Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Monday 7th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Theresa May (Maidenhead) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not sure whether your reiteration just before I stood up to speak, that you hope that anybody who wants to withdraw will do so, was a hint. When I put in to speak in the debate, I had intended to speak on a new clause that has not been selected, but after looking at the other amendments and new clauses, there is one aspect that I want to speak on briefly.

I apologise to those Members of the House who were on the Committee, because I can see that there was quite an exchange on these matters in Committee, but I want to pick up on an issue that was raised by the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), who talked about the need for a mission and, in a sense, to restrict this organisation’s mission. He spoke particularly about climate change, which I know is a key issue. I was the Prime Minister who put the 2050 net zero emissions target into legislation, and the UK can be very proud of having been the first major country to do that.

An enormous amount of work needs to be done to ensure that we can take the decisions individually, as businesses and as a Government that will lead to net zero. Part of that will be about research, but as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) said, there are enormous numbers of people out there doing research and companies looking for products to sell that will help to get us to that position. It seems to me that we should not restrict the mission of ARIA. It is important to give this organisation the freedom to look widely. I say that not just in a blue skies thinking way, but also because I had some interaction with the American equivalent of ARIA, on which ARIA is based, when I was Home Secretary because it was doing some really interesting research and innovative work on issues of security.

In evidence to the Committee, Professor Bond suggested that ARIA should be about

“radical innovation, which is different from grand missions and grand challenges.”––[Official Report, Advanced Research and Invention Agency Public Bill Committee, 14 April 2021; c. 20, Q16.]

That reference to “grand challenges” was, I am sure, a reference to the modern industrial strategy, sadly now cast aside, which set out grand challenges but also set out the aim for the UK to be the most innovative economy, and ARIA can have a real impact in that area.

The challenge for ARIA is that it needs to be truly innovative, it needs to have blue skies thinking and it needs to be doing what other people are not doing, but it has to have a purpose in doing that. What I hope we will not see is an organisation where lots of scientists and people get together, think lots of wild thoughts, enjoy talking about them and possibly publish a few papers, but at the end of the day, there is no practical difference to people’s lives as a result of that. The aim of this is to do that innovative thinking but, in due course, for that innovative thinking—whether it is taken up by other scientists, business or whoever—to lead to a real improvement in people’s lives.

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I agree with the line that the right hon. Lady is taking, but she is missing out one really important factor in achieving the desirable objectives she has listed, which is that ARIA must be prepared to fail on a number of occasions and take high risks. Does she agree with that?

[Mrs May]

I do agree with that. Indeed, at the risk of scratching a sore for the Government, I would add that the modern industrial strategy made the point that, in terms of Government support for different areas of research and development, we must be willing to see some fail, because we cannot possibly know from the beginning everything that will be a success. That is important, but of course, I hope that ARIA will not be an organisation for which everything fails. It has to be prepared to have some failures, but obviously what we want to see is some really positive work coming out of this that can be of real benefit.

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I look forward to listening to other Members, particularly the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton, who has more experience than me in these matters.

[Graham Stringer]

I generally agree with the comments of the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller). Before I get on to the core of the Bill, I would like to pick up on two or three points from the debate.

The hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe), with whom and under whose chairmanship I am happy to have served on the Science and Technology Committee, will not be surprised to hear me not quibble but disagree with his interpretation of the Haldane principle, which we have talked about many times. The Haldane principle does not—and never did, from when Haldane proposed it at the end of the first world war—prohibit politicians from saying that we should prioritise health over defence, defence over transport, or anything over anything else. It is to stop politicians interfering in the detailed technical decision of who the best person is to do that research. When we get on to the core mission of ARIA, I would want politicians to do some of that, but not all.

Unfortunately, the SNP representative, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), is no longer in his place, but it was absolutely extraordinary that he prayed the Barnett formula in aid of regional levelling up. I used to travel on the train from Manchester to London almost every week with Joel Barnett, who regretted the Barnett formula almost more than anything else he had done in his political career. Without getting into a debate, let me say that he understood that it meant people in Glasgow got more public subsidy or support than people in Manchester or Birmingham in very similar situations.

Finally, I would make a point about priorities. Hon. Members have talked about climate change being the top priority; politicians are notorious for having lots and lots of top priorities, but as far as I have noticed, the top priority over the past 15 months has been dealing with covid and the coronavirus. Incidentally, after 25 conferences of the parties, the only thing that has had any impact on the steady increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been covid: the response to covid has reduced carbon dioxide for the first time since people started talking about it, essentially.

Let me move on to the core issue of ARIA and the points that have been made about it. Now that new clause 4 has been taken off the agenda, the debate is much less controversial than it otherwise would have been, but that does not mean that it is not difficult. As the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire said, we may not need a mission statement. I go some way along that path with him, having looked at the practical evidence from what happened with ARPA and DARPA in the United States. They were given—certainly at the start of the process when the Americans got frightened when the Sputnik satellite went up—almost complete freedom and a lot of money, and that led to the development of part of the internet. Some of the messenger RNA work that has led to the vaccines we have now came out of the ARPA process, as did drones and many other things. That was not because people were given a mission statement that said, “Develop messenger RNA”; it was because they were looking for problems to solve and to make the United States a more secure society, so they had the most general statements.

