Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Sixth sitting)
Debate between Aaron Bell and Chi Onwurah(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)
I beg to move amendment 22, in schedule 3, page 14, line 3, at end insert—
“Freedom of Information Act 2000
(12) In Part VI of Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“Other public bodies and offices: general”), at the appropriate place insert “The Advanced Research and Invention Agency”.”.
This amendment would make ARIA subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Hollobone. Amendment 22 is critical and very simple. It would make the Advanced Research and Invention Agency subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
The amendment forms part of a sequence of amendments that we have tabled, which seek to deliver greater oversight of ARIA and greater accountability, in order to increase public confidence, particularly at this time when we are in the midst of a cronyism scandal. We do not believe that ARIA’s blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act regime can be justified.
I make the point that £800 million of public money will be spent by ARIA. It is a new agency whose aims and ambitions we all support, but public trust will be vital to its long-term success. In our evidence sessions, we heard from Government witnesses such as Professor Philip Bond. Dominic Cummings, the self-proclaimed architect of ARIA, gave similar evidence to the Science and Technology Committee, which celebrated trusting the leaders of ARIA with £800 million of taxpayers’ money and no purpose. The Labour party believe that this could be a side door to sleaze in science.
We do not want to bureaucratise ARIA. We acknowledge that a hands-off approach is integral to its success. We simply want ARIA to be accountable to the public via the Freedom of Information Act.
On Second Reading, the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme stated that,
“UK Research and Innovation receives about 300 FOI requests a year”.—[Official Report, 23 March 2021; Vol. 691, c. 830.]
I have since received an answer from the Science Minister to a parliamentary question, which states that, for example, UK Research and Innovation received 371 freedom of information requests in 2020 and has answered 100 in the first three months of 2021. I asked about the costs to UKRI of complying with those requests, but it does not keep track of costs, which implies that they are not significant.
ARIA will be spending between 1% and 2% of the funding that UKRI is spending. If UKRI receives about 300 requests per year, we might calculate, say, that if freedom of information requests were related to the amount of public money being spent—a reasonable approximation—ARIA might receive between three and six freedom of information requests per year. I ask the Committee: would six freedom of information requests per year be a bureaucratic burden on ARIA, as the small and agile organisation we want it to be?
Aaron Bell
I thank the hon. Lady for giving way and for welcoming me back to the Committee by mentioning me in her first paragraph. I was sorry to miss this morning’s sitting, but I was paired with an Opposition Member. I admire her mathematics, but given the interest in ARIA and the cutting-edge research that it will undertake, I do not think that scaling back in the manner she did and suggesting that it might receive only three to six requests a month is likely. As she knows, UKRI has a team of people to deal with freedom of information requests. We should consider carefully whether we want to put such a burden on ARIA, because we want it to be nimble and lean. I am afraid that I do not believe the quantum of money can be scaled to the number of FOI requests. I think ARIA would get an awful lot, given the research we want it to undertake.
Chi Onwurah
Will the intervention from the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock be on a similar point? I imagine it will.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Fourth sitting)
Debate between Aaron Bell and Chi Onwurah(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Aaron Bell
I thank the hon. Lady for the other Newcastle for giving way. She draws a comparison with DARPA, but is the more obvious comparison not with UKRI? Like ARIA, UKRI is bound by the code of conduct for board members of public bodies, which includes. for example. the obligation to declare publicly any private financial or non-financial interests that may, or may be perceived to, conflict with one’s public duty. That speaks to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk made: we would not expect the kind of people we will appoint to the board to act in the ways that she seems to think they will.
Chi Onwurah
I thank the hon. Member for the second Newcastle for that contribution. I will make a couple of points in response. Let me gently say that Government members of the Committee are trying somewhat to have it both ways, in saying that ARIA will be like UKRI while not putting in place any of the measures, systems or processes of accountability to require it to be like UKRI, building on the fact that ARIA is, as I understand it, meant to fill a gap in our research landscape.
On whether ARIA will follow all the rules that UKRI follows, I am pretty sure that the answer to that is no, because as I understand it, it is not going to follow freedom of information or procurement rules. We have seen over the past few months with the scandal over Greensill—this is what the comments from the Chair of the Liaison Committee were about—that the existing rules and regulations are not sufficient. Finally, for the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme to say that we can expect these people to behave better because they are going to be better than that—really? Many scandals have been founded on expectations like that and again, we do not want the touch or hint of scandal near our fantastic science base.
Chi Onwurah
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend; I think that it is progressive, transformative and very necessary. We heard today that the Prime Minister has decided to set another target for our emissions—I think that it is to slash UK emissions by 78% by 2035—undaunted by the fact that he has not met any of the targets that he has set previously.
This issue is not about setting targets; it is about changing the way in which our economy and our society work, to reduce our emissions. Just think of the role that ARIA could play in that process. My hon. Friend suggested that achieving net zero is not a narrow mission; it is a broad mission, because net zero impacts every aspect of our life. An ARIA CEO would have plenty of discretion in choosing which aspects of the climate and environmental emergency to address.
Aaron Bell
That is potentially a worthy mission, but the point is that the hon. Lady said there is no direction. Well, going boldly is going to the frontier—even “The Final Frontier”, if we go to “Star Trek V”. [Laughter.] The edge of the edge is not in one direction. The edge is a circle, or even a sphere—all the areas that we do not know about. Trying to focus on one narrow point, as she is doing with the amendment, misses the point of ARIA and the potential for its transformative effect across a wide range of disciplines and lots of areas of science, technology, engineering and, indeed, perhaps even mathematics.
Chi Onwurah
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that contribution. Envisaging the edge of the edge, whether it is a circle or an ellipse—whatever it is, it is obviously broad. It is too broad. I think it could be anything. I think this Committee believes that ARIA must have a transformative impact on society, otherwise why are we here? The area where we need a transformative change is in climate change, which is a hugely broad area.
The UK, under this Government, is off track to meet current targets. The Government have no ambitious green recovery plan, they have axed the vital housing retrofit scheme and they have cut subsidies for electric vehicles. They are desperately in need of focusing our activities on the impact of climate change.
We know that two of the great challenges in reducing our emissions are transport and the existing housing stock. Think what impact an inspired programme director in ARIA could have on that great challenge of effectively insulating and reducing the emissions from our 20 million or so homes, or ensuring that transport, which the Government have said will be included in their emissions targets, is green. That is not a narrow mission. Net zero is not a narrow mission; it is as broad and as big as our planet, and it is certainly where we desperately need to focus our attention.
In response to the point about the Government choosing the mission, I would say that only the Government have the democratic mandate—they won the election—to choose the mission, while allowing ARIA’s leadership the operational independence to implement that mission. It is critical that the mission reflects public concerns, to establish buy-in as well as the tolerance for failure. Without a clear mandate from the Secretary of State, ARIA’s leadership will be put in the unenviable position of having to decide which Government Departments and policies to prioritise, and who will have the ear of the ARIA CEO. I say again that the Government cannot outsource this responsibility as they have chosen to outsource so many other responsibilities.
We are at the beginning of the decisive decade, in which the world must avert the worst impacts of climate change, and ARIA could provide much-needed research to help advance the solutions that are necessary to decarbonise our economy rapidly and fairly. In addition, this year the UK will host the critical COP26 UN climate summit. Would it not be a fantastic message to say that our leading high-risk, high-reward agency is focused on climate change? Would it not provide a model for other countries to follow?
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Third sitting)
Debate between Aaron Bell and Chi Onwurah(3 years, 7 months ago)
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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.