Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Daniel Zeichner

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Chi Onwurah]

I am disappointed in the Minister’s response, but I will not push the amendments to a vote. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I beg to move amendment 25, in clause 12, page 5, line 13, at end insert—

““Invention” means the process by which ideas are converted into value in the form of new and improved products, services and approaches.”

This amendment would establish the meaning of “invention” as referred to in the title and functions of ARIA.

The amendment is about defining “invention.” Before the sharp-eyed hon. Member for North Norfolk points out that, at the start of these proceedings, I tried to take the word “invention” out of the title, I repeat my earlier observation that we are quite prescient on this side of the House. I had rather anticipated that, despite all the fantastic strength of our arguments, Government Members were not necessarily persuaded, strangely enough.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Fifth sitting)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Daniel Zeichner

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Public Bill Committees

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

I beg to move amendment 19, in clause 3, page 2, line 20, at end insert—

“(2) On or before the date that an annual report is laid before Parliament in accordance with paragraph 15(4) of Schedule 1, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament, and publish, a statement containing the required information about details of funding and ARIA’s tolerance to failure.

(3) In this section, the required information about ARIA’s tolerance to failure is—

(a) how this section has been interpreted by ARIA during the relevant financial year,

(b) the number and value of projects funded by ARIA which have been terminated or disbanded on the grounds of failure during the relevant financial year, and

(c) details of ARIA’s funding in the relevant financial year and its proportion of Government research and development expenditure.”.

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to make an annual statement regarding ARIA’s tolerance to failure.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Twigg. Before I speak to amendment 19, I want to say that that in the intervening time between the previous sitting and today, I have managed to break my foot, which was truly an achievement, given that all I was doing was running. If I am not as quick to rise as I would otherwise be, I hope you will be forgiving, Mr Twigg. The Minister said on Tuesday that the Advanced Research and Invention Agency might contribute to being able to “Beam me up, Scotty!” That would have been highly desirable as I tried to make my way into this place this morning. I am sure we wish ARIA luck in that. I am grateful to everyone for their indulgence as I deal with my new-found injury.

Amendment 19 would require that the Secretary of State makes an annual statement about ARIA’s tolerance to failure, in order to provide greater oversight and responsibility. It is very much in keeping with all the amendments that the Opposition have tabled. It is a constructive amendment that seeks to ensure that ARIA’s mission, when it has one, and its workings are understood by the public in general and that we have the right oversight to ensure that ARIA is not in any way subject to or tainted by the sleaze that is all too common and evident in the current Government’s procurement dealings with their mates. We believe that it is right that ARIA should be given operational independence from Government. We support the idea of specifying that it has a high tolerance to risk and failure, but the challenge is to establish what that tolerance is and to ensure that it is scrutinised properly and that there is public understanding of it.

We believe that ARIA should have a high-risk appetite, but we need greater clarity in order to understand how that appetite will be determined, calibrated and explained, and how Ministers will be accountable for ARIA’s failure and success with public money. That is critical and it was a theme of the evidence sessions that, if we are to maintain public support, we must be open and honest about ARIA’s tolerance to failure.

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good introduction to today’s proceedings. I express my sympathy to her for having to stand up and sit down; I will not make her do it too often.

The evidence sessions brought some of this out, but does she agree that attitudes to failure in our country are very different from those in America in particular, which is where we are learning lessons from in establishing the agency? Given that, does she also agree that this is a particularly important amendment? The British attitude towards failures is not very tolerant; we do not necessarily view them as being positive. There is a risk here because unless we get this right, it will be difficult for those establishing the agency to be able to explain what they are doing to a wider audience.

[The Chair]

Ms Onwurah, if it becomes uncomfortable standing, please remain seated.

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[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which I hope does not reflect a lack of understanding of the ways in which science research and our national interest work. On national security, a direction could be given to ARIA not to work in nuclear energy with a Government whose interests did not align with our own, for example. That is quite a relevant example, because we know that, rather than investing in it themselves—even though interest rates are so low at the moment—the Government have welcomed, and even encouraged, investment in our nuclear energy by the Chinese. Some kind of direction might well be given on that basis. There are many ways in which climate change is essential to our national security, so I do not think that example was very well chosen.