What UKRI has done is excellent in many ways, but it has lots of accountability systems. The person who put forward the original idea for doing work on quantum computers stated in evidence to the Committee that he would not get through the process now. Lots of questions are asked, some of them ridiculous. Several Science and Technology Committees ago, Professor Brian Cox came along and we talked about impact assessments whereby every research project has to state how much impact it will have on society. He said, “I have no idea how to answer that question and nor do my colleagues.” The normal metrics are about citations and numbers of papers. Even when I was a scientist, a long time ago, I used to see chemists churning out papers, sometimes on ridiculous things or with only slight variations just so that they could say, “We got our 10 papers this year.” That is not really a good way to do science. Compared with the complete freedom process, there is a rather bureaucratic system that is delivering good science—we win Nobel prizes in this country—but is not pushing back the frontiers of science as quickly as we might like. Having an organisation with a great deal of freedom is very important.

I differ slightly from the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire on one point, as did the Science and Technology Committee in two recommendations in the report that we produced in February, both of which effectively said that there should be a client side to the organisation. The reason for having a client side is not to stifle innovation. Having a client is useful, not in telling scientists what to look for or stopping them looking for completely new things, but in situations where they develop something. One of the problems with all the different ARPAs in the United States is that they find it difficult to get product to market because they do not have a client, whereas DARPA, which has the Department of Defence as a client, can take many of the innovations and inventions and develop them straight away. So there is another side to the total freedom approach.

I suppose that most politicians want the best of all possible worlds, so the ARIA I would like would, as in my new clause 2, have the Department of Health as a client Department. It could be something else, but I think that what we have been through over the past 15 months means that health almost speaks for itself. It should also have freedom to find problems that nobody else has thought of—that nobody in this House has thought of and many scientists will not have thought of. When Dominic Cummings came to the Science and Technology Committee, in less controversial terms than his last visit to the Joint Committee session, we talked in detail about how the science develops and we heard something really interesting that I suspect is true. Finding somebody who can chair a body such as this is more difficult than finding Nobel prize winners or people who are likely to win Fields medals. That is what will make this organisation successful or not—somebody who is bright or clever enough to understand questions that have not been asked before. Will that lead to cronyism? When we asked the current chair of UKRI, she was clear that very few people in this world could do this job, and we could probably sit down and write their names. Am I worried about cronyism? No. I am worried about not getting the right person.

Does anybody ever think about what networking means? At the top of science, the best scientists, and the people who get the grants and funding, are basically the great and the good and the really well networked. If Einstein cannot get a job in science and works in a patent office, or whatever the 21st-century equivalent would be, they cannot get into cronyism because those elites in our top universities, which are excellent, swallow up all the funding, and in many cases exclude the young and the brightest scientists. I am not worried about cronyism; I am worried about this body not getting the freedom it should get.

Under schedule 2, the Secretary of State basically keeps control. What makes the Bill difficult is that all politicians who vote to raise taxes want to control public money. That is in our nature. It is right, part of the democratic process—no taxation without representation —and a fundamental issue in a democratic society. To say, “Go off with £800 million and do your own thing” is difficult, but evidence from the States suggests that that is the best way to push forward the frontiers of science. My worry about the Bill is that there is too much control, not too little, and it might stifle initiative.

Finally, on initiatives, when the vaccine taskforce was set up we invited it to the Science and Technology Committee. I was not impressed that somebody was appointed without proper process, but the woman did an extraordinarily good job and she is now getting honoured. Sometimes in an emergency risks were taken—it worked a lot less well with the test and trace system. Sometimes we have to take risks. If we understand the way that scientific advances have been pushed forward, freedom as opposed to bureaucracy tends to work.

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I served on the Bill Committee, and I tabled various amendments at that stage, a number of which we have carried forward to Report. I was interested in a number of things that were said. On the supposed mission and purpose of ARIA, the Bill says only:

“In exercising its functions, ARIA must have regard to the desirability of doing so for the benefit of the United Kingdom, through…economic growth…scientific innovation...or improving the quality of life”,

and that it must

“have regard to the desirability of doing so for the benefit of the United Kingdom.”

It does not even have to do things for the benefit of the United Kingdom; that is not written in the Bill.

The former Chair of the Science and Technology Committee, the hon. Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe), spoke about high risk and high reward. I understand where he is coming from, but I do not know what that reward means or looks like. The reward is not identified in any way. I am happy for there to be a high reward, but I would like some idea of what that is supposed to be, so that we can measure whether it is successful.

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[Aaron Bell]

It really is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Angela Richardson), who is one of my best friends in this place; it was a pleasure to serve on the Bill Committee with her and with so many other hon. Members present. Along with the hon. Member for Brent Central (Dawn Butler), my hon. Friend and I served both on the Science and Technology Committee when it conducted a report on what at the time we were calling ARPA, and on the Bill Committee, so I have felt a real sense of personal involvement in the process as it has developed.

Since I will not speak on Third Reading, I would like to thank everyone who has been a part of the process, particularly the Clerks of the Bill Committee; the Minister for her dedication; and the Whip, whom I see in his place, for his help on our side of the Committee. It was a very good-natured Bill Committee, as others have said. Some amendments that we are