Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (First sitting)

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Q Thank you. Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, please introduce yourself for the record.

Professor Leyser: Thank you. My name is Ottoline Leyser and I am the CEO of UK Research and Innovation, which is an arm’s length body of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Department. We are the major public sector funder of research and innovation for the UK. We fund right across the disciplines and sectors that conduct research and innovation.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

Q Given that this is my first contribution, may I say what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairship, Ms McVey? I look forward to working with all members of the Committee on the Bill, which is important for our future research and prosperity.

I welcome our two witnesses. I have one general question for both of you, given your broad range of experience in research and development: what is the problem that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency is fixing? Professor Dame Ottoline, do you have a clear understanding of the proposed working relationship between ARIA and UK Research and Innovation, and should that be put on a formal footing to provide clarity? Mr Dyson, Nesta Challenges is based on challenges, so what is the role of challenges and missions with regard to the work of ARIA in driving high-risk, high-reward research?

Professor Leyser: I do not actually see ARIA as being about fixing a problem; I see it as adding something new and extra to an already very high-quality research and innovation system. As I have said, UKRI is the major public funder for research and innovation. We invest £8 billion of public money every year in research innovation, and we have a major responsibility to act as stewards for the whole system in the UK to ensure that it has the right capabilities and capacity to conduct the research and innovation that we need for the kind of inclusive and sustainable knowledge economy that is so important for our country.

As CEO of UKRI, I have to think about all parts of the system. I have to think about the people—do we have the right kinds of people in the system, the right mix, the right diversity, the right set of skills, and the right career trajectories and pathways through the system? I have to think about infrastructures—do we have the right balance of institutes, universities, catapults and national facilities, as well as high-quality equipment within institutions and universities, for example? Are we funding the right mix of ideas, starting from the really high-risk, high-gain research, which will be the focus of ARIA? It is also our responsibility to fund the really important work that perhaps does not fall into that transformative, high-risk, high-reward category, but without which the benefits of that high-risk, high-reward research will not be realised and the foundations for the next transformative ideas will not be built. I also have to think about the connectivity in the system, how to join it up and make it all work effectively. Then I have to think about how we can take that and focus it on particular challenges that we face in the country. The work that UKRI does seeks to balance all of those needs and support all of them to create a really high-functioning system for the UK.

I hope that ARIA will do what you might call an extreme or particularly transformative, visionary version of that focus activity, so it will work in a different way from the way in which we typically work. Because of our incredibly broad responsibility for the system, we tend to work in a way that asks the system, in a very broad and open way, how it can best deliver the things that we think need to happen, whereas ARIA will work on the programme manager model, so it will identify a small cadre of visionary leaders who will have extraordinary ideas, we hope, to drive forward the edge of the edge, transformative, visionary ideas, and they will hopefully be empowered to work in very different, agile ways to take forward those kinds of ideas. That is quite experimental. They should be able to experiment with different ways of funding research, including, for example, the challenge model, which Tris is such an expert on. There is a whole range of opportunities. That is how I see it working. It is a small, agile agency that will bring together these visionary individuals to add something on top of a very high-functioning system. It is not about fixing a problem; it is about adding something new at the edge of the edge to push forward those frontiers.

I absolutely agree that it is very important that activity is properly rooted in the research base for which I and UKRI are responsible, because it will depend totally on that research base. The people employed at ARIA will absolutely need to understand deeply what UKRI is doing and what the opportunities are across that research base in order to deliver their vision. I would expect a very close working relationship with ARIA to allow that to happen.

Tris Dyson: I would agree with quite a bit of that. Nesta Challenges produced a report in the summer called “The Great Innovation Challenge”, which we should share with you. We looked at the funding ecosystem. The current funding ecosystem is pretty good and our main funding mechanisms work quite well. It is not wasted. It includes direct financial support through bodies such as UKRI and also the Small Business Research Initiative. It also includes research and development tax credits and the effect that has.

