in the coming years. These will be decided by the National Science and Technology Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, in due course. Through these new mechanisms, this Government are taking a revised, strategic approach to assessing and funding our national scientific priorities. It would clearly be inappropriate to create another new body to do essentially the same thing. To reach new, brilliant people and ideas, we must diversify our ways of funding research, and I welcome the support of my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe on this point. Clause 2 sets out how ARIA could achieve this, offering a broad range of support to R&D and—in response to my noble friend Lord Borwick—we do not expect it to offer prizes as understood in a common sense. What “prizes” refers to in this context is better termed as research competition, where multiple teams of scientists attempt to solve essentially the same problem.

The noble Lords, Lord Patel and Lord Davies of Brixton, asked about ARIA’s scope and objective. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones and Lord Ravensdale, also asked about the technologies which ARIA would fund. The Bill sets out ARIA’s functions, and in the policy statement we have also set out its design principles. But to uphold the autonomy which is at the heart of this new agency, only ARIA’s leadership itself can be responsible for specifically setting out its strategy and its funding priorities. It is not a blank cheque, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, has suggested.

The noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, in his contribution asked whether what we are trying to achieve through ARIA could be delivered through UKRI. I reassure the noble Lord that, in designing ARIA, we carefully considered all delivery options to optimise its chances of success. The noble Lords, Lord Clement-Jones, Lord Kakkar and Lord Broers, also asked about how we make sure that ARIA will work hand in hand with UKRI and the wider research landscape. Of course, while we are diversifying our system, it will only work if it is cohesive. It is not always necessary to legislate for these sorts of relationships. Communication, openness and trust are things which ARIA’s leaders will need to have not just with UKRI but with other stakeholders across the entire ecosystem. We have been looking for exactly these qualities in our recruitment of ARIA’s CEO. I pay tribute to the creation of UKRI and the bringing together of the research councils and Innovate UK under one umbrella, a point that was noted by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. His was an excellent contribution, and I hope we can look forward to further from him on this subject.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister, and would like to invite him and the Government Whips to approach Hansard and ask them to publish in italics the half of my speech which had to be cut.