More generally, if the hon. Member is asking how trade-offs between national security and other priorities should be made, which is a very important question, we have already said that we believe in national security, and national security should always be the priority. However, when such a direction is made for reasons of national security, which we support, the fact is that we will not know why it was made. Perhaps that is right, because if it is an issue of national security, those concerns should not be shared publicly; none the less, somebody needs to scrutinise them. I hope everybody on this Committee will agree that someone in Parliament should be scrutinising decisions on national security, particularly when those decisions are taken by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. As I have already said, neither the Department nor the Secretary of State has long experience of making national security decisions.

[Daniel Zeichner]

I fully take the point made by the hon. Member for North Norfolk, but we Opposition Members have a degree of prescience in being able to predict the way that votes in this Committee might go. We anticipated that the Government might not accept our suggestion about giving ARIA this mission. Does not that the lack of a mission create this further problem? If we had had that clear mission around climate, this would be far less of an issue.

[Chi Onwurah]

Once again, my hon. Friend raises an excellent point, and indeed he brings together the themes of our amendments. He is right to say that if ARIA had a clear mission, there would be better understanding of the kinds of decisions and trade-offs that might well need to be made, and we could have a much better informed discussion around that. However, the fact is that we have neither a mission for ARIA, nor any opportunity to scrutinise the national security directives that might be made in the interests of addressing climate change, but also might be made in the interests of ensuring that we have oil drilling rights, or that we continue to fund minerals extraction around the world in order to support other research objectives. It is clear to us that we need to have this scrutiny.

As I indicated, there have been a number of debates on Intelligence and Security Committee scrutiny of other Departments, including in relation to the National Security and Investment Bill and the Telecommunications (Security) Bill. In those cases, despite that Committee being keen to scrutinise national security decisions, the Government have shown a great reluctance to allow parliamentary scrutiny of issues of national security. Some believe—I am not one of those cynical people—that this is because the Government are not happy with Parliament’s choice of Chair of the ISC. I am loath to believe that the Government would be so petty when it comes to such an important matter as national security, so I hope the Minister will clarify how we will have appropriate scrutiny of national security decisions made by the Secretary of State, as set out in this Bill, and why the ISC is not the right vehicle for that.

I will finish with two brief quotes in support of the amendment. In the National Security and Investment Bill Committee, we had the great privilege of taking evidence from Richard Dearlove, former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

He said:

“My view would be that the annual report has as much transparency as possible, but you are probably going to require a secret annexe from time to time. It is a bit like the reports of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which I dealt with frequently as chief. They and we were keen that they should publish their reports, but there comes a point where it is not in our national interest that some of this stuff is put in the public domain.”

––[Official Report, National Security and Investment Public Bill Committee, 24 November 2020; c. 21, Q23.]

That is the case here as well.

My right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has said:

“I do not want to give the impression that the ISC is looking for work, because I have been a member for a number of years and we are busy with a lot of inquiries—I have three or four hours’ reading every week looking through reports from the agencies. However, it is important that the ISC can at least look at the intelligence that lies behind decisions.”––[Official Report, Telecommunications (Security) Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2021; c. 143.]

That is all that we are seeking to achieve through this amendment.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Fourth sitting)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Daniel Zeichner

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

This is an opportunity; we can help spare the Government future embarrassment. Quite frankly, if we have this set of out-there people running the organisation and they then choose to appoint someone highly controversial, it could be extremely embarrassing. I remember occasions when Labour Secretaries of State had difficulties with scientific advisers. These are controversial areas, and I can foresee an extremely difficult situation. Without an ability to intervene, where does it lead?

[Chi Onwurah]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. It is important to understand that ARIA will be an independent agency, but it will be spending taxpayers’ money and it will therefore reflect the public and the national interest. If somebody is recruited who, at the time or later on, is found to have views that are abhorrent to society, or not fit to serve on the board for other reasons, by what process could or would such a person be removed from the board? If, for example, after appointment of a member to the board, it was found that they championed eugenic research or that they believed in anti-vaccination mythologies, for example, would there be any means by which they could be removed?

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[Chi Onwurah]

I thank the hon. Member for his contribution, which I think was made in a constructive sense.