There has, however, as I think the Government have recognised, been an overall need to increase funding in research and development, which is why the target of 2.4% and the promised increases in Government funding are so welcome. In that context, we think that there is an opportunity to explore new avenues and do things slightly differently. Some of the opportunities that that presents, both through ARIA and more generally, is around boosting the diversity of people involved in frontier technology and innovation and improving geographical reach. If we do have a long-standing problem in the UK, it is perhaps with that feed-in to commercialisation and the connection between university R&D and patenting and things that get picked up by the private sector, so that might be something to look at. We do not think that there is a problem, but I guess that this does present, as Ottoline has said, an opportunity for a new, smaller, dynamic agency to add to the current ecosystem.

We think the advantage of ARIA would be that, because it is smaller, it might be able to generate a culture that is a bit more nimble and a bit more agile, take some more risks, look at things about diversity of innovators, and engage with types of innovation and types of innovation funding that ordinarily might be perhaps a little too high risk. It can also be a little more focused and entrepreneurial, but—to consider the second part of the question—it can also look beyond just grants and R&D tax credits, which are overwhelmingly the main way of funding innovation in the UK.

On the role of challenge prizes, challenges get used quite loosely to mean a lot of things, but what we mean by them is outcome-based funding, where you use the combination of technology foresight and insight with some creativity and understanding of how markets evolve and develop, and what opportunities might exist in the future, in order to identify quite specific problems, where there is a real ability to push things forward in innovation but where it is unclear where the most promising innovation is going to come from. For ARIA, I think that this might be quite a useful tool, because, comparatively speaking, you are dealing with relatively small amounts of money, and outcome-based challenge funding gives you a degree of focus but also allows a degree of payment on results. So, you have milestone payments on the basis of ability to solve problem A, B or C, or of demonstrating some traction in the market.

They have other benefits as well, which go beyond the non-financial. You can use relatively smaller amounts of money in a challenge prize model because you might be building up a deal flow for investors, customers and other people who you want to crowd in and bring in additional funding. They are also quite high-profile because of the nature of the competition or the race towards solving x. That means that the publicity and the promotional opportunities for innovators can be quite significant, above and beyond just the financial reward.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q Thank you very much for those responses. It is great to hear such support for our existing science base. A lot of the discussion around the Bill has been critical of the bureaucracy associated with current research, which has served us so well, particularly in this pandemic.

Both of your responses referred to the role of ARIA in looking at new areas, particularly having new areas of focus that may have been missed and addressing them in different ways. The document of intent that the Secretary of State published leaves the choice of areas of research or the overall mission to the programme managers rather than the chief executive of ARIA, whoever that might be. How will that address our country’s research needs, and do you think that the Secretary of State should have responsibility for identifying the overarching missions that ARIA looks at?

Dame Ottoline, there has been controversy with you over exempting ARIA from meeting freedom of information requests. UKRI meets freedom of information requests. Do you find them to be burdensome in going about your objectives, and what proportion of your budget is taken up by them? I will go to Tris first this time, if that is okay.

Tris Dyson: I think that the question about leaving it up to the team that is put together at ARIA is a very good one. When you ask people about the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Advanced Research Projects Agency and so on, you get quite different answers as to what they do—that is probably because they do so much—but one of the common responses is that they have very empowered programme managers who understand and know their fields and are able to pursue agendas with a degree of freedom.

I think that has got to be a model that an agency like this—if it is going to be higher risk-taking and a bit more agile, and is going to look at funding innovation that you might ordinarily overlook—needs to be able to pursue, but it does mean that you need to get the right team in place and empower them appropriately. That means that you need a combination of, obviously, people who understand frontier science and technology; but then you also need a degree of creativity and insight as to what the opportunities might be. You need people also who understand the strengths and abilities within the UK, in order to build on that. So, yes, we are significant advocates of the idea that you would have a small, dynamic, empowered team; but they will also need to be relatively ruthless to stop funding things that do not work quite early on, and stick with things that do. That will have to be a mindset, or a regimen, that is baked in from the start.

