Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Edward Miliband Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)]

Let me start by saying that across the House we share the admiration for British science. It is one of our most brilliant national assets, employing nearly 1 million people directly and generating extraordinary value for our country. As the Secretary of State eloquently said, the work on vaccines has been truly remarkable. We commend our scientists and everyone involved for their work. Indeed, I hope the Secretary of State will not mind my saying that it is a successful example of an industrial strategy; the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) probably shares my view.

I turn to the details of the Bill. I should say from the beginning that we support the Bill; we have some issues with it, but we certainly support its aims. I just want to say something about the wider context, because I found it slightly remarkable that the Secretary of State did not mention the fact that we are two weeks from the start of the next financial year but the scientific community does not know its budget, and the Government appear to be contemplating significant cuts to its programmes.

The Secretary of State said last week to the Science and Technology Committee, which is chaired by the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells, that the Government

“are talking the talk of a science superpower…but…we also have to walk the walk.”

Quite. We support the intent of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, but hon. and right hon. Members across the House should be aware that while the ARIA budget is £800 million over this Parliament, UK Research and Innovation’s annual budget is £9 billion. Last week, UKRI published a letter confirming that the BEIS official development assistance allocation will lead to a £120 million gap between its allocation and the commitments that it has already made. It warned of cuts coming on that scale, and the House should be aware of where those cuts are going to be. Potential areas include climate change, antimicrobial resistance, pandemics, renewable energy and water sanitation. Those are the kinds of things that that funding addresses. Mr Cummings was also at the Select Committee meeting—I will return to him shortly—saying that ARIA would solve the problems of civilisation. That is all very well, but I fear that these cuts seem to be coming right here, right now; and we cannot launch a successful moonshot if we cut off the power supply to the space station.

The other fear that we have is that the threat of cuts does not end there, because there is no clarity on how to cover the huge cost of the UK’s ongoing participation in Horizon Europe programme. To be clear, this programme used to be funded not from the science budget, but from our EU contributions. I say to the Secretary of State that it surely cannot be right to take money from the science budget to fund our participation. He will know that there is real fear in the scientific community about that.

I will give the Secretary of State the chance to intervene: does he not agree that cutting the science budget to fund Horizon would be exactly talking the talk but not walking the walk? I will happily give way to him if he wants to tell us. Maybe he can tell us when we will get clarity—when will the scientific community get clarity on how the Horizon money will be funded? He does not want to intervene, but the science community deserves clarity. We support ARIA but it deserves clarity. These are people’s jobs. This is incredibly important work and I hope he is fighting with his friends in the Treasury as hard as he can to give people that clarity and avoid the cuts.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

rose—

[Edward Miliband]

Maybe he is going to tell us the news.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

The right hon. Gentleman will know from his years in government—appreciably, many years ago now—that these conversations with the Treasury are ongoing, and we hope to get a satisfactory result.

[Edward Miliband]

We shall look forward to the Secretary of State getting a satisfactory result. I am not sure that I always got a satisfactory result with the Treasury, although I was in the Treasury at one point, at least as an adviser. This is very important and, as I say, people’s jobs and livelihoods and the scientific base of this country, of which we are all so proud, depend on it.

Let me come to the Bill, which we support. The Bill is important—the Secretary of State said this—because there is incredible work going on in the scientific community, but there is consensus that there is a lack of a mechanism to identify, build and fund truly ambitious, high-risk, high-reward programmes. We recognise the case for an independent agency that operates outside the established research funding mechanisms, but we feel that the Bill requires improvement.

I guess our concerns cohere into a different view about the role of Government and the lessons of DARPA, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) talked about, on which in some broad sense—maybe not in the Secretary of State’s mind, but in others’ minds—ARIA is modelled. It is impossible to ignore what we might call the spectre of Dom in this debate. He was at the Science and Technology Committee—chaired by the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells—and he does rather hang over this Bill. He is its sort of governmental godfather. In his telling, DARPA’s success—I think this is important—is simply because the Government got out of the way and let a bunch of buccaneering individuals do what they liked. It is definitely true, as I understand it, that DARPA has important lessons about the need for the culture that I talked about, including higher reward and, of necessity, a higher chance of failure, but it is simply not true that DARPA was somehow totally detached from Government. DARPA had an obvious client—the Department of Defense—a clear mandate around defence-related research, a clear synergy in its work with the procurement power of the US DOD and, incidentally, abided by laws on freedom of information.