I think the Chair of the Liaison Committee is making a point about that guidance. Clearly, it was not sufficient for David Cameron and it is clearly not proving to be sufficient in other cases. I hope that, as this amendment sets out, it is not simply about declaring. This is a critical part and I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to emphasise it. The amendment does not say they should declare conflicts of interest; it states that the Secretary of States makes regulations—detailed, I would say—establishing the procedures to deal with conflicts of interest. That is the key thing. This stems from the need to have a close working relationship with the private sector, which will give rise to conflicts of interest that may be quite complex, especially with new and evolving technologies, which may go on to complex and potentially international supply chains. Those conflicts of interest may be complex, involving equity stakes and so on. We need procedures to deal with them that are more detailed than the current general ones and which are specifically targeted at ARIA’s unique role.

Dr Regina Dugan, the chief executive officer of Wellcome Leap, effectively supported that proposal:

“The particular way that we work is through contracts; we do not actually do grants. I also think that this position of not taking equity is important, because the non-profit element of it is part of the differentiation, and we have an entire commercial sector that is good at assessing value and figuring out return on investment.”—[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Public Bill Committee, 14 April 2021; c. 48, Q43.]

What is different with ARIA is that it is, potentially, going to be taking equity, which can raise more complex conflicts of interest.

Professor Pierre Azoulay of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that

“the programme managers at DARPA and also at ARPA-E—the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy—have a fixed expiration date, which means they will need to go back to academia or to the venture capital firm or large firm that they left, and generally they want to do so with their head held high and their reputation intact. I think that that has created over time a norm of correct behaviour, if you will, and the absence of cronyism.”—[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Public Bill Committee, 14 April 2021; c. 38, Q30.]

We want to see that norm of correct behaviour established through supporting processes and procedures. I asked Dr Highnam,

“What should we be looking for in the directors and programme managers as the key positive part of the culture that ARIA should seek to build?”

He answered:

“Honour in public service is top of the list.”––[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Public Bill Committee, 14 April 2021; c. 39, Q32.]

I should say that I have not heard any Government witness or Minister emphasise the importance of honour as a key characteristic of board members. I think it is really important that procedures to deal with conflicts of interest are established. That view is shared by the Chair of the Liaison Committee, who has said

“After the dust settles over the Greensill affair, I suspect that we will find that the lack of judgment over David Cameron’s approaches to ministers is less important than the general failure to address what has become a casual approach to conflicts of interests amongst many in government and in politics…All can see now the general inability of the various codes and systems”—

to the points made—

“of oversight, such as the toothless advisory committee on business appointments, to provide sufficient transparency and accountability, which is why even its chair, Lord Pickles, wants reform.”

When the Chair of Liaison Committee, who is much respected on the Government Benches, says that, and when we are mired in scandals as a consequence of a lack of appropriate conduct and clear processes and procedures, I urge the Minister to accept the need at the very least for greater detail when it comes to avoidance of conflicts of interest. I urge her to accept the amendment to establish processes and procedures to avoid conflicts of interest in this new body, which is critical to our future economic and scientific prosperity.

[Daniel Zeichner]

It is a pleasure to be part of a Committee that you are chairing, Mrs Cummins. I fully endorse what my hon. Friend has said about the amendment. In fact, she has pretty much said it all, but there are one or two points that I want to add.

We are considering a profound set of issues. The evidence sessions showed some fundamental differences in culture between our country and the Americans, and it is their example on which we are largely modelling our initiative. To some extent it goes to the problem that we are facing as a country at the moment. For a long time, we rather considered ourselves not to be prey to such conflicts; we had a British way of doing it. Procedures were not necessarily written down, but there were understandings and people behaved properly. The sad truth is that over the past 20 to 30 years, somewhere that changed. That is the truth, and that is why we are in the current situation.

In the evidence session with the Americans, I was very struck at one point when we were pressing them on how they avoided conflicts of interest. Their response was a kind of American swelling of patriotic pride, as they said that they would not do that because it would somehow harm the American dream. [Interruption.] Exactly. People in Britain are different; it is not that we are not proud of our country or patriotic, but I would say that our patriotism is different from theirs.