Professor Leyser: I absolutely agree with what Tris has said. I think it is widely acknowledged that the success of ARIA—and in many ways the rate-limiting factor—is going to be finding those people. The whole ability of this organisation to operate in this edge-of-the-edge really visionary way that we are all very excited about is critically dependent on those people; and they are in very short supply. So I think the idea of leaving it open to that team of people to decide their focus, to pick the projects that are at the edge of the edge, as it is described, is a really important element.

I also view the notion of this small, agile additional agency as having that freedom in a very positive way. The needs of the country—the priorities that the Government and Ministers set to solve particular challenges for the nation—fall very much within the UKRI remit, and indeed we have very successful programmes doing exactly that, including in a challenge-led model. Those programmes tend to operate on a slightly different basis in the more traditional open call route that Tris describes with grant applications and so on. Again, I would see ARIA as an additional small, agile, free agency that can creatively identify and capture those transformative opportunities that, indeed, are not necessarily thought about in the broader system, and reach parts of the system that our current system does not as successfully reach. It needs to be very experimental and I suppose from that point of view it is not the place where you invest the responsibility for delivering major national priorities.

We are very committed to our freedom of information responsibilities. We get about 30 requests a month and we have a team who deal with those requests and also the other data access requests, and so on, that are part of our responsibility. I am happy to be able to do that. I think that is important for public money, and there is a judgment call about the burden of administration of that, relative to the benefits in transparent use of public funding.

[Chi Onwurah]

I will stop there, because I know many Members have questions.

[The Chair]

I will go to the Minister, and then to Stephen. Can I have an indication—will Members put their hands up—of how many there are? That is four. If you want to ask another question, do you want to ask it now, or come back a little bit later?

[Chi Onwurah]

I will come back later, if that is okay.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Amanda Solloway)]

Q May I say what a pleasure it is to be here under your chairmanship to discuss such an important subject, Ms McVey? I have two separate questions for both the witnesses. The first question, for Tris Dyson, is about funding mechanisms and how they support the R&D system. Do you have some examples of how a range of funding mechanisms support the R&D system?

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

Those were both short answers so, Chi, we have time for you.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q There are two contradictions that I have spotted in what you are saying. Dame Ottoline, you talked about ARIA needing to deliver transformational research and outcomes, but at the same time you said that it is too small to be entrusted with society’s great challenges. Should not the public interest determine what that transformation is? Mr Dyson, you talked about ARIA having a new diversity of funders—regional as well—yet at the same time we hear that it has got to be people who know people and have lots of experience, and we do not have diversity in the base now. Twenty seconds each on those contradictions.

Professor Leyser: I did not say that it would be too small. My point is that if it is really working on the edge of the edge, it is about capturing the extraordinary opportunities that these people see in the system. Those cannot be straightforwardly dictated. They are not to do with those outside requirements; they are to do with what the opportunities are. The smallness of the agency is to do with what proportion of your R&D spend you put into that activity, given that we have major national priorities that need substantial investment, where the target is driven by those national priorities. It is an opportunity—

[The Chair]

Order. I am sorry, but I am going to have to stop you there. They had both been concise answers. I am sorry that we did not finally get to hear your further answer, Tris. Thank you both very much indeed for your time, Dame Ottoline and Tris Dyson.

Examination of Witnesses

Professor James Wilsdon, Professor Mariana Mazzucato and Professor Philip Bond gave evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chi Onwurah]

Q I thank our witnesses for taking the time to join us today and bringing us the benefit of your considerable expertise and experience. Professor Mazzucato, you wrote the groundbreaking book “The Entrepreneurial State” and the more recent “Mission Economy”—perhaps there is a clue in the title, in terms of the emphasis on the benefits that mission-orientated research can bring. Indeed, many thought that this new agency, ARIA, was based on some of your work, yet at the same time it does not seem to reflect some of the important context that you set out for it. Can you tell us whether it will achieve the benefits that you set out in your work? What needs to change? What should the Bill Committee look at changing in order to ensure that that can happen? Similarly, Professor Wilsdon and Professor Bond, based on your work on research and innovation systems—particularly in a UK context—what benefits will ARIA bring and what needs to change in order to improve it?

