Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Second sitting)
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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Chi Onwurah
Thank you very much. I know that others have questions to ask so I will leave it there, but I just want to say how inspiring it is to hear such positive reference to the power of public service, science and research, and to oversight as being an enabler rather than a burden.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
Q
I am going to start with Dr Peter Highnam. How do you ensure evaluation and scrutiny of DARPA’s programmes outside what is mandated in legislation? What information do you gather to assess when to start and stop projects and programmes, and how are these decisions made?
Dr Highnam: That is a surprisingly big question. The p in DARPA stands for “projects”, which is critical for a place like DARPA. We are not doing technology area x or y just because, and we do not do it for the long term. We have projects that are well defined at the beginning. A case has to be made. They are monitored, they have metrics and all manner of independent evaluation associated with them before we go out to find the best teams we can to participate and to be funded to work on that research. Then that project ends. That is very important: things begin, and they end.
To make the case for a project to get off the ground, we use a structure called the Heilmeier questions, named after the DARPA director in the mid-70s, George Heilmeier. They are five very important questions. They look easy, but they are very hard to answer well. In my view, that is the creative act in the DARPA model—to answer those questions well and make that case. Once the project is approved and teams are onboard, you then have regular evaluations. As things change in the world around us, in science and technology, with us in defence, and in other aspects of our environment, they may be overtaken by events. That is very rare, but it would be grounds for no longer continuing. Were we too ambitious in certain aspects of the programme? Do we need to change it or change some of the people participating in the teams? And so on.
This is a constant process. It is not about starting it up and letting it run until it finishes. It takes a lot of effort to make sure you know what you are doing when you start with taxpayer funding and the opportunity cost that comes with that. Then you keep an eye on it, especially during the transition of the results to our national defence.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Dr Dugan: The story of Wellcome Leap actually dates back to about 2018, when the Wellcome Trust, from its unique position in the world, asked, “Is there more we could do to have greater impact?” It did a pretty careful analysis of innovation as it happened in larger organisations in the venture world and also at DARPA. The assessment was that in global human health, there is indeed this innovation gap. That innovation gap is characterised by larger programmes with higher risk tolerance, which are not driven by consensus peer review. This is very much the way we conduct programmes at DARPA—the intersection of a goal and the science and engineering that need to be pulled forward in order to attain that goal. That effort—those large programmes—are what Wellcome sought in the formation of Wellcome Leap. What I have observed in the last year of operation is that, in fact, there is this innovation gap in human health. It is same one that was identified after Sputnik that led to the formation of DARPA. The coronavirus is showing us just how much work needs to be done in human health across policy, equity and the economics, but it also shows us the power of a breakthrough and how tough it is to get one.
I was the director of DARPA when the pivotal investments in mRNA vaccines were made. Many others came to the table to create this success for the world in this time, but we need more breakthroughs like that, and we need them faster. That is why Wellcome Leap was formed.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Professor Azoulay: Absolutely, it is essential and I think it happens at multiple levels. It happens in the relative administrative autonomy that those ARPA-like agencies have, relative to their Government Departments of reference, whether it is the Department of Energy for ARPA-E or the Department of Defense for DARPA.
It definitely also happens at the hiring level and in the fact that one can hire programme managers in ARPA-like agencies from very diverse backgrounds, not necessarily a background in the civil service, and pay them according to rules that might not be those of the traditional civil service.
Focusing on programme managers, that matters because they themselves have quite a bit of autonomy in the way in which they delineate and orchestrate their programme. They have a lot more discretion in choosing what projects to fund and assembling the teams that will perform those projects than would be the case in a traditional science funding agency, such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation in the United States context or, I would think, UK Research and Innovation in the British context.
Chi Onwurah
Q
Professor Glover: Just for easiness, can I ask Committee members to just call me Anne? Otherwise it is a bit of a mouthful.
On the idea of five or six individuals, I would caution on that slightly. I am partly bought into the idea, but if you are identifying five or six individuals, you have already pinned your colours to the mast in what you want. You have already prejudged the areas you want to work in or the ideas that you are interested in.
Where the five or six people might be really important to identify is for the running of ARIA itself. Whether it is the overall director of ARIA or the research leaders in the different themes that might be funded in ARIA, they will be key people and they need to be credible, trusted, very effective at communication and really open-minded. In my view, a large part of the success of ARIA will come from having quite inspirational leaders throughout.
In terms of how you fund and who it is that you are funding, I would go back to what I was alluding to earlier. There needs to be a big conversation about this. There are often older men who have got a reputation in research, so they are naturally the ones we go to, but as I know from bitter experience, as you get older, sometimes your thinking closes off in particular areas and you are less open to ideas. I am thinking of Professor Donald Braben, whose comments the Committee would probably be very interested in. He set up a venture research unit in BP, back in the ’90s I think, and has written several books about this kind of blue skies research area.
What Braben said is that we should look for “irreverent researchers and liberated universities”. Do not look for people who have a research area that we think is really important and we must go there. Debate widely among researchers, of course, but also Government Departments, devolved Administrations, foresighters, businesses, citizens. Let us imagine the future. ARIA could be the stepping stone, if you like, to inventing that imagined future. For a future to exist, you have to imagine it in the first place and you have to convert it into what you would like. There are lots of different ways of doing that. With inspirational leadership, you can move towards that. You can probably increase dramatically your chance of getting it right by having an irreverence around what you do, and not the usual measures of success.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Professor Glover: I would argue that there is huge value in that. Obviously, the funding is coming from Government, but by giving it freedom from Government you might also be giving it the freedom to fail in many ways, and that is exceptionally important. If it is seen as very close to Government—whichever Government is in power—it potentially becomes a bit like a political football, either in what is being funded or in the direction suggested for where ARIA funding should go.
If there are notable failures of funding, which you would expect if it were a high-risk, high-reward funding agency, political opponents will also say, “Well, look, this is a complete disaster under your custodianship. Here are all the failures.” You just want it to be separate from that. It is also part of trying to embrace the unthinkable, if you like, in terms of the research we do and the areas we go into. Necessarily, those will sometimes be difficult areas, and not ones that you should expose Government to either. In the spirit of opening everything up, I would say that keeping that independence is extremely valuable.
Tabitha Goldstaub: I totally agree with what Anne just said—I would have said exactly the same thing. I think that the separateness and independence are really vital to the success of ARIA. The only thing that I would really think about adding here is how important it is that ARIA does have a relationship with Government, because it will need to have many customers, both private sector and public sector. The programme managers will need to create those bonds with central Government Departments individually.
I think that a commitment from Government to remain independent but to become good customers is very important. The health and transport sectors are good examples of where that might work. What is different is that a surprising number of these next big scientific fields, and these next big breakthroughs, such as artificial intelligence, are going to depend on systemic transformation, where you cannot separate the technology from the policy and regulation.
So yes, ARIA has to be independent, but it also needs to ensure that it works really closely with central Government and with regional and local government. Local government spends about £1 billion on procurement, and cities are key investors in infrastructure, so finding a good link with local government, as well as with central Government, is important. This will hopefully end up creating, as Anne suggested, a way that people feel part of this. Regional strengths deliver benefits to actual localities. Even if it is within the next 10, 15 or 20 years, it is really important that government feels part of that, even though ARIA is independent.
Stephen Flynn
Q
On independence from Government, from looking at your bio, Anne, I can see that you have worked for a few public agencies. If ARIA does not have the public contract regulations and freedom of information in place, will that free it to do what it needs to do? Should we see that as a positive as opposed to a check imbalance, given that we are referring to public money?
Professor Glover: I will deal with that point first—it is an exceptionally interesting point. Initially, when I saw that it might not be subject to FOI, I was thinking, “What are the pros and cons of that?” There is one thing that needs to be fundamental in ARIA, and that is an openness and transparency about what it is funding and why, and how it is doing it. For most things—UKRI would be similar to this—what you provide information on obviously cannot be something that would break the General Data Protection Regulation or that would be commercially sensitive. That should hold exactly true for ARIA as well.