[Chi Onwurah]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. Perhaps the fact that DARPA is part of the US defence establishment, with all the military honour and commitment to the defence of the nation, is one of the reasons why honour was held so high by the Americans. Does he agree that the absence of any mission and any departmental ownership of ARIA means that will not be the case in the UK?

[Daniel Zeichner]

My hon. Friend has touched on a very important point. It was something that I tried to draw out in some of the evidence sessions. I would point Members to an excellent book written a few years ago by Lord Sainsbury, an esteemed former science Minister. He talked about the differences in culture between Europe, America and the UK, and warned against just trying to transpose one system to another, unless one really understood the cultural context. We have not mentioned it so far today, as it has very much been about natural sciences and perhaps, mea culpa, engineering at the beginning, but the social sciences may be biggest challenge of all. That was touched on at one point in the evidence sessions when one of the witnesses said it is not just a matter of the technologies, but public acceptance and understanding of them. It will require some really innovative work from social scientists to understand how that will work.

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[Daniel Zeichner]

I feel passionately about this issue because I represent a part of the country that often comes in for criticism, in the sense that some people, even some of my colleagues, say to me, “You’ve already got everything—you shouldn’t be getting any more.” This is a complex argument. If some areas have a long tradition of doing well and competing internationally, we can hardly deny them the resources to carry on with their work. However, we are painfully aware that there is a danger of overheating in some parts of the country.

I chair the all-party parliamentary group for the UK’s innovation corridor, which is, essentially, London-Stanstead-Cambridge, and there is much discussion at the moment about the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford arc—the so-called golden triangle. The discussion seems to have been going on for years and years—certainly for as long as I have been in this place, and long before that. There is this hope that through the clustering effects we can do much better than we already do, and we look to examples in other parts of the world to see how it is done.

The reason I support this amendment is that this is not simple or easy. There have been many attempts to spread the Cambridge cluster effect. In fact, ironically, it often seems to cluster more and more in particular bits of Cambridge. It is very hard to get people to go to other places, but that is what we want to try to encourage. One of the ways in which we will do that is by having the data and the information. This is a great opportunity for ARIA to be mindful of that in its report. It is not a difficult thing to do. It should tell people what is going on and where it is putting its resources. If it is not working in the first few years, that would give us the opportunity to intervene and make a change.

[Chi Onwurah]

Once again, my hon. Friend has reminded me in his excellent contribution of an important point that I should have made, which was that the regional development agencies, abolished by the Conservative coalition in 2010, did report on regional innovation and science spend. Whenever I speak to the North East England chamber of commerce, I am told that one of the difficulties in making the knowledge exchange framework accessible or understandable is the lack of data on regional science spend. Part of the point of this amendment is to help restore some of that data.

[Daniel Zeichner]

That is absolutely right. One of the many tragedies of the last 10 or 15 years has been the fact that strong attempts by the last Labour Government to have a positive regional policy were swept away. Vince Cable, I think, described the destruction of the regional structures in 2010 as positively Maoist. Astonishingly, Lord Heseltine later came to Cambridge to bang the drum for regionalism outside the very offices that had been shut by his own Government a few months earlier.

We do not have a good record on regional policy in this country. We need to do better in future, for everybody’s benefit. Frankly, my city can do without the overheated house prices and the problems that come with everything being clustered in one place. It would be good for us, but also for everybody else, to get more balanced economic growth across the country.

We could do one small thing today—and I really do not see how it would be difficult for the Government to concede. I do not know how many Bill Committees I have been on—I have never yet had any success, although I live in hope. I make this plea, however, because I really do not see how the concession could be that painful.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Third sitting)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Daniel Zeichner

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Chi Onwurah]

The hon. Lady makes an interesting point and it raises two issues. First, how the CEO will be recruited and which rules for public appointment that process will follow is not clear in the Bill, so perhaps the Minister will provide that information. If the Secretary of State has to follow those rules, surely the amendment simply makes it clear what he—he in this case—has to do, and ensures focus on and recognition of the requirements. I do not feel that those two considerations are incompatible.

