Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Third sitting)

Aaron Bell Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Dawn Butler]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I do not think anyone will vote against the amendment, because all it seeks to do is ensure that there is a memorandum of understanding between ARIA and UK Research and Innovation about how they will work together. The two organisations will be working on the same themes, though doing things slightly differently, and they need to communicate. I am happy to give way to anyone who thinks it is not a good idea that UKRI and ARIA communicate. The amendment is practical and sensible and seeks only to clarify how they would work together.

Our evidence session was informative. Dame Ottoline Leyser from UKRI said:

“The people employed at ARIA will absolutely need to understand deeply what UKRI is doing and what the opportunities are across that research base in order to deliver their vision. I would expect a very close working relationship with ARIA to allow that to happen.”––[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Public Bill Committee, 14 April 2021; c. 6, Q3.]

When she said that, I thought that the relationship must have been written in the legislation and I had missed something, because she said it as though it was going to happen. I went back to the Bill to have a look, but nothing in it says that UKRI and ARIA have to work together or at least know what each other is doing. I thought that quite strange. When I asked her how she expected that to happen, she said “naturally”. We in Parliament make laws and legislation; we do not leave things to happen naturally if we can we put them on the statute book. The amendment seeks only to have a memorandum of understanding between the already established UKRI and the newly established ARIA.

If the Committee votes against the amendment, people outside will not understand. They will ask, “Why don’t you want a memorandum of understanding?” Everything cannot be done just on trust. We have trust and transparency, but right now ARIA has neither, and it will not be subject to freedom of information rules. It is the wrong approach to say to people outside, “We are going to give £800 million to an organisation that will have no oversight, no FOI and no link to UKRI.” How would that be sensible, especially when—I say this gently—the Government are caught up in sleaze at the moment? That would not help at all. People will say, “You want £800 million to go to whom and to do what?”

Ultimately, we know that men of a certain age get these opportunities, and these men tend to fail upwards. Without the amendment, we are saying that we will allow people to fail upwards and we will not know what they are doing because failure will be part of what ARIA is. We accept that failure can be a part of ARIA, but there needs to be some oversight and connection to the already established UKRI.

[Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Member for her service on the Science and Technology Committee with me, where we have been discussing this issue and the covid crisis over the last year. She made a point about men of a certain age. Last year, it was two women of a certain age—Dido Harding and Kate Bingham—who helped to respond to coronavirus. At the time, the Opposition made various allegations of cronyism, particularly about Kate Bingham, which ought to be withdrawn now that we have seen the success of what can happen when we take away some of the administrative burdens, focus clear-mindedly on a key goal and get it delivered. Making these allegations of sexism when we have had two women leading our response to coronavirus is not appropriate.

[Dawn Butler]

I thank the hon. Member for his service on the Science and Technology Committee, where we often agree and very often disagree. Of course we praise what goes well, but let us not forget that £14 million was spent on a test and trace system that was scrapped, or that Northern Ireland spent £1 million on a test and trace system that works perfectly well. Let us not forget those facts. Now, we are talking about £800 million.

Professor Pierre Azoulay said,

“It is important not to put those two agencies in competition; they both have a role to play.”—[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Second sitting), 14 April 2021; c. 46]

Both agencies have a role to play; let them work together. Let us work on the premise that it will be a success.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kirsty Blackman]

It is a pleasure to be able to take part in this Bill Committee. Unfortunately, I had to come to London to do so, but it is nice to see some of the faces that I have not seen for a while, other than on little screens. I will start with a bit of fluff: I thank the Clerks for their huge amount of hard work in assisting us with the amendments that we tabled to the Bill. It was really helpful. I am sure they provided the same level of help to everybody else, but we very much appreciate it.

I will speak to amendment 28 and the Opposition’s amendment 9. Our amendment 28 relates to the number of women to be appointed to the board in non-executive positions. There is some lack of flexibility around the positions because two are taken by named individuals. There are also positions that are not appointed by the Secretary of State because they are executive positions. In relation to the non-executive members, it is incredibly important that a significant percentage of women is included among them.

The hon. Member for Broadland said that we should legislate only where we have to. I think in this case it is incredibly important to legislate. We know that only 12% of all engineers are women, and that 25% of 16 to 18-year-old girls would consider becoming an engineer as opposed to 51.9% of boys in that age group. There is an incredibly hard glass ceiling, particularly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and in the kind of roles that will benefit from the funding that ARIA will receive.