I want to suggest that there are two different views about ARIA: one is that we should let the organisation simply do what it wants, relying on the wisdom of a genius chair and chief executive; and the other subtler and, in our view, more sensible approach—one more consistent with the lessons of DARPA—is that Government should set a clear mandate and framework for ARIA and then get out of the way and not interfere with its day-to-day decision-making. I also believe there is a democratic case, because the priority goals for the spending of £800 million over this Parliament should be driven by democratic choices; not about the specific items that it funds, but about the goals and mission.

That takes me to the three points that I want to make: first, about the mandate for ARIA; secondly, about its position in the wider R&D system; and thirdly, about accountability. I will try to emulate the Secretary of State’s brevity—perhaps not exactly his brevity, but as much as I can.

The deputy director of DARPA says about its success that

“having national security as the mission frames everything.”

The Secretary of State said to the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells at the Science and Technology Committee:

“If I were in your position, I would be asking what the core missions of ARIA are.”

I think the point that Dominic Cummings made, or I am sure would have made, is that this will be a job for the people we hire who are running the organisation. The Secretary of State went on:

“It will be up to the head of ARIA to decide whether he or she thinks the organisation should adopt what the innovation strategy suggests…or reject it.”

I really understand the wish to give freedom to ARIA, but surely it is for Government to shape and not shirk the setting of priorities, and it is not just DARPA where we can learn that lesson. Moonshot R&D—the Japanese agency established in 2019 to fund challenging R&D—has seven specific moonshot goals set by the Japanese Government, and my understanding from the evidence taken by the Science and Technology Committee is that the UK scientific community agrees with that idea.

I notice the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) putting his head in his hands. He has done that before when I speak, but let me just make this point in seriousness: £800 million is not in the scheme of things a huge amount of money, certainly when compared with UKRI’s budget. The concern is that unless, as the Select Committee said, ARIA focuses on a single or a small number of missions, it will dilute its impact.

Take the net zero challenge. I believe it is a challenge of political will and imagination, but it is also a technological challenge. If it is the No. 1 international challenge, as the PM said last week, and if it is the No. 1 domestic challenge, as I think it is, why would it not be the right mandate for ARIA for at least its first five years? Indeed, Professor Richard Jones and Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who perhaps have even greater claims than Dom to being godfather and godmother of this idea, said that climate change would be an ideal challenge on which an agency such as ARIA would focus. To be clear, providing a mandate does not mean micro-managing decisions, and it would be grossly simplistic to suggest otherwise.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me to my feet, first, because I think he does a tremendous disservice to Dominic Cummings. Without his inspiration, this Bill would not be before this House. Secondly, I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman is aware of the chart that Mr Cummings showed while giving evidence to the Select Committee. It showed a large circle of areas with potential for people to investigate and a smaller segment of that, which is where all of the foreign Governments and our Government focus their research, precisely because they are driven by the political decisions, frameworks and missions that politicians set. Does the right hon. Gentleman not think there is some opportunity for us to do something slightly different and without the sticky fingers of Government interfering?

[Edward Miliband]

The hon. Gentleman and I have a respectful disagreement on this: I think it is for the Government of the day and this House to say what are the massive national priorities. Then it is for an organisation such as ARIA to fund the research in the high-risk, high-reward way that I mentioned. That is simply a difference of view. Without a clear policy mission, we risk a fragmented approach.

I will make this other point, which is that the chair and chief executive will be in the somewhat unenviable position of having to decide which Government Departments to prioritise. Of course they can work with different Departments, but let us set a clear challenge for the organisation.

The second point is not just about the question of mandate, but how it sits in the life cycle of technological innovation and how it works with other funding streams. ARIA is born of a frustration about the failure to fund high-risk research. We do not disagree with that thinking, but that makes it especially important that it does not duplicate the work of existing funding streams. Let me give an example. Innovate UK, part of UKRI, is supposed to be a funding stream to turn ideas into commercially successful products. I do not know from reading the Government’s statement of intent what Innovate UK would fund that ARIA would not and what ARIA would fund that Innovate UK would not.