[Daniel Zeichner]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a fundamental issue. There is a real problem particularly around design, as Caroline Criado Perez identified in her book “Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men”—some of us attended the book launch here a couple of years ago. Extraordinarily, she pointed out that a swathe of design was done without women in mind at all, so crash tests and so on do not work because they are tested on the wrong people. That reflects the danger of having a board without a wide range of people. I read somewhere the other day that the armed forces in some country had only just discovered that women require different underwear from men. There is a blinds pot here, and it goes back to blokes in sheds I am afraid.

[Chi Onwurah]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, and I agree wholeheartedly. The fact that most technology and science has been designed and developed by a narrow demographic minority has great implications for our society. Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking of the wonderful inventions and technologies that we might have in the world had women and minorities been able to play a full part in our scientific development. My hon. Friend gave the example of how, as Caroline Criado Perez said in her book, so much of our world has not reflected the needs or interests of women, which is really important. I say to the Minister: the agency, which we will come back to a number of times, will fail. It is designed to fail. When it fails—not in general, but particularly—it needs to have the support of the public to understand the reason why it failed. To lock women out of the board, which is what it will effectively do, and not reflect the importance of diversity, will be a factor in public trust.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill (Second sitting)

Debate between Chi Onwurah and Daniel Zeichner

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Daniel Zeichner]

Q To summarise slightly—I do not want to become a grim AREPA—what we need is not only an ARIA that can do the things that we have been talking about today, but possibly other things alongside it to make it work. Would you agree with that?

David Cleevely: It is fine tinkering around with the engine and putting another turbocharger on it, but if the chassis, the transmission system and the wheels will not deliver what you need, all that energy and power is going to go somewhere. In an international system, all we will do is to help to accelerate other countries that are willing to buy our stuff from us. That is fine; I am all for international co-operation, but I really would like to see a bigger contribution to economic growth and productivity improvements in the UK.

Bob Sorrell: To pick up on what David is saying, ARIA is part of the solution. We need all the things that we have, effectively, to put us in a position to lead against the challenges that we face. We would not be in this position if we did not have such a brilliant research community in the UK to start with. It is fantastic that we are having a conversation about how we capitalise on that. It is not just £800 million for ARIA, which is just seed money to start it, but the investment in the overall infrastructure that will make many of these things possible. We need to commit to doing that as well, if the UK is really going to lead and be the test bed and demonstration centre for the technologies that it can lead in and deploy globally.

David Cleevely: I think Bob and I are absolutely in agreement on that.

[Chi Onwurah]

Q If nobody else has a question, I will take the opportunity to come back on that point, particularly on procurement. I remember having a great deal of difficulty persuading the Prime Minister that the American Department of Defence was far better at buying stuff from UK small businesses than the UK Ministry of Defence, as the figures show. What do you think we could do, or what should Government be doing, to enable, require or ensure that ARIA, or AREPA, better supports small business growth and, at the same time, addresses the issue of market pull?

David Cleevely: The general thrust of what AREPA—if we are going to adopt that word—is trying to do is right. There are a number of things going on in bits of defence, for example. You have DASA and various others playing around with projects within the different services, for acquiring different kinds of technology. I think the phrase “a bit more coherence” was used by Felicity. I think we need to understand what the map of that innovation system looks like.

I am pretty convinced that people are pretty smart—they will make the right decisions. You just need to give them the right structure, hence my point that serendipity does not happen by accident. These kinds of things happen because you have constructed systems and processes so that people bump into and talk to each other, and will exchange ideas. ARIA is fine as it stands, but it sits within quite a complex system. I would like to see much more recognition within Government about how complex that system is, and how it actually operates. I completely agree with you that it has been far easier, in all my companies, to sell stuff into the United States—particularly into the United States defence market—than it has ever been to sell into the UK.

Bob Sorrell: To build on that, I did a couple of terms at Innovate UK and we tried stimulating public procurement during that period. I think a lot of it is about the culture and getting it right, to allow people to invest in those smaller companies and different technical solutions, to move them away from the existing ones. We got that to work during covid. We managed to get it to work, and we managed to get ourselves investing and procuring things in a different way. That is why I keep coming back to that and looking at what we did differently then that allowed people to make those different choices. I think we have to take some of that learning to see how we can get public procurement to work in a better way going forward.