Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Morse (CB)]

I too will speak to support the amendment advanced by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, who has explained it very clearly. It is worth getting back to basics on it—if I may use that expression—for a second. The ARIA scheme is about driving our national research frontiers forward by publicly funded risk taking, if I can summarise it as simply as that. It is a good idea that is widely supported.

But this is the reverse of what will happen if foreign-owned companies are allowed to acquire companies that own intellectual property derived from ARIA or to take that intellectual property offshore. If this happens, the reverse of the objective of the scheme will be achieved. This possibility is not far-fetched. I spent 10 years as Comptroller and Auditor-General at the National Audit Office, and, during that time, I saw cases relating to a series of companies where exchange of control provisions in the hands of government were not exercised properly or the scheme was administered rather feebly. As a result, these things became faits accomplis and the property went offshore. Sometimes, you would be told, “Well, we believe in the market operations, so we really don’t like to interfere with this sort of thing”.

Actually, we need strong, clear decision-making about this now. We need to make it clear in this amendment that we are not prepared to see intellectual property that has been paid for by British taxpayers go offshore. It makes mugs of British taxpayers.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to cast some doubt on Amendment 1. It is very well intentioned, but I fear that it may be mistaken. The background to my concern is my regret that ARIA is modest: some £200 million a year is being provided, which is a pinprick compared with the vast sums spent on other things, such as Covid and bailing out the banks.

The Bill is meant to set up an agency that can take risks free from bureaucracy and the day-to-day constraint of politics—a latter-day Manhattan Project, if you like. Bureaucratic and other constraints are being applied to the R&D budgets of many billions in the hands of UKRI. That is fine, but I do not think that they have a place in ARIA, which should be run leanly and efficiently and not encumbered by expensive experts—on IP, for example—and large legal departments. It should be able to think and act outside the box.

So I object to the provision in paragraph (bb)(ii) in Amendment 1, and I am slightly surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, has signed the amendment, because we generally agree on these IP issues. However, I agree with my noble friend Lord Lansley that we need to know whether ARIA can keep the income that it receives from IP and rights. To answer his question, I see IP and rights as being in the same box—but no doubt the Minister will clarify that when he speaks.

--- Later in debate ---

Personally, I would have liked that to have been ARIA’s explicit purpose; nonetheless, I am heartened by indications that the Government might be prepared to move on this issue. I am very pleased to support this amendment because I think it would represent important advances to some degree on this issue. I very much commend the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, for—hopefully—his persuasive powers in getting the Government to the right place. I will listen carefully to what the Minister has to say, but I still suspect that future generations will look back with a degree of surprise that at this time, and in the knowledge of the climate and ecological threat we face, our advanced research agency was not more clearly harnessed to this, the gravest and most important task at hand.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great delight to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, who brings his business acumen and passion for both innovation and climate change to the feast. We have discussed these together often in Peers for the Planet.

We have the climate change Acts, and a huge amount of attention is paid to climate change in every part of government life and in their multi-billion-pound R&D budget. ARIA is a small, independent body and should be left to decide what is most important to our future and to the inventive opportunities that it is set up to create. That might include climate change, health, poverty or the quality of life. Technology, for example, improves our lives, but it also brings risks. ARIA should be left to decide what is most important. It should be able to think completely outside the box and make its own choices, and not be bound by precedent. I am afraid that I am therefore sceptical about these amendments.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and my noble friend have made a compelling case for supporting this amendment, based on the climate and ecological emergency that we face. Tackling those challenges will require massive innovation and ingenuity and the development of practical applications from that. If ARIA has the bold, independent, innovative culture that the Minister emphasised throughout Committee, then it must be the ideal vehicle for this research, and we should spell it out. We should make ARIA an essential component of the net-zero strategy.