There needs to be some thinking around the whole aspect of openness and transparency, because that brings along with it trust and engagement. If there were any suggestion that Government funding was going into ARIA and it was being syphoned off into particular areas, and we could not find out what those areas were, there would be nervousness. People would, quite rightly, object to that, so there would have to be some greater thought given to how the agency is able to be open and transparent. It might be writing its own rulebook in that area, about what it will provide information on and what it should not.
On whether £800 million is enough, you are asking a scientist and a researcher here, so no, it is never going to be enough, but we have to start somewhere. I cannot make a direct comparison with DARPA’s funding, which is about $3.5 billion or $4 billion per annum, but I might be a bit out of date on that. It does not seem unreasonable to me to start at that level of funding and to start off on the journey to see what is and is not working, where there is greater demand and where you might need more funding to meet it. What you would want to see is that this was such a success that there was substantial demand for funding.
On the other hand, you do not want to get into the situation that standard research funding has—I have certainly visited it many times during its lifetime—where you are putting in 10 research proposals to get one funded. That is an enormous waste of everybody’s time, including the agency that is funding the research. There needs to be a balance between how much money is available and what you hope to do with it.
The last thing I would say is that how that funding is apportioned needs to be carefully thought out, because there needs to be some security of funding. Traditionally in the UK, we have normally had three-year tranches of funding. Long before the end of the three years you have to try to think about how you get continuation of funding. You might hope that ARIA could look at a different model of funding, which might span different timescales depending on what the nature of the project was.
Many projects, particularly ones that are quite disruptive in thinking, will not deliver in a short period—two or three years—of time. Some could do, but some will not, so there needs to be that security of funding over different annual budgets to allow the investment over a period of time.
Tabitha Goldstaub: I will start with the amount of funding. I see the £800 million as just a start. I think that £800 million is sufficient as long as ARIA works in partnership with Government Departments, the private sector and other grant makers. ARIA should not be restricted in matching or exceeding the Government funding with funding from the private sector. There are people in the community that I have spoken to who think that for true intellectual and financial freedom, ARIA should be able to more than double the Government funding. It was good to see in the Bill that the potential for ARIA to take equity stakes in companies and start-ups in a venture fashion could lead to increasing that part over time and making more funding decisions. I see the £800 million as really just a starting point.
On freedom of information, I agree with Anne that openness is key. Transparency fosters trust, and I do not think there is any need to stop freedom of information. We need to keep freedom of information to help with the efforts for connectivity. If the community are going to feel part of ARIA and will it to do good things, they need to be able to use freedom of information. I cannot see any argument against this for the administration costs. Earlier this morning, we heard Ottoline Leyser say that UKRI gets 30 requests a month. If ARIA is 1% of the budget of UKRI, perhaps it could get 1% of the requests, which would be fewer than four a year. I cannot see it, for that reason.
The other reason why there is a desire for secrecy and no FOI is that people traditionally are not comfortable to innovate and fast fail in the open, but that is changing. DeepMind has teams. I have spoken to Sarah Hunter, who is at Google’s moonshot factory, X. She explained how they started in secret and everything felt so appealing, to protect people from any feeling of failure, but what they learned is that there are so many other much better ways than secrecy to incentivise people and to give them the freedom to fail. Actually, allowing for more transparency builds much more trust and encourages more collaboration and, therefore, better breakthroughs.
Anne has spoken about the community. I definitely will speak again about the community, but in addition to the community engagement, ARIA will need to have a press department and media engagement teams that are separate from BEIS, separate from the grid and separate from the Government, to enable it to be agile in its communication and foster a two-way conversation. In order to answer your question, I really think this is the key point: openness and transparency create more trust and more breakthroughs.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Felicity Burch: As I know you are aware, I think having a long-term approach to funding R&D matters hugely. From the perspective of the business community, having institutions that are in it for the long run that they know they can come back to and that they are aware exist is really important for their own confidence to invest.
Thinking about the agency slightly more specifically, when it comes to its own patience, one of the things that CBI members have highlighted to me as a particular benefit of the DARPA model is the commitment to funding their programmes for significant periods of time. For example, there might be 10-year funding with three-year gates to check if the project is working. Those commitments, with that 10-year view—so long as everything is going more or less according to plan—is hugely important for bringing business funding alongside that. So if we can bake a long-term view and patience into ARIA from the start, it will certainly help it to be successful.
Amanda Solloway
Thank you. Sir Jim?
Professor McDonald: It is nice to see you, Minister. There is a requirement here to have a significant cultural change—that is embedded in your question—to move away from the value-for-money concept that is deeply embedded in the UK Research and Innovation funding structure. That is important, but of course we would need to innovate the funding model, which is what is being sought here. Value-for-money assessments for disruptive innovation may not be assessed, as you indicated, until decades later, so we will need a longer-term outlook or alternative approaches to assessing value, such as a means of building capability and capacity in both technology and skills.
Of course, projects that were deemed unsuccessful in achieving their goal may produce value in terms of people, skills and lessons learned, so we must take a long-term view. I think we see that notion of patience, but it is about the ability to have that highly driven, focused approach that the executive officers and the board of ARIA will take and—we may come on to this—the ability to fail fast and elegantly and not be punished for failure as long as the process has been driven openly, transparently and with excellence underneath it.
I would say, absolutely long-term vision and drive forward. If everything worked and everything was successful, we should challenge ourselves and think maybe the questions were not quite as challenging as we thought they might be. Failure is not something we should be discouraging—it is about risk and collaborative approaches to driving problems to a solution—but long-term vision is absolutely essential. That is why, as you have heard from Adrian and Felicity, that patience and that long-term view is key. It should become a very natural part of the UK landscape, so that it is something that we boast about and that acts as an attractor for business and investment, and to attract and retain talent.
Adrian Smith: Let me echo everything that Jim said. The scale of mission that we would hope to see from such an agency means that the timescales will be long and we will need to build new research capability over those timescales, in so far as we are interacting with technologies, and perhaps new supply chains. If those are to come out of the woodwork, they need to believe that we are in it for the long term and that there is patience on the part of the funders and others. The timescales are really important, not just in terms of if it is a hard problem, it will take a long term to solve; if it is a hard problem, we will need to build all sorts of new capabilities and capacities. To have the courage to invest in those, we need to know we are in it for the long term.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Adrian Smith: Is that a question for me? It is probably a better question for Felicity. Going back to the earlier comments, a fundamental is to trust long-term commitment from the Government that we are really in this, and we have a plan with clear funding milestones and we will stick to that plan. That is what will give the international community the message that we are in it to be really serious. That serves two purposes: for the narrative of the UK, and as an attractor for brilliant people, whether they are in research or industry around the world, to come and join in this long-term challenge.
Professor McDonald: How do we attract them? The scale of the ambition will be a major attractor to someone, with that executive excitement and experience that they will bring. Large-scale ambition and, as we said earlier, a commitment to the long term to making this work for the UK, in that it is a long-term integrated approach. I suggest that the CEO would have to have experience beyond academia; preferably, as you have suggested, Minister, including industrial experience—that ability to take the journey from concept through to proof of concept, demonstration at scale and deployment. Ultimately, commercial exploitation is key.
I can assure you that the engineering community will be well engaged with this as we help to bring forward individuals of the right stature. Industry expertise and understanding should be a prerequisite for ARIA personnel. An interesting example, which many of our colleagues in the Committee will be familiar with, is the vaccine taskforce: bringing together industrial expertise—traditionally competitive companies large and small within their supply chain—with Government officials and the National Institute for Health Research. That was a fantastic microcosm of large-scale, high-risk and ultimately high-reward outcomes. In many ways, that gives us a precursor for some of the approaches and cultural changes that would be needed to take that forward. For the chief executive or chair of the board, it would be great to have industry-relevant background, a commitment to innovation and excitement about the scale and potential impact of the work that they are taking on.
Felicity Burch: I listened to a number of the earlier sessions, and I was delighted to hear about the focus from so many stakeholders on the need to build a diverse team within ARIA, but also thinking about the diversity of the community that we engage in it. One of my reflections is that we are trying to build something that looks a bit like US DARPA, but we are 60-plus years on now, and the international, national and social picture is completely different. We have an opportunity to build something that really excites, for the next generation of researchers and business people.