The vagueness of the mandate for ARIA is matched by vagueness about where in the innovation cycle it sits. I was not doing Mr Cummings a disservice on this score by the way, because I support the Bill, but he said to the Select Committee:

“My version of it here would be…to accelerate scientific discovery far beyond what is currently normal, and to seek strategic advantage in some fields of science and technology…I would keep it broad and vague like that.”

He went on to say that he would say to the agency:

“Your job is to find people…with ideas that could change civilisation completely”.

I am sorry, but that is too vague, and I do not believe it unreasonable to say that there needs to be greater clarity about where in the life cycle ARIA sits.

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I think the right hon. Gentleman at heart is a secret Cummings-ite, because he is constructing a number of paper tigers to try to find offence with a Bill that he fundamentally wishes his party had thought of first. What possible incentive would a new disruptive ARIA have for trying to replicate the work already being funded by existing councils? It will have access to all of that body of work. What incentive would it have to try to replicate it when it could pursue new, disruptive and exciting opportunities?

[Edward Miliband]

That just makes the case; if what the hon. Gentleman says is the case, would it not be a good idea, as the former Science Minister Lord Johnson suggested, for ARIA to share information with UKRI, for the two bodies to work effectively together and for the agencies to enter into a memorandum of understanding, which will benefit us all? If it is as easy as that, I am sure that will not be a problem for ARIA. I have been called many things in my time, but a secret Cummings-ite? Perhaps not. I have been called worse things. If it is as simple as that, they should be able to work together, and I hope the Secretary of State will reflect both on the mandate question and on this life cycle question.

Thirdly, let me turn to the issue of Government oversight and public accountability. We believe it is right that ARIA should be given operational independence from Government. As I say, we support the idea of specifying high tolerance to risk and failure. The challenge for public policy is how to establish this tolerance of failure. Obviously it starts with the agency’s leadership, where the Bill is also very vague on what attributes or skills the Secretary of State is looking for. My understanding is that this position is not going to be recruited outside the normal civil service procedures—okay, I think I understand the reasons for that—but it cannot just be decided on the whim of the Secretary of State, brilliant though he is. I hope the Minister will clarify this during the passage of the Bill. There does need to be an answer on who else from the scientific and research community will have a say on the decision and how this person is going to be chosen, given that, in the Government’s own words, they will have

“a significant effect on the technological and strategic capabilities of the UK over the course of generations.”

On freedom of information, we just strongly disagree with the Government. I do not think there is justification for ARIA’s blanket exemption from FOI. The Government say it is necessary for agility. DARPA is subject to the US version of the Freedom of Information Act. The Secretary of State and the Minister might be interested to know that DARPA, in the US, had 47 of these requests last year, so this is hardly an obstacle to getting on with the day job. There is a disagreement here about how we give public confidence. Just saying that everything should be secret does not give public confidence. Accountability matters to the public and we should have confidence that we can defend the approach of the agency. Tris Dyson from Nesta Challenges has said:

“The public will expect to know what’s happening with public money and greater risk requires transparency and evaluation in order to determine what works.”

We also believe there is a role for the Science and Technology Committee in scrutinising ARIA’s role. Perhaps that can be clarified as the Bill progresses.

I am conscious of time, so let me say in conclusion that we face enormous challenges as a society, including new threats from disease, as tragically illustrated by the pandemic, the advent of artificial intelligence and, as I have said, the climate emergency. So the challenges we face are huge, but I believe—I know this is shared across the House—that the ingenuity, know-how and potential of our scientists, researchers and others is as great as, if not greater than, the challenges. If we support them, they can succeed. ARIA can support our scientific research. We support this Bill as a way to add capacity and flexibility to our research and innovation systems. It needs to be done in the right way. On the Bill and what is happening to British science, we will support the Government when they do the right thing but we will also call them out on cuts to science funding, and during the passage of the Bill we will seek to improve it so that it can strengthen our science base and do what is required to help us meet the massive challenges we face as a society.