Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Rees of Ludlow, one of our most distinguished scientists. I agree with him about the modern excess of performance indicators and the valuable contribution the private sector can make. I am very grateful to my noble friend the Minister for his clear exposition of the purpose of the Bill, and I declare my interest as a director of Health Data Research UK—which is largely funded by the Medical Research Council—and of Capita plc.

I am not a scientist. Indeed, perhaps because I went to an all-girls school in less progressive times, I have never had a physics or chemistry lesson in my life. I have, however, always been a huge proponent of scientific innovation and invention and everything that encourages them, from academic excellence to fostering a culture of enterprise. As a former Minister for Intellectual Property, I also regard a sound framework for the protection of IP as a vital necessity.

The context of these proposals is important. I congratulate the Chancellor on an assured Budget performance in very difficult circumstances. There was a cheering ending for those like me—watching from the Gallery—who believe that high taxes hurt the economy, and enterprise and innovation. I would single out his welcome extension of R&D tax credits to cloud computing and data costs, the shift to focusing tax relief on domestic rather than overseas research, and the increase in the UK R&D budget to £22 billion by 2026-27, which is 2.4% of GDP and a cash increase of 50% by the end of the Parliament.

I did, however, find one moment chilling: the growth forecast of 6% in 2022, 2.1% in 2023 and a miserable 1.3% in 2024. This is, of course, not the Chancellor’s fault. It is an OBR forecast, and we need to do all we can to prove it wrong. I want to see growth overshooting substantially. That brings us to innovation and its companion, productivity. We need major change to bring about a new dynamism in our economy so that growth takes off and is sustained. We can build on the success of the Covid vaccine and the legacy of our multiple Nobel Prize winners.

The proposal for ARIA is the most radical I have seen in my time in this House. It sets aside all the most cherished Whitehall controls which envelop all other agencies. It would create a significant, truly blue-sky research base not subject to normal constraints other than, of course, the financial limit. My view—which I think is widely shared if the discussion in another place is to be believed—is that it is both welcome and timely, given the country’s needs.

Given the greater freedom that the new agency will have, the choice of the right people to lead it will be vital, as my noble friend Lord Borwick said. That poses two questions: who will these be, and who will decide on them? I will be interested to hear from the Minister how that vital but difficult task will be managed.

On one illustrative point, we should certainly not specify how the new body should go about its work, as some parliamentarians have already tried to do. That would be absurd. Neither this House nor the other one, nor indeed Her Majesty’s Government, is likely to be the best authority on the development of science over the coming years.

Perhaps not for the first time, I am in a different place from my noble friend Lord Bethell. Societal challenges and fashions move on, as we saw with the pandemic itself. I believe we need independent thinking and that the agency should decide its own programme.

Normally in our debates I press at this point for the provision of a cost-benefit analysis of the proposal. Today I will not do so—I cannot see how such an analysis could be done before the new body is established—but we will need checks and reporting by the agency. I suggest that we need annual reports, while recognising that judgments of success will not be possible for several years and that patience and tolerance of failure are needed, as the Minister has said. However, eventually it will be possible to assess both successes and missteps, and we should not hesitate to do that. As one example, we should have a requirement in the Bill for the agency to make a full assessment of its work ahead of the 10-year dissolution power in Clause 8 so that we can determine objectively whether the experiment should be continued.

In all this, I am influenced by what I have learned of success elsewhere—for example, about the Manhattan Project. I was lucky enough to visit New Mexico before Covid and to learn from its museums, and those who have spent careers in the nuclear industry, of the importance of the people you put in charge of such a project, and of giving them responsibility and space. Those are the two concerns that I have already alluded to. In New Mexico the team was literally hundreds of miles away from any stakeholders.

As some of you will know from my Zoom backdrop, I am an enthusiastic student of the 18th-century Staffordshire potters. Stoke was the Silicon Valley of its day and mushroomed in a way not unlike the pop music business 200 years later. The entrepreneurs pioneered brilliant new chemical techniques and competed in a vibrant and growing consumer market right around the globe. Focus, competition and the stealing of each other’s ideas and master craftsmen were everyday occurrences.

Look at the rise of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese manufacturing in the 20th century. They copied a lot but that was a skill that drove growth, and there developed in Japan a vital intellectual attitude—“lean thinking”, pioneered by Toyota—which has been an inspiration to successful businesses right round the world. Unfortunately, it has yet to be fully established in the public service or the NHS—but I threaten to digress.

This is a worthwhile initiative. I support the Bill’s Second Reading and look forward to its progress through the House.