If you look at businesses that are trying to achieve those same goals and the practices they put in place to try to recruit brilliant people, you will see that, first and foremost, purpose really matters. Clearly defining the mission of what ARIA is trying to achieve when we get the team in place, making sure that it is something that excites people, having a clear market, and also solving national and international social problems will help encourage really bright, brilliant people to get involved.
Secondly, it starts with the senior team. We are building this team from scratch, and we need to make sure when the team is being recruited that it is diverse in the broadest sense possible—that we see women, ethnic minorities, and those with disabilities represented on the senior team for ARIA to really send a signal that the way we want to innovate in the UK is diverse and that we want to make the most of all our talents around the country.
Aaron Bell
Q
Felicity Burch: One of the really exciting opportunities from ARIA is the potential for joint ventures and engagement. Essentially, my answer here is pretty short. Go ahead and do it, but make sure you engage with business communities a bit further down the line in exactly the design of how those funding mechanisms might work. Different businesses at different stages of their journey will be interested in different funding mechanisms.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Bob Sorrell: That is a great question. If you compare and contrast us with the Americans, there is a definite culture in the UK that failure is something that you hide under the carpet, put away and forget, but science is all about failure and pushing the boundaries. If you are not failing, you are really not challenging those boundaries. I think it is about establishing a culture in which we can accept failure and move on.
The problem comes, in both industrial and academic environments, in facing that day, because there is a tendency to keep things creeping along because you have invested so much effort to get them to this particular point. You do not want to kill it, because then you have to stop the project, and people feel emotionally involved in it. That creates a whole series of issues associated with it. It is about making the hard decisions and learning from failures. We describe them as failures, but actually they are some of the most valuable learning experiences that we gain, and they stop us reinvesting in making the same mistakes in the same areas if we are really careful about what we extract from them, and do not just try to shut them off in a box, in a rather embarrassed way, and say, “That’s something that we will leave to one side.”
Amanda Solloway
Q
David Cleevely: As well you know, I am very keen on establishing networks of individuals and making sure there is lots of exchange. Part of the essence of putting an agency like this together is to ensure that you get a lot of cross-fertilisation. There should be a great deal of exchange going with that, and you would, of course, have to have in place the conflict of interest and various other peer-review processes.
It is very important that an agency like this would work closely with the private sector. My first encounter with DARPA goes back to 1977. At that point, I was working for Post Office Telecommunications, which shows how long ago it was. We were discussing the idea of funding this funny thing where you cut information up into packets. A lot of the collaboration that was done on all of that involved a great deal of what was then a monopoly, though a commercial entity, helping to fund those things. That kind of stuff is extremely important and needs to be built into the processes by which this agency operates.
Can I just pick up on the notion of failure? There are two kinds of failure. There is the kind of failure that we have seen with SpaceX, where you send a rocket up and you land it and it crashes or burns up after about 12 minutes because it is leaking fuel. That is one kind of failure. Quite honestly, the private sector got involved in replacing NASA because NASA became too cautious about dealing with that kind of thing.
There is another kind of failure where you have picked the wrong technology—the wrong way of approaching a problem. I think we are talking about the second kind, and about recognising how to stop that. That is a peer-review process; that is a way of making sure you do things. What we need to avoid is reacting to failure where the rocket is crashing on touchdown. That is not really failure; that is simply experimentation.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Bob Sorrell: I would say three quick things. First, ensure that there is a real partnership between industry, Government and academia, in actually shaping the agenda for ARIA. I would have flexibility; we heard that earlier, I think, from a colleague from the CBI talking about models in which we could second people into the ARIA organisation. I think there is an opportunity to do that, and we have had experience of doing that previously.
The other thing is that ARIA provides some really important learnings, and it should be able to integrate those back into UKRI, and vice versa. UKRI has some valuable learnings that it can impart to ARIA. This is an evolutionary process through which both parties will definitely benefit, and it should be framed in that light.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (First sitting)
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 5 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
Q
Tris Dyson: We put together a document in the summer, which we can share with you, that has examples both from Nesta Challenges and particularly from the United States of outcome-based challenge prize funding. That is obviously mainly the space that we occupy. There were some great examples of where it stimulates and creates whole new industries and sectors. There were also some examples of where there can be quite big mistakes, because you go off down the wrong course.
I know there has been quite a lot of inspiration from DARPA and from the US. One example would be the driverless car in the early 2000s. DARPA ran a series of challenge prizes in the desert around the development of driverless cars. It was literally an annual race where teams from universities would compete to develop vehicles that would outperform one another, and there was prize funding associated at the end of it. That is more or less where driverless cars began. The teams that came out of those universities and the individuals have now been picked up by Google, Uber, Apple and everybody else. It is why a lot of that frontier technology is now being developed on the west coast and the rest of the world is playing catch-up.
Another example would be the Ansari X prize, which was about building a privately funded spaceship that would carry two passengers. It had a very specific target about how high a sub-orbit it needed to reach within a two-week period. That created an enormous race for people to build privately funded spaceships, again in the early 2000s. You can see now what has happened in the private space flight industry in the US. The team that won that is now Virgin Galactic and we see every day in our newspapers what has happened to them.
We are a bit newer to this in the UK, but we also have some examples. We concluded a challenge prize just before Christmas that was looking at lower-limb paralysis. It was essentially saying that there have been dramatic improvements in the fields of artificial intelligence, robotics and sensory technology but why has the wheelchair not changed very much in the last 100 years, except for electrification? That was a global challenge in partnership with Toyota that resulted in some amazing breakthrough systems and products for people with lower-limb paralysis all around the world. A Scottish team called Phoenix Instinct won. They developed a wheelchair that moves with the user, anticipates movement using AI and sensory technology, and has a very lightweight alloy frame that is quite revolutionary from the perspective of a wheelchair user. Those are some examples.
Whether you do a challenge prize or not, I think you would need to do the same thing with ARIA, which has got to focus on areas where there is the most opportunity and where you have a decent hypothesis that technology pathways can be developed in order to solve that problem and encourage activity around that singular thing. That is the whole premise of missions or challenge prizes.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Professor Leyser: Absolutely. I think that the kinds of examples that Tris has just talked about are quite illustrative from that point of view. Typically, the way the current system works is that we would put out a call for applications in a variety of contexts. It might be a completely open call; right across UKRI we run these so-called response-paid funding competitions where people with ideas about what they want to do can apply for funding to do them, whatever they might be. On the whole, those kinds of applications are the sort of bread and butter of really established research organisations: universities, institutes and, through Innovate UK, businesses. A lot of them are also collaborative with industry. It is that kind of grant application process that then goes through peer review, and we try to pick the projects that, as an overall portfolio, will best deliver what the UK needs, both in the short term and, absolutely, in the longer term, building that capacity and capability.
It tends to be established organisations that know the system and how to apply for those kinds of projects, and which have the structures available in their organisations to do that. With ARIA, however, I think there is the opportunity to test a much wider range of models, such as those kinds of competition-type prize approaches that Tris described—he is an expert in those. There is also a fairly well-established system called Kaggle for coding competitions, for example. That potentially reaches a much wider range of people. You do not have to apply; you do not have to have a system that can support that kind of application process. The funding flow is very different: it is a response to the results; it is the winner of the competition. As a result, it may be possible to reach a much wider range of people. In that coding space, for example, there are really extraordinary people working in their homes as freelance coders who would find it very difficult to access the classical UKRI and most of the funders that there are currently.
I very much hope that we would be able to tap into some of the talent right across the UK that is not in the more established places. That would be one really exciting outcome from this with that prize model. Where you have a really clear objective—so it is really clear who has won the money, so to speak—it is possible to do that in a way that does not automatically engage the kind of financial management systems that we have to use. For example, are we sure that this money is being spent on what the applicant said it would be spent on? If you are giving somebody the money for having done the research or having delivered the outcome—the car that goes across the desert—you are in a very different situation.
I do think there is a very interesting possibility for ARIA to reach those people who are talented and can contribute in ways that it is much harder to with the standard systems. I hope that we would learn from that and be able to import some of that expertise into the standard system when it was established and really clear that it was providing good value for money in a robust way.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
Q
Tris Dyson: Well, more money is better. I think this money needs to be deployed intelligently, so being quite clear on the missions and the focuses is really important. It is even more important with a still significant amount of money but relatively smaller sums. Getting those areas right is really important. The examples that were just given about Kaggle and databased approaches are potentially a useful avenue for some of this, because the R&D investments and sunk costs are relatively low as opposed to building spaceships or something like that. That would be the sort of calculation you might need to make.