Professor Mazzucato: Thank you so much for the question and for inviting me to give evidence. Without going into the history of the DARPA model—I am sure you have done that already—I think the really important thing is to ask what it is about the UK system that an ARIA could give benefit to. We need to remember that the whole point of having a DARPA or ARIA-type institution is actually to provide that kind of purpose-driven approach to innovation. It is not a replacement for blue-sky research, funded in the United States by the National Science Foundation or in the UK by the research councils. It is precisely that kind of rare moment where you can do high-risk, high-bet research, very much linked between the basic and the applied; it is neither basic nor applied.

Fundamentally, where it has been successful—let us not forget that other countries have also tried this and it has not always been successful—is when it is on the back of a strong system. For example, DARPA in the US would have failed miserably had there not also been a strong military and defence system.

Secondly, it has to work across Government. DARPA in the US, for example, works with the small business innovation research programme, a procurement programme across all the different Departments, which set aside about 3% of their budgets to do purpose-driven research that brings in, for example, small and medium-sized enterprises. Again, that procurement side means that it is fundamentally linked to how Government works; it is not separate from Government.

Thirdly, it has always been linked with a vision or mission of what is to be done. Again, in the wartime scenario, it is clear that the DARPA model was mainly about military goals, but the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E, is about renewable energy and a green transition, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Health is about strengthening the health system and going after big health innovations.

What questions are we asking in the UK that an ARPA-H and ARPA-E or an ARIA would actually resolve? If we think of one of the biggest successes of DARPA, which is of course the internet, they did not obsess about the internet. They were not saying, “Oh, we need a technology.” They needed to solve a problem. The problem at the time was getting the satellites to communicate, and the internet was a solution for that. There were also many other experiments being done at the time, some of which failed. It is about that kind of willingness to take risks, but those being purpose-driven and problem-oriented.

The first question we should be asking in the UK is: what are the big problems? What questions are we asking that would even require an ARIA? If we do not have enough of a national debate on that, and if we do not have enough of a rethink in Government on things like procurement—the everyday of what Government does—and if we do not have strong systems underlying an ARIA, such as health and energy systems and so on, it will be really hard for this agency to be successful.

[Chi Onwurah]

Thank you. Professor Wilsdon?

Professor Wilsdon: I agree with everything that Mariana has just said. The one thing that many of us have been calling for since this idea was floated as an option for the UK system is more clarity on its purpose—its mission, in Mariana’s language. It is regrettable, in a way, that it has reached the stage of a Bill without that question having yet been properly answered. There are multiple dimensions to why it is regrettable.

First, it is a recipe for confusion. When it does finally decide what it is for, it has to then negotiate and haggle for space in the wider system, as Mariana said. That is time-wasting and is a source of bureaucracy, which this thing is supposed to avoid. Secondly, the Bill and the debate around it sort of vests the choices about purpose and function in the leadership of ARIA. I agree with Mariana that the role of Government in setting up a new agency is surely to undertake and co-ordinate with the public and wider society a discussion of what this would be for—what big priorities we have as UK society to which a new agency can be directed.

I am fully in favour of a new agency. I think there are lots of arguments, as we have heard already from Ottoline Leyser and Tris Dyson, that in a system that is expanding and doubling its budget over a short period of time, there is definitely scope in the budget to do new things, and I would be wholly in favour of that. Without that clarity, we essentially run the risk of setting it up and then there being a delayed period before it actually does anything very effective.

The final point I would make is that in relying on appointing the leadership as the route to answering the question, all you do is move the source of the problem. If the Government have not been able to resolve the question of what it is for, how do we identify who the right leaders are? We have not yet decided what this thing is for and where it operates in terms of the scale of basic to applied. Does it have domain focuses? I don’t see how you can find the right people. If you do find people, how do you avoid it simply becoming a tool, a plaything, of their prior interests and priorities?