We know that young women, and young men, are more likely to take up and aspire to positions if they can see people who look like them in those positions, see people who have succeeded, and know that there is an opportunity to climb the ladder rather than hit the glass ceiling, as people so often do in engineering. This would be a real opportunity for the Government to make it clear that it is incredibly important to have women in these roles. Maths is not just for boys; it is a subject for everybody. When I was doing my advanced higher maths, I was the only girl in the class. Not one other girl had chosen to take advanced higher maths. It was not a small class, it was a class of about 20, and it was because people felt that it was a boys’ subject and girls should not be taking it.

It is important that the Government agree to such an amendment. If the Minister is unwilling to, it would be helpful to hear how the Government plan to increase the gender balance on the board and ensure that women are appointed to these roles. For example, they have said to FTSE companies that they need to have a percentage of women on those boards, but they are not putting that into the legislation in this instance and it is important that they do so.

The Opposition’s amendment 9 in relation to diversity is an incredibly good amendment. In fact, I am quite upset I did not think of it. We have a similar problem with diversity in engineering. Mainly white men are in these positions, and people in school do not look at these positions and think, “I’m going to aspire to do this,” because they do not see people like them in those roles.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South and I represent Aberdeen constituencies, where Robert Gordon University and Aberdeen University do a lot around engineering, oil and gas. We have thankfully seen a significant amount of immigration to our city because of the oil and gas. Outside London, the highest percentage of non-UK-born citizens is in Aberdeen. That means a significant number of people from ethnic minority groups are in the engineering profession, but again we have the same issue. It is very unusual to go into a room full of oil and gas executives and for any of them not to be white, and it is fairly unusual for any of them to be women, although we are seeing an increase in those numbers. These amendments would make clear the Government’s intentions and say to organisations such as the FTSE companies that are being asked to have gender balance on their boards, “We are doing this too; we are leading by example”.

[Aaron Bell]

It is really nice to see the hon. Member back in London. I know it is a burden for SNP Members to come all the way down to the United Kingdom Parliament, but it is lovely to see her in person.

I do not think the Government are doing so badly on diversity, particularly on women. I reassure the hon. Member and the Opposition that, in relation to their amendments, the panel will be selected by Sir Patrick Vallance and other independent advisers. The job that they have done during covid demonstrates how many women we have in positions of scientific importance. We have the women we mentioned earlier: Dame Jenny Harries, Dame Ottoline Leyser, who gave evidence to us, and the Science Minister herself. From the diversity perspective, I think the absolute hero of the press conferences has been Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, who has been a wonderful communicator to the whole country, so I gently say to the hon. Member that I do not think it is as bad as all that and that the amendments are therefore unnecessary.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I was hoping that I was not being too critical of the Government. I did not intend to say the UK Government are terrible in this regard. I think they have done some good things around gender balance on boards, for example. I would have gone further, but they were a good start. I am not hugely critical of where things are, but I think a kind of stamp on this Bill, to say, “This is the direction we would like to go to”, would be helpful.

This can be done. We have done it in Scotland with the Scottish National Investment Bank. Our amendment is very similar to the proposal in relation to the investment bank—we are doing a huge amount for our public bodies. The investment bank intends to have a significant number of women on it, and it is the same for gender representation on public boards in Scotland more generally. I would very much appreciate it if the Minister let us know whether the Government will take the actions that we have proposed in our amendment. If not, what do they intend to do to ensure that people from diverse backgrounds are included?

--- Later in debate ---

[Chi Onwurah]

I am always grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s interventions, as he makes interesting—if inaccurate, in this case—points. Let me emphasise how it looks from the outside right now: we have all these friends getting contracts because they have the WhatsApp contact of the Secretary of State, and people appointed to be in charge of procurement also work for big producers. I am afraid that the Bill does not contain the necessary safeguards, and it is incumbent on the Committee to ensure that that kind of sleaze does not taint science.

[Aaron Bell]

One of the reasons why things look that way from the outside is the accusations made by the Opposition. I have an example. The hon. Lady was not here earlier—I completely accept that she had a reason for that—when I referred to Kate Bingham’s appointment, and the £670,000 spent last year on a crucial campaign to get hard-to-reach groups not only to take part in vaccine trials but to take the vaccine. At the time, the Leader of the Opposition said:

“You cannot justify that sort of money being spent”,

and the deputy leader of the Labour party said, “This cronyism stinks.” After what we saw last year, I think it a little rich of the Opposition to go round suggesting that this is the problem, when, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock said, the Science and Technology Committee, and all the science community, are very engaged. The idea that there would be scientific sleaze is frankly risible.

[Dawn Butler]

rose—