You can also use leverage. One of the areas that the UK has been pioneering is around regulatory sandboxes, for example, through the regulators’ pioneer fund, which is administered through UKRI. But some regulators, off their own backs, have also been setting up and developing sandboxes that allow innovators to play with datasets in an environment where the regulator is giving them a little bit more permission than they might have had otherwise. That in itself is an incentive, particularly when you are playing around with datasets.
You can think of examples where we have got significant strengths. One of the things we have talked about a lot during the pandemic—more recently, at least—is the UK’s strengths in genomics research. That means we have got an enormous range of data that could be made available to people through the likes of Genomics England, which in itself is an inducement or an encouragement above and beyond the financial. So being clever—boxing clever—with the money is important.
In terms of ruthlessness, part of this comes to the culture. The ARIA team will have to establish a culture where they trial things out, set targets and objectives and have constant reviews where they get together and decide whether to kill things off. That is clearer when you have defined missions or objectives that you are working towards. It is much harder when you are fostering lots and lots of different things—it is hard to compare X with Y.
Professor Leyser: From my point of view, the question I would ask is not so much how much money should ARIA have but what proportion of the public sector R&D spend should go into this way-out-there, high-risk, transformative research-type project and, of that, how much should be in ARIA. It is a proportionality question and, as Tris said at the beginning, at a time when there is an aim to drive up UK investment in R&D to 2.4%—hopefully beyond that, because 2.4% is the OECD average and I think we should aim to be considerably better than average—that is quite a stretch target for us. We do incredibly well—the quality and amount of research and innovation in this country is extraordinary—given that we currently invest only 1.7% of our GDP. So I think the opportunities to build that really high-quality inclusive knowledge economy, given how well we perform in the R&D sector with such a small proportion of R&D, are incredibly high.
On that rising trajectory, with us aiming for that 2.4% and beyond, I think spending a small proportion of that on this edge-of-the-edge research capacity and capability is the right thing to do. I would look at the budget in that context as a percentage of the overall R&D spend. People have been comparing the current ARIA budget with the budget of organisations such as DARPA, but if you look at it as a percentage, you get a very different number because, obviously, the US spends a much higher proportion of their—anyway—bigger budget on R&D than we do. That is the important question from that point of view.
How will we know that it has succeeded, and what would one expect the percentage failure to be? I agree with Tris that it is incredible difficult to predict. There is also serendipity and other things to factor in. If you set yourself a fantastic target of solving a particular problem or producing a particular new product and you fail to do that, none the less, along the way you might discover something extraordinary that you can apply in another field.
That high-risk appetite feeds into the question, again, of how much money or what proportion of the overall R&D portfolio should be invested in that way. One has to think about risk in R&D in that portfolio way. It is considered generally in investment markets that really high-performing investment portfolios are a portfolio. You invest in stuff that you know will deliver in an incremental sort of way, and then you invest in the really high-risk crash or multiply parts of the system. That is very much how one has to think about ARIA.
In that domain, where you have a very high probability of failure—that is what high risk means—but also an extraordinary probability of amazing levels of transformative success, it is a dice roll. The total number of projects will be relatively small, so it is very hard to predict an absolute number or proportion that one would expect, and one should not need to—that is what high risk, high reward means.
Amanda Solloway
Q
Professor Bond: I would probably have a board and another structure. Certainly one of the super-important things that works in the US ARPA is that the programme managers are challenged in a sort of dragons’ den. It is a friendly dragons’ den, but they have to convince very capable, technical people that they can do what they do. That is one structure that would need to be slotted into place.
As for the board, I think you could have a slightly unusual board. I do not think it needs to be big; it could be very small. It could be less than 10 people, for sure, but you could also expand it a little bit with something that is a bit like a non-executive director, or NED—somebody from a different area with a rather different take on things. The balance will be important. You want a balance of people; I think you want some very radical thinkers in there, some people who know how things work in industry and some people who know how things work in academia, and so on.
As for the autonomy, I am personally a big believer in giving the chair and the director enormous amounts of autonomy. You pick people you are willing to bet on and then hand them a lot of trust. In fact, if you want to define the ARPA model at some level, it is this: it is a different model of trust. Bureaucracies occur because although we like to trust people, we have to throw up lots of rules and regulations to make sure that things work the way we feel they should work. What you are doing in creating this kind of model is handing trust to people. You want people with high integrity who are brilliant, and then you let them get on with it, and you trust that they will do something that reflects their character.
I do not think the board needs to be big; I think it needs to be very good. There should be a small number of outstandingly good people, who can tap into a broader network and bring in people to give a different vision and view from that which you will only ever get with a small number of people.
The Chair
Before I go to Stephen Flynn, can I just have an indication of who wants to ask questions? I have got Sarah, Daniel, Aaron, Jane—okay. Thanks very much indeed.
Professor Mazzucato: Can I make one super-quick point on what Philip just mentioned?
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill
Amanda Solloway ExcerptsTuesday 23rd March 2021
(3 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 View all Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
I, too, want to go, “Yay!”, because this has been an absolute pleasure. As the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) said, we have seen the House at its best, and it is a great pleasure to take part in the debate. I listened to the fantastic contributions, and I thank all hon. Members for their thought-provoking input. Without exception, the debate indicates how essential and central science is to our economy and society. That has been recognised across the House, so I shall expand on how ARIA will build on the strengths of our R&D system.
The proposal to create the Advanced Research and Invention Agency—ARIA—has been welcomed by leading scientists, institutions, businesses and colleagues today. We have listened to agencies around the world, and consulted the research community at home. The hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) asked about that. We have, of course, considered carefully the recommendations of the Science and Technology Committee, brilliantly chaired by my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). I am confident that this is a bold, brave and positive step towards our ambition to cement the UK’s position as a science superpower. One of the things that we must be clear about is the way in which ARIA fits into the wider landscape and what it will achieve. My right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central asked how we would define ARIA’s purpose, so let me set that out.
ARIA will fund high-risk, high-reward research in a different way from UKRI and the rest of the system. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) highlighted in his excellent contribution, ARIA will give us something genuinely different, drawing on the UK’s existing R&D strengths. In that way, it will reach fantastic people with brilliant ideas who are not currently funded.
There have been several questions about funding, but I think that the Secretary of State made the position clear. The right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells, my hon. Friend the Member for Havant (Alan Mak), and the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan) raised ARIA’s mission and what it should focus on. That is an important issue, and I have listened to the different views with great interest. Climate change has been suggested. The Government continue to invest in net zero, including through the £1 billion net-zero innovation portfolio fund announced as part of the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan. I should make it clear that ARIA’s programme will be motivated by a single clear ambition set by the programme manager. However, those decisions will be made by ARIA, and ARIA’s leaders will be responsible for strategic oversight of their programme portfolio. They will be able to speak to researchers, other funders and Government Departments to help to inform their judgment. There are UK funding programmes for which Ministers set the strategic direction, and ARIA has been set up specifically without those constraints.
The hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) and my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) asked about the need for ARIA to have a specific customer. ARIA’s groundbreaking work will absolutely draw partners for its projects and programmes, but we want to leave the door open for it to be able to forge those relationships across a range of sectors.
The hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), the hon. Member for Richmond Park and my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby asked about recruitment and ARIA’s culture. I recognise how crucial that that will be for ARIA, which is why we will recruit a CEO to provide the creative, inspiring leadership that the organisation needs—someone uniquely able to build a team of high-performing people. That will not be on a whim. We will conduct a genuinely open and fair recruitment process for a CEO and chair.
The hon. Members for Aberdeen South and for Glasgow North West asked about the oversight that Government will have. The hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) queried the way in which we will hold ARIA to account. They are absolutely right that ARIA will be at a greater distance from central Government than we are used to. That is a deliberate move based on international experience. The evidence suggests that freedom and autonomy is what makes this kind of agency work. I am mindful of the effective governance of ARIA, which is incredibly important, but it must be tailored to ARIA’s objectives if we are to get the balance right—and it is about balance. There are powers in the Bill for the Secretary of State to intervene on issues of national security and to introduce additional procedures to measure conflicts of interest. They sit alongside powers to make non-executive appointments to the board, which will of course include the Government chief scientific adviser in an ex officio role. The arrangements are robust.
The right hon. Member for Doncaster North and the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray)—whose final speech was commendable; I wish him the very best—raised the Freedom of Information Act. ARIA will have a very small number of staff, and because of the load that FOI requests would place on the organisation we do not think they are the right way to provide scrutiny. I remind Members that the Departments and public authorities that work with ARIA will of course be subject to FOI requests. There will be other statutory commitments to transparency. The Bill makes it clear that ARIA will be required to produce an annual report on what it does, which will be laid before Parliament alongside its accounts.
The hon. Members for Aberdeen South and for Airdrie and Shotts also spoke about procurement. The Bill exempts ARIA from the obligations on a contracting authority in the public contract regulations, but procurement decisions will be taken by ARIA, not by Ministers. It is because it is one step removed from Government that the exemption will empower ARIA’s talented programme managers and directors. Again, the freedom to act quickly will be balanced by the requirement for ARIA to audit its procurement activities, as set out with the Department in the framework document.
The hon. Members for Cambridge and for Airdrie and Shotts, my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton North East (Mark Logan) and for Bolton West (Chris Green), and many other Members made representations on ARIA’s location. I recognise that they care passionately about the scientific excellence found in all parts of Bolton, Cambridge, Airdrie and, of course, right across the UK, but ARIA will be run by a small number of people and will have a small physical presence, and the potential candidates to be its CEO and chair will have a strong interest in the location of the headquarters. I cannot commit to a specific location at this stage, but if ARIA is to deliver UK-wide economic benefits, it should, like UKRI, function and deliver on a UK-wide basis. Stakeholders in the devolved nations—such as Universities Scotland—have been clear in their support for that approach.
Let me finish by thanking Members from all parties for their rich and considered contributions. My door is always open and I invite any Members who wish to discuss the Bill with me further to do so. We must remember that the United Kingdom is a hotbed of brilliant invention and innovation. The Secretary of State spoke about our proud history of scientific excellence, which I am confident the creation of ARIA will help to safeguard far into the future.
In the previous century, the US ARPA funded the ambitious research that underpins the internet and GPS—technologies that have transformed our lives, opened countless avenues of inquiry and created extraordinary value. Such successes do not happen overnight or by accident; they all start with a wild ambition that is nurtured into reality against all the odds. It is this ambition that will course through the veins of ARIA’s staff and the talented researchers they fund. As Science Minister I have listened to many inspiring scientists and inventors, and it is now my ambition to give their brilliant ideas the best possible chance to profoundly change lives and the lives of our grandchildren—and of my granddaughter—for the very better. I wait with excited anticipation for the remaining stages of the Bill.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Programme)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7)),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill:
Committal
(1) Public Bill Committee shall be committed to a Public Bill Committee.
Proceedings in Public Bill Committee
(2) Proceedings in the Public Bill Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion on Tuesday 27 April 2021.
(3) The Public Bill Committee shall have leave to sit twice on the first day on which it meets.
Proceedings on Consideration and Third Reading
(4) Proceedings on Consideration shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which proceedings on Consideration are commenced.
(5) Proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on that day.
(6) Third Reading No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings on Consideration and Third Reading.
Other proceedings
(7) Any other proceedings on the Bill may be programmed.—(David Rutley.)
Question agreed to.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Money)
Queen’s recommendation signified.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of any expenditure incurred under or by virtue of the Act by the Secretary of State.—(David Rutley.)
Question agreed to.
Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Carry-over)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 80A(1)(a)),
That if, at the conclusion of this Session of Parliament, proceedings on the Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill have not been completed, they shall be resumed in the next Session.—(David Rutley.)
Question agreed to.
Oral Answers to Questions
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has extended our support measures in the most recent Budget to provide an additional £65 billion. With the new restart grant scheme, the Government will have allocated a total of £25 billion in business grants. Our restart grants will provide up to £6,000 for non-essential retail businesses and up to £18,000 for hospitality, personal care and gyms. This year and next year, we are spending £407 billion to support people and businesses throughout the pandemic.
Chris Stephens [V]
We know that when big business is set to fail former Prime Minister David Cameron uses his hotline to the Chancellor. With 3 million still excluded and the £20 universal credit uplift, furlough and self-employed support ending in September, can the Minister tell us whether any former Tory leaders have contacted the Department on their behalf, or is it sink or swim for the ordinary folk?
Amanda Solloway
As I have indicated before, this Government have done unprecedented work and one of the things we do all the time is speak to stakeholders and all the people we need to. Think about the money we have invested: £407 billion to support people and businesses throughout the pandemic.
Darren Jones (Bristol North West) (Lab) [V]
Many bricks-and-mortar retailers are still desperately concerned about the build-up of commercial rents during the lockdown, including many pubs that are prevented from negotiating a rent review due to restrictions in regulation 7 of the pubs code. The recent extension of the ban on commercial evictions is welcome, but when will Ministers come forward with a long-term solution to commercial rents?
Amanda Solloway
I thank the hon. Member for the question. One of the things we are doing is working with the stakeholders. We have done a review of the pub code and we will be reporting on that situation soon, but we have extended the moratorium and we will be looking into this as well.
Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP) [V]
I am afraid the previous answer simply was not good enough, because we cannot have a situation where some businesses do not have the support that they need while another set of businesses have had absolute certainty since the start of the pandemic—those, of course, being the ones with links to the Tory party; as we now know, they have had Ministers on speed-dial since day one and even a former Prime Minister tried to get in on the act. So does the Minister believe her Government have a culture of covid cronyism at their very heart, and will she now back an independent investigation into apparent lobbying by David Cameron?
Amanda Solloway
Throughout the covid-19 pandemic, the Government have supported people and businesses across the United Kingdom. The Budget extends the UK coronavirus job retention scheme and the self-employment income support scheme and extends the VAT cut to support tourism, leisure and all the sectors. People and businesses all over the United Kingdom will benefit and have benefited from the Government’s actions.
Mrs Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
Craig Tracey (North Warwickshire) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
The Government have taken significant steps to support women in businesses. We have launched the Government-backed Women’s Business Council and published the women in finance charter. The recent Rose review and report also shows that good progress is being made to overcome barriers for women entrepreneurs.
Mrs Latham
The majority of people employed in the wedding industry are women. The road map out of lockdown offers very little hope for the wedding industry or the supply chain as couples would rather wait than have only six, 15 or 30 guests. What assurances can my hon. Friend provide that women in the wedding industry will receive the support their businesses need to survive until June 2021, or even beyond?
Amanda Solloway
I thank my hon. Friend for her great support; I know how much she supports women entrepreneurs, especially with Derbys Finest. Since March 2020, the Government have provided an unprecedented package of financial support to businesses, including those in the wedding sector. That package of support is kept under regular review. My colleague the Minister for Small Business regularly meets the industry-led weddings taskforce to understand the impact of covid-19 on businesses in this sector.
Craig Tracey [V]
Research clearly shows that gender-diverse boards perform better on every single measure, so it stands to reason that diversity across the workforce can only be a benefit. Will the Minister confirm what steps the Government are taking to encourage more women into business, particularly in areas such as engineering and science, in which they are traditionally under-represented?
Amanda Solloway
My hon. Friend makes a really important point, and I thank him for his tireless work to champion women, especially in his role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on women and enterprise. I sincerely thank him for that. FTSE companies have indeed made great progress, and we have seen a more than 60% increase in the number of women on boards in the past six years. The Government recognise that the science, technology, engineering and maths workforce is vital to increasing the UK’s productivity and economic growth, and I am really pleased that Government-funded programmes such as the STEM ambassador programme and the CREST awards are successfully encouraging young women into STEM roles.
John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
Afzal Khan (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
We have been very clear that employers threatening to fire and rehire as a negotiating tactic is completely unacceptable. As we have been concerned by such reports, we engaged ACAS to conduct a fact-finding exercise as to how fire and rehire has been used. It spoke to a wide range of stakeholders, including businesses and employee representatives. We are now considering these findings.
Kate Osborne
The Government have been sitting on the ACAS fire and rehire report now for over a month, raising fears that they are trying to bury it because they do not agree with the recommendations. Will the Minister tell me when we will get a chance to see what ACAS has to say, and, in the meantime, will she tell us whether ACAS agrees that the shameful practice of fire and rehire is quite simply unacceptable?
Amanda Solloway
As I previously stated, we find that fire and rehire is just not acceptable. In fact, the Department engaged ACAS to hold discussions in order to generate the evidence that we need. We therefore need to make sure that we consider all this. There is, of course, a degree of confidentiality that we need to bear in mind as well. ACAS officials shared their findings with BEIS officials in February, as the hon. Lady rightly said. We are giving this full consideration and will communicate our next steps in due course.
Afzal Khan [V]
Fire and rehire is utterly immoral. Members across the House have received many emails from desperate constituents who are being subjected to the disgraceful tactic. From British Airways and British Gas to Go North West, workers across the country have been treated with contempt. One of my constituents who was served with a section 188 notice said to me, “We want changes to be made with us, not to us.” Seeing as this Government promised to protect and enhance workers’ rights when we left the EU, will the Minister confirm how many employers in receipt of coronavirus job retention scheme payments have adopted fire and rehire tactics, and will she now commit to outlawing this practice once and for all?
Amanda Solloway
Just to reiterate, we have been holding clear consultations with a group of stakeholders and ACAS has been conducting this for us. We will be republishing the report in due course.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
At the Budget, my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced an extra £425 million in additional restrictions grant funding to local authorities, which means that more than £2 billion has been made available to local authorities since November 2020. This discretionary funding enables local authorities to support businesses, including businesses in supply chains that are impacted by restrictions but ineligible for other measures.
Mr Dhesi
Given that the UK has suffered the worst recession of any major economy, businesses in Slough and throughout our country find themselves in a precarious position. To help them, the Government should have brought forward a plan that includes debt restructuring and a job guarantee for the young. Despite repeated requests, an estimated 3 million people—including taxi drivers, plumbers, other self-employed people and sole traders—find themselves with absolutely no support at all from the Government. What does the Minister say to people who have worked hard their entire lives, paid their taxes and now find themselves and their businesses up against the wall and collapsing, through no fault of their own?
Amanda Solloway
Indeed, we do find ourselves in unprecedented times, but the Government have been so committed in all the things we have done. We have committed to providing additional support for small and medium-sized enterprises as restrictions are lifted, and businesses will continue to benefit from Government-guaranteed finance throughout 2021. On young people, the apprenticeship scheme we are offering is second to none.
Alex Davies-Jones (Pontypridd) (Lab)
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy regularly speaks to Her Majesty’s Treasury on a range of issues. I am pleased that we are taking part in the Horizon Europe programme; it will bring a huge benefit to the United Kingdom. We will set out our plans for 2021-22, including Horizon Europe funding, in due course.
Carol Monaghan [V]
Last week, the Government’s integrated review confirmed that there would be a multi-year settlement for UK Research and Innovation. Can the Minister confirm that funding for associating to Horizon Europe will be covered separately from this settlement? If not, can she explain how funding for Horizon Europe and this multi-year uplifted settlement will be supported?
Amanda Solloway
As I have previously mentioned, the discussions around this are ongoing and the funding will be announced in due course. I would like to point out to the hon. Lady that we have an ambition to be a science superpower and, in fact, we have committed £22 billion by 2024-25.
Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab) [V]
Everyone who has had a coronavirus vaccine knows of the deep sense of gratitude to scientists. In facing the challenge of climate change, future pandemics and technological change, we look to science. At the general election, the Prime Minister promised to double science spend. Instead, we appear to have a £1 billion cut to the science budget plus a £120 million cut to our overseas development science as part of a “new settlement” that protects
“the most effective research programmes.”
Can the Minister say which programmes will be cut, which scientists will lose their grants, and which institutions will close? The Government who clap the NHS but impose a real-terms pay cut now plan to praise science and cut scientists.
Amanda Solloway
BEIS regularly has talks with Her Majesty’s Treasury on these issues. Let me reiterate that we plan to be a science superpower by 2024-25, with a £22 billion investment. We also have a Second Reading debate today on a high-risk, high-reward agency. Furthermore, in terms of the spending review, more than £40 billion across Government was spent on science.
Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)
Research and Development Funding
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 6 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) on securing the debate and raising important issues for the future of research development funding. I thank all hon. Members for the quality of their contributions. There have been many enthusiastic observations, indicating the passion felt by many Members. I fully echo that sentiment, and I am pleased to have the opportunity to reiterate that R&D is absolutely central to the Government’s ambitions of unleashing innovation and continuing to cement the UK as a science superpower.
The hon. Member for Cambridge spoke of the importance of research and development, highlighting the benefit that it brings, as well as the issue of Horizon Europe. I am delighted that the United Kingdom has an agreement to take part in the Horizon Europe programme. He also rightly pointed out that R&D is about relationships as well as investments, which is why the association to Horizon has been welcomed by businesses and the research community and will bring huge benefits to the United Kingdom. The decision to associate to Horizon Europe came after the spending review, so we continue to work through where its costs will fall. We will set out our plans for R&D spend in 2021-22, including funding for Horizon Europe, in due course. I reiterate the comments made by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy earlier today that we continue to robustly defend the research budget. We are working hard to confirm R&D budgets as soon as possible.
A number of hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Cambridge, for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) and for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan), raised official development assistance. I recognise the depth of feeling across the research sector regarding ongoing funding for international development research. The impact of the pandemic on the UK economy forced the Government take some difficult decisions, including temporarily reducing the overall amount spent on aid. This has inevitably meant less funding for BEIS R&D development programmes, as it has for all areas of ODA spending. My officials are working with our delivery partners to best manage the impact of those reductions and to protect the strongest research programmes. I should add that both the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary have reiterated the Government’s commitment to international development and our intention to return to the 0.7% GNI target when the fiscal situation allows.
The hon. Member for Cambridge mentioned our commitment to the R&D road map and to developing an R&D people and culture strategy that will set out the direction and actions that Government, funders, employers and individuals can take to ensure that the R&D sector has the people it needs, working in a culture that gets the best out of everyone. I am committed to ensuring that the UK attracts, develops and retains talented individuals and strong teams to support our science superpower ambitions.
The hon. Members for Arfon (Hywel Williams) and for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Steve McCabe) raised the important question of levelling up. The Government are due to publish the UK R&D places strategy in the summer. We will ensure that R&D and innovation benefits the economy and society in nations, regions and local areas across the United Kingdom, contributing to the Government’s wider levelling-up ambitions. This is about not only how much money we spend in each place, but outcomes, so our focus must be on the impact that our R&D system can have in different places across the country.
R&D is incredibly important in so many ways. It advances the boundaries of human knowledge and discovery and is a key driver of economic growth and productivity. It also enables society to solve the challenges of the future in areas of fundamental importance, such as health and climate change. As several hon. Members have noted, the UK gets significant value from its investment in R&D. Each £1 of public investment in R&D ultimately leverages around £2 of additional private sector investment and creates, on average, around £7 of net present social value.
Hon. Members will know that we published our R&D road map last July. It sets out our vision and ambition to ensure that the UK is the very best place in the world for scientists, researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs to live and work. Although we recognise the challenging economic and fiscal climate, the Government committed through the spending review in November to invest £14.6 billion in R&D in 2021-22, with BEIS, as the custodian of the R&D system, being allocated £11 billion for R&D in 2021-22. That commitment re-emphasises the importance of science, research and innovation towards our future prosperity, as well as our ambition to move towards the UK investing 2.4% of GDP in research and development by 2027.
The UK has a world-leading research base and global expertise across a wide range of disciplines. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK accounts for 14% of the world’s most highly cited academic publications. Our strong core research system is integral to that success, as recognised by the Chancellor in the spending review. He confirmed an ambitious multi-year settlement for UK Research and Innovation and the national academies core research budget. By 2023-24, the Government will be investing £1.4 billion more per annum in core funding for our world-leading research base compared with 2020-21.
My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) spoke about funding for life sciences, and I am grateful to the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) for his passionate and constructive contribution. My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas) also spoke passionately about the importance of funding for devastating conditions such as brain tumours and cancers, and I recognise the importance of such research. That is why we are committed to supporting the health and life sciences sector, where we are fortunate to boast a vibrant ecosystem that brings together researchers in some of the world’s top universities to work collaboratively with their counterparts in leading pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers in the NHS and others. This has never been more important than in the response to covid-19, and we recognise that years of blue-sky research, enabled by the strength of the UK’s core research system, was vital to our success in developing effective vaccines so quickly. The Government continue to support that response, with commitments including £128 million to support vaccine research and manufacturing.
The rapid response to covid-19 has also led to a cultural shift around funding and decision making, with a desire to move towards a leaner and more agile system. The new Advanced Research and Invention Agency will be an independent research body that funds high-risk, high-reward scientific research, and it will complement the work of UK Research and Innovation and other research funders. ARIA will be led by a prominent world-leading scientist, who will be given the freedom to identify and fund transformational science and technology at speed. It is based on successful models that are built on giving researchers significant autonomy and freedom from bureaucracy.
Looking forward, we want to go further and build on our truly excellent UK R&D achievements, which is why we are committed to increasing UK investment in R&D to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) spoke about this, and about the importance of public and private investment in reaching that target. Public investment in R&D is increasing, but we must also leverage further private sector investment. UK businesses provided almost £26 billion of R&D in 2019—an increase of 3.3% compared with 2018—as part of a long-term trend of positive annual growth.
Earlier this month we published “Building Back Better: our plan for growth”, in which we announced plans to publish a new innovation strategy in the summer to inspire, facilitate and unleash innovation, supporting and harnessing the tremendous capability of UK innovators to boost future prosperity, both locally and nationwide. The Budget also announced £375 million to introduce Future Fund: Breakthrough, a new and direct co-investment product to support the scaling up of R&D-intensive businesses, and Her Majesty’s Treasury has announced that it will review R&D tax relief to ensure it remains up to date, competitive and well targeted.
In conclusion, research and development are integral to our objective of unleashing innovation. R&D will help us drive the Government’s long-term plan to build on the UK’s world-class credentials in research and development, and deliver economic growth and societal benefits across the UK for decades to come.
Recon“United Kingdom Research and Innovation: PhD Funding”
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
I am tabling this statement for the benefit of hon. and right hon. Members, to bring to their attention the support that the Government are providing to United Kingdom research and innovation (UKRI) funded doctoral students to address the challenges related to covid-19 restrictions. This is an update to the statement laid on the 22nd February, which contained an administrative error.
When lockdown began last year, UKRI communicated immediately that PhD studentships should not be suspended, ensuring students could continue to receive their stipends. In April 2020, £44 million of urgent funding was announced for up to 6-month extensions for PhD students in their final year who could not complete their studies as originally planned due to covid-19 restrictions. This was taken up by 77% of eligible students.
In November 2020, a further £19.1 million was allocated to research organisations hosting UKRI funded students. This enabled those organisations to target additional support to those UKRI funded students who needed it most including those whose study had been impacted by caring responsibilities or health reasons, and those in their final year.
These two phases of funding amount to over £60 million of funding and will provide support to approximately 10,000 students.
Since the introduction of the current restrictions in January, the Government have continued to monitor the impact on the research sector. I asked UKRI to explore what else could be done to help and I can now confirm that we will be providing additional support to UKRI funded PhD students.
The £7 million unused from the April allocation for course extensions will now be made available to allocate extensions, based on need, to those students still to complete their studies. Additionally, UKRI is exploring options to increase flexibility for grant holding organisations to allocate existing funding for training and cohort development activity to fund extensions.
Research England will also be delivering around £11million of block grant funding to English universities as a contribution to their support for their postgraduate research communities, including to students funded by universities themselves and to self-financed students.
By the end of this phase of support funding, UKRI will have provided additional support, including extensions, to around half of all their funded students who were studying at the start of the first lockdown extension. This support has been targeted at those most in need and with equality, diversity and inclusion considered throughout.
Ensuring that the research sector in the UK has the people and skills it needs is crucial to realising Government ambition to cement our status as a science superpower. We will continue to monitor this situation closely, to ensure that we are able to consider additional support if necessary.
[HCWS786]
Departmental Contingent Liability Notification (UKAEA Fusion Liabilities)
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
I am tabling this statement for the benefit of hon. and right hon. Members to bring to their attention the details of an amendment to the contingent liability for the fusion activities of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, hereon referred to as UKAEA.
UKAEA operate experimental fusion reactors at Culham, Oxfordshire. Under the Nuclear Installations Act 1965, UKAEA is required to meet any third-party liabilities arising from an onsite incident resulting in exposure to ionising radiation.
A remote and unquantified contingent liability is in place which provides cover for such liabilities above £2.25 million. UKAEA’s captive insurer previously provided cover for such liabilities up to £2.25 million. This was wound up in 2019 as it did not provide good value for money to the taxpayer. Commercial arrangements to replace the captive insurer and cover nuclear liabilities—either in part or in full—would not provide good value for money. The best value for money for taxpayers would be to amend the existing remote unquantified contingent liability held by BEIS to include all costs arising from exposure to ionising radiation due to the fusion activities of UKAEA.
This contingent liability will remain remote and unquantified. There is no expiry date so it will be reviewed annually to ensure it continues to be good value for money for the taxpayer.
The Government will be subject to a new contingent liability for all liabilities from UKAEA fusion activities that lead to exposure to ionising radiation, and I will be laying a departmental minute today containing a description of the liability undertaken.
[HCWS783]
Postgraduate Student Funding
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
I am tabling this statement for the benefit of hon. and right hon. Members, to bring to their attention the support that the Government are providing to United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) funded doctoral students to address the challenges related to covid-19 restrictions.
When lockdown began last year, UKRI communicated immediately that PhD studentships should not be suspended, ensuring students could continue to receive their stipends. In April 2020, £44 million of urgent funding was announced for up to six-month extensions for PhD students in their final year who could not complete their studies as originally planned due to covid-19 restrictions. This was taken up by 77% of eligible students.
In November 2020, a further £19.1 million was allocated to research organisations hosting UKRI funded students. This enabled those organisations to target additional support to those UKRI funded students who needed it most including those whose study had been impacted by caring responsibilities or health reasons, and those in their final year.
These two phases of funding amount to £63 million of funding and will provide support to approximately 10,000 students.
Since the introduction of the current restrictions in January, the Government have continued to monitor the impact on the research sector. I asked UKRI to explore what else could be done to help and I can now confirm that we will be providing additional support to UKRI funded PhD students.
A further £7 million will now be made available to allocate extensions, based on need, to those students still to complete their studies. Additionally, UKRI are exploring options to increase flexibility for grant holding organisations to allocate existing funding for training and cohort development activity to fund extensions.
Research England will also be delivering around £11 million of block grant funding to English universities as a contribution to their support for their postgraduate research communities, including to students funded by universities themselves and to self-financed students.
By the end of this phase of support funding, UKRI will have provided additional support totalling £70 million, including extensions, to around half of all their funded students who were studying at the start of the first lockdown extension. This support has been targeted at those most in need and with equality, diversity and inclusion considered throughout.
Ensuring that the research sector in the UK has the people and skills it needs is crucial to realising Government’s ambition to cement our status as a science superpower. We will continue to monitor this situation closely, to ensure that we are able to consider additional support if necessary.
[HCWS786]
Oral Answers to Questions
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Navendu Mishra (Stockport) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
Using threats of firing and rehiring as a negotiating tactic is completely unacceptable. That is why this Government have asked ACAS to look into this matter. It is talking to businesses and employee representatives to gather evidence of how fire and rehire has been used in practice.
Navendu Mishra [V]
I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
GoNorthWest bus workers, many of them my constituents, are balloting for industrial action against shameful fire and rehire tactics that would see 10% cuts to wages and jobs and sickness protection policies shredded, all in the middle of a pandemic. With British Airways recently forced to back down from similar threats against cargo staff after targeted strikes by Unite the union, does the Minister agree that Government inaction against this exploitative legal loophole has meant that industrial action and trade union organising are working people’s only defence against disreputable employers?
Amanda Solloway
This Government have an unprecedented record in looking after employee rights, and we expect all employers to treat employees fairly in a spirit of partnership.
Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)
John Lamont (Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk) (Con)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
My hon. Friend will be aware of the great support that the Government have already given. The Government continue to offer unprecedented support through packages for businesses worth more than £280 billion. That includes loan schemes, grant funding, tax deferrals, the self-employment income scheme and, of course, the coronavirus job retention scheme. All have been designed to be accessible to businesses in most sectors and across the UK.
John Lamont
I am grateful for that response. As the Minister will know, the damaging tariffs from the US-EU trade dispute are punishing textile mills in my borders constituency. Textile bosses tell me in no uncertain terms that these tariffs are going to cost us jobs and investment. Will the Minister agree to meet me and representatives from the textile sector in my constituency to discuss opportunities to support them during this difficult time?
Amanda Solloway
My hon. Friend has been a huge champion for Scottish textiles, and we are working hard to de-escalate the dispute and get punitive tariffs removed. Either I or the Secretary of State would be very happy to meet him and representatives from the textile sector in his constituency. I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully)—the Minister for small business—continues to engage with stakeholders from across the retail and consumer goods sector.
Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
As I made clear to the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra), the use of threats of firing and rehiring as a negotiation tactic is completely unacceptable. We expect all employers to treat employees fairly and in the spirit of partnership. Laws are in place to ensure fair treatment in respect of employment contracts and redundancy matters.
Mick Whitley [V]
Heathrow firefighters, engineers, campus security, baggage handlers, terminal operators and more are taking strike action today against disgraceful fire and rehire abuses by management that have resulted in pay cuts of up to 25% for thousands. Ministers may call these tactics unacceptable, but with greedy bosses and shareholders using covid as a cover for long-held plans to slash wages, what steps are they actually taking to stop Heathrow exploiting its workers in this way?
Amanda Solloway
As previously mentioned, the Department has engaged ACAS to hold discussions to generate valuable evidence about the use of fire and rehire. The Government will communicate our response to the evidence in due course.
Andrew Gwynne [V]
Warm words from the Minister, but fire and rehire is an outrageous tactic that is sadly growing in popularity. The latest large company to jump on the bandwagon is Tesco, where staff at the Livingston depot are facing pay cuts of between £4,000 and £13,000 a year—this while profits are soaring thanks to these same essential workers who have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic to keep families fed. When will the Government do what it takes to stop Tesco and other rogue bosses ripping off their workers? Or will they just wring their hands and wait for a report that they will simply ignore? We want action, Minister.
Amanda Solloway
Having worked for a retailer—Sainsbury’s—for 13 years, I would like to acknowledge the hard work that we know all the people in retail do. However, I reiterate that the Department engaged ACAS to hold discussions in order to generate valuable evidence on the use of fire and rehire.
Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)
UK Space Industry
Amanda Solloway Excerpts(3 years, 8 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Midlothian (Owen Thompson) on securing this incredibly important debate and acknowledge the richness of this entire debate—there really are just far too many comments that I would like to make. I have been hearing words such as “opportunity”, “future”, “growth”, “jobs”, “inspiration”, “economic recovery”, “connectability”. All of these are just so exciting, and it is the reason why we really need to focus on the space industry.
To highlight just a couple of Members—there are too many to mention, although every Member has made such a valuable contribution—my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) talked about being Minister for the Universe. I think that is really exciting; I am the Minister for the Universe now. That is so great, and I could not agree more about making sure we seize this opportunity. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) talked about Tim Peake and the inspiration he can bring. I was really fortunate over Christmas to receive one of the books that so inspired him. That is the kind of thing we need to harness and capture.
Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
On the subject of inspiration, I am sure the Minister will agree with me that we have the opportunity to inspire a generation of children. Aa an example, as I walked to the Chamber earlier for this debate, I received a voicemail from my boy enthusiastically explaining a new fact that he had learned about a comet. It is that kind of enthusiasm that we need to inspire among a whole generation, to take our education and our industry through to the next generation.
Amanda Solloway
I thank my hon. Friend. I know his son Freddie, and wow! That is what we have to do: inspire future generations.
The hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) talked about Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. I remember that, and I remember thinking how important—how amazing—all these achievements were. Finally, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) talked about how we must plan for our future. I am grateful for all those contributions, which were all valuable.
We must use space every single hour of every single day, and that is what makes it so exciting. From getting the latest weather forecast to navigating the oceans and operating the National Grid, satellites keep our troops safe, underpin every financial transaction and help scientists monitor our climate. Space innovations can and have transformed how we live and work, from automated cars to wearable technology, while space science helps us to understand our place in the universe and protect our future.
As I speak, British satellites are capturing high-resolution images around the globe to help us assess environmental hazards, manage natural resources and understand our climate. British technology is on the way to Mercury—gosh, that is incredible—making possible the European Space Agency’s first mission to study how the planet closest to the sun was formed. That is really amazing.
Satellites have kept our families, communities and businesses connected this past year, while space-powered technologies such as drones have supported the incredible efforts of our NHS, as was acknowledged by the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford). That includes enabling my 86-year-old dad in Wales to watch this speech today.
The Government’s partnership with our inspirational space sector has been at the heart of its success. Our space growth partnerships bring together the UK’s space industry, research base and Government to drive our ambitions forward, and will help us build back from the challenges of the pandemic better and stronger than ever.
We have established a new National Space Council to co-ordinate space policy. We will grow our space economy across the Union, bolster our capabilities to protect the UK and our allies, foster innovation, and make the UK a world-class destination for global talent and investment. The UK’s priority for space will be set out in the first comprehensive space strategy, which will be delivered in the next six months. I could not agree more that we need that.
Our free trade agreement with the EU, worth £668 billion, is a vital step, allowing the UK to remain at the forefront of this high-tech industry. It paves the way for the UK to remain in the Copernicus programme, where there will be opportunities for UK businesses to bid for high-value manufacturing work and access satellite data, on which we will build science and commercial applications.
Outside the EU, our £374 million annual investment in the European Space Agency is ensuring that UK scientists and engineers take lead roles in this decade’s most exciting missions, from building Europe’s next Mars Rover to searching for life on other planets and studying the sun in greater detail than ever. We are investing in new international partnerships that will boost UK space exports and strengthen our collaboration on ground-breaking science and research with other leading space nations, such as the US, Australia and Japan.
We are also establishing major new national programmes to build the space capabilities that are vital to our prosperity and security. Our space-based positioning, navigation and timing programme is exploring new ways to ensure continued delivery of satellite navigation and timing services that are critical for UK energy networks and communications in the maritime, aviation and defence sectors, all of which we have heard about throughout this incredible debate.
We plan to make the UK a global hub for space innovation. We have launched a £15 million national space innovation programme, the UK’s first dedicated fund for pioneering space technologies, which will help solve some of the greatest societal challenges. Our strategic investment in the OneWeb satellite communication constellation demonstrates the Government’s ambition to put Britain at the cutting edge of the latest advances in space technology. Access to our own global fleet of satellites has the potential to connect people worldwide, creating jobs and building on a strong advanced manufacturing service base. Our aim is to be the first country in Europe to launch small satellites.
We have kickstarted work to build the first UK spaceports, including in Scotland, supported by grants worth £40 million. We expect the first launches from 2022, creating hundreds of secure, highly skilled jobs. To ensure that the UK’s launch offer is competitive and encourages new market entrants, the UK Government are putting in place a world-leading regulatory framework, with the Civil Aviation Authority assuming responsibility for the regulatory functions of the Space Industry Act, in addition to regulating orbital activities under the Outer Space Act 1986.
We are working with our partners in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to build their local strengths and drive development of their sectors. Government initiatives will join and complement our existing areas of strength as part of our developing national space ecosystem, unlocking new talent and making a career in space a realistic prospect in every part of the country.
We have a truly vibrant space sector, which stretches across the nation, going further to ensure that our space industry benefits from every region. We must seize this moment and deliver.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the future of the UK space industry.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
We will have a two-minute suspension to make the necessary arrangements for the next business.