In today’s line-up of witnesses, you are going to hear a number of compelling visions from different people for what this thing could do. I do not have a particular vision to sell you, but those visions map on to the prize and the things that you would expect the CBI or the Royal Academy of Engineering to argue for. If you set something up without resolving that first, you are moving it to the site of the leadership. It is a recipe for capture by particular interests in the system, which I think would be regrettable and quite distorting of the role that this thing is supposed to play, which is to be added to existing things.

I worry generally about the process, as someone who is perfectly happy to support the idea. I don’t think it is being executed in an optimal way to achieve the outcomes that the Government wish to see.

[Chi Onwurah]

Thank you very much. Professor Bond?

Professor Bond: I thank the previous speakers. I think that the idea is about having radical innovation, which is different from grand missions and grand challenges. Certainly the budgets that have been talked about fit an agency doing radical innovation, rather than some very large-scale grand challenges. The discussion over the need for a directed mission is an interesting one. You can do it both ways. The original ARPA started off with the rather nebulous but powerful mission statement of, “Develop strategic advantage”. That is acceptable if you have a good director who understands what that means. DARPA, for example, or IARPA and so on, have somewhat narrower remits, but that does not necessarily make things easier. A really good director can overcome issues around narrowness of mission statement by using the opportunity to do things that span across many domains. In fact, I think it is a rather liberating thing. The fact that we have not at this point had utter clarity on things I regard as extraordinarily good, not bad.

A defining characteristic of all of the US ARPAs is that they have a strong focus on rotating people in and out—about 80% from industry and 20% from academia, or some balance like that—and they do a lot of work with both. I entirely agree with what was said about a link between applied and more fundamental research, but I want to strengthen that statement by saying that with the industry base there is a focus on getting things done as opposed to publishing papers, and it is important to remember that.

On risk tolerance, a lot has been said about DARPA and taking a lot of risk. I personally think that talking about taking a lot of risk is a poor framing of what they do. What they aim to do is have a significant multiplicative effect on what they achieve. In other words, radical innovation simply says, “We want step change. We want to do things that would create a tremendous impact were they to be done.” What DARPA—all the ARPAs probably, but let’s talk about DARPA in America—has always been good at is managing that risk tremendously well. A large part of the reason they have succeeded is their extraordinarily good management of risk.

In terms of deciding what it is for and whether one should necessarily have a public engagement with that, for some things that is very valuable. For others, opacity is surprisingly effective. Most of the US agencies have some degree of opacity, partly because they work on defence and security, but partly because you are going to ask people to stick their neck out and try to do things that they start out by viewing as probably impossible. Step 1 for an ARPA mission specialist or programme manager is to try to get some evidence that it is not impossible and might be possible. If you are asking people to work like that, shining a spotlight on them is more or less placing them under pressure to step back from that plate and become more conservative. I do not think that is a good thing.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q Thank you very much. Professor Mazzucato, you were very clear that it is helpful not to consider this as a replacement institution. We have already heard some confusion as to whether it is cutting edge or transactional. You were also clear about the need for a strong research base, engagement on procurement, and a vision. What should that vision or mission be, in your view? We have heard from Professor Bond that there might be a trade-off between transparency and risk taking. How would you respond to that?

Professor Mazzucato: I just want to clarify what I understand in terms of challenge orientation, because I think there is also a bit of confusion there. Challenges globally are the sustainable development goals. Every country is actually signed up to them, including the UK, so we should hear a bit more about the SDGs in the UK national debate.

Let us just bring it back to the DARPA or NASA kind of model. Broadly defined, DARPA is, of course, challenge-oriented. The key thing is how it can translate those challenges into missions. Take the moon landing, which I wrote about in my recent book. I talked about both what to copy and what not to copy from it—most of it was what not to copy. The challenge was the space race, the cold war, Sputnik—NASA did not have much to do without that. They transformed that into a mission, which was to get to the moon and back again in one generation, so it would be wrong to say that DARPA and NASA are not challenge-oriented.

The point is that how they are structured is much more specific than that. Those are problems that need solving. They did not just say, “Oh, let’s go and compete in space with the Russians.” Again, it was very specific: getting to the moon and back in one generation. You can actually answer the question, “Did you get there: yes or no?” Lots of different sectors got involved; it was not just one big isolated project—that is the whole picking winners problem. It required innovation in nutrition, textiles, materials, electronics, and the whole software industry can, in some ways, be seen as an output of that. Again, how did they organise the thinking and the purposefulness of the organisation? One of the first things they did was change their own internal structure to be much more horizontal, with project managers, precisely to be purpose-oriented.

I just think there is a bit of a false dichotomy between whether you need a challenge or whether it is about a big radical innovation. DARPA has always been challenge-oriented, and that is why they needed those radical innovations to actually confront those challenges. The questions they were asking were much more specific and were framed in a targeted way, so you could actually answer the question, “Did we achieve it or not?”

In terms of the risk, I absolutely agree that it is not about risk for the sake of risk. In a conference I organised back in 2014, called “Mission Oriented Innovation”, I invited Cheryl Martin, who back then was the second director of ARPA-E, and she said that they actually structured ARPA-E in such a way as to welcome as much high-risk thinking, and that the whole point was to matter in the economy. They would actually measure their success both on whether they took those risks, because if they were going for easy things, they were not doing their job, and on whether their successes, of which there would only be a few—they accepted that there would be lots of failures—would have a big impact in the economy. For example, they ended up being very important for battery storage.

ARPA-E is very different from DARPA. It has a tiny budget of about only $300 million a year. One of its problems—it is also really important for the UK to learn about the problems—is that it has been too wedded to industry. It has focused too much on asking industry what it needs and then it ends up almost being this massive technology office, compared with DARPA, which had a very clear Government customer—basically, the Department of Defence. It is important to ask again who the obvious customer for ARIA is and how that is linked to different Departments, so it does not just become a matter of bringing geeks into government—the line Dominic Cummings mentioned. Yes, you want experts in government, but geeks in and of themselves are not what you want to strive for; you want to solve problems that different Departments of a democratically elected Government put out there.

We should also make sure that those problems are not told to Government by experts like ourselves on this Zoom call, or other Zoom calls, as James rightly said, when everyone will just put forward their own pet project. We need to think about the democratic forums and the different types of the debate that are needed in a country, precisely so that the problems and purpose are shared as widely as possible. That includes winning the war, back in the cold war days.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q What do you think ARIA’s mission should be? I will put that same question to the other witnesses.

Professor Mazzucato: I am holding the 2017 industrial strategy, which Greg Clark’s team put together. We very much advised on that and one of my roles was to say stop just making lists of sectors. You will remember that under David Cameron’s team there were five sectors: automotive, aerospace, life sciences, finance/financial services and the creative sector. I said not to make a list of random sectors, which can easily get captured by those sectors with the loudest voice, but to think about what their problems were. They solved that in the industrial strategy—they listened, and I was very happy—and decided on four challenges, namely, healthy ageing, clean growth, the future of mobility and the opportunities that AI and the data economy provide to us.

In terms of identifying the missions underneath those, I set up a commission co-chaired with Lord David Willetts entitled the Commission for Mission Oriented Innovation and Industrial Strategy. We worked very closely with the different challenge teams in BEIS precisely to answer your question. It is definitely not the role of an economist, academic or business person to tell you what the missions are. That must be co-created within Departments alongside different stakeholders, but surely the first answer is that those missions must be those that respond to those four challenges.

On clean growth, the answer must be carbon-neutral cities all over the UK; or take a global challenge such as clean oceans—sustainable development goal 13—and getting the plastic out of the ocean. What is the UK’s contribution to that? What about the digital divide, under the challenge of AI and the data economy? Just think back to when the BBC had a mission. Back in the 1980s, it wanted to get every kid to code, before it was sexy—today it is very sexy to talk about coding. The BBC was doing that back then, and its own procurement strategy helped to deliver that by producing the BBC Micro computer. The BBC did that not because it was obsessed by technology but because it needed it to fulfil that mission. So, this strategy is not completely new to the UK, but we should not pursue it as a siloed project; it must answer the big questions such as the digital divide, carbon neutrality, health ageing and so on. But you have the 2017 industrial strategy, so start there; we cannot keep rethinking from scratch each time.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q Thank you. Professor Wilsdon?

Professor Wilsdon: I do not have a mission in my back pocket that I want to push. My argument is simply that the thing needs to have more clarity. I do not really mind what it ends up doing, as long as we go into it with a better sense of what we are trying to get out of it, as Mariana said. It is worth going back to some of the other strategic documents that operate and run the UK system, including the industrial strategy, as Mariana says.

In July last year, the UK Government published its draft R&D roadmap. Again, that is a good idea and it is something that many other countries do. It set out a longer-term planned direction for the system, and tried to explain to the system and to wider stakeholders how the different parts fit together and their different functions. To me, the logical sequence of events would have been to conclude that process—I realise it has been a difficult year for everyone for obvious reasons—and then to identify the particular gaps and priorities to which a new funding mechanism could be directed. What we have done is fixate on a particular institutional model, imported from the US in the late ’60s, and dumped into Britain today, as the way in which somehow, magically, we are going to cut through all sorts of real or perceived barriers and obstacles in our existing research and innovation system. I just think that is a very flawed way to do this.

We are where we are. The Bill is in front of Parliament. We need to focus at this point on how we can amend it, or you can amend it, to improve it. I think that trying to bring more clarity, or at least a sense of how this issue will be addressed through the governance of this new thing, is really important. Otherwise, you or your successors, and we or our successors, will be back here in a few years’ time, asking ourselves why it did not work. I know that it has a tolerance of failure—we are all in favour of that—but the thing has to at least succeed in some respects, alongside its appetite for failure.

[Chi Onwurah]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Professor Bond, did you want to comment?

Professor Bond: I just want to make a remark, if I may, on scale. Talking in the same breath of putting man on the moon, which cost up to 5% of US GDP, so roughly 60% of UK GDP, and ARIA, for which the figure is £200 million a year, is, I think, an issue.

I agree that there is confusion about challenge. The grand challenges are really better structured in different ways, which is why NASA has a director and why the Manhattan project had very strong, firm leadership. I want to use that to emphasise, first, that ARPA/DARPA mainly does not use challenges. There are some fields where it has done—robotics, autonomous vehicles and a few others—but that is not its main way of doing things. The issue about the word “challenge” is that for some things, particularly in computer science, it can be a very good way to bring together people in different teams that would not normally operate in that way, but it is just a mechanism for doing that.

The question you have asked me is about the mission for ARIA. I totally agree, by the way, with what was said: it is much easier in life if you have a customer. But if a really good director is picked, they are going to go out and get some customers—probably within Government. There is so much that can be done in government; there are so many good things to be done that if you have an imaginative and intelligent director—I am sure that will happen—that person can find plenty of sensible things to do. I therefore think you do not need to be overly prescriptive; you can try to leave it open.

I was also involved in the structuring around the industrial strategy grand challenges. First, they are another step up in scale. Secondly, I do not think we should be binding anyone to having to focus on those at all. It is rather obvious that there are many interesting and important problems societally. It is obvious that there are many, many ways in which somebody could look to do things, whether with education and helping kids to learn better, or with the NHS or anything else. I would leave it up to the director and the mission folk to do. The whole point of a DARPA is really to leave it open.

What you want these people to do is one thing: you want to demand of them that they make their best attempt to do radical innovation—to do things that, were they to work, would mean a step change in what should be done. It is going to be easier if that can get implemented in some efficient and effective way, so how that is done is a great question, especially as it will be a small office. That is somewhere that the office is clearly going to have to work with Government and find customers within Government, and do things that are so impressive that that will work. That is a challenge, but that is why you get a director.

[Chi Onwurah]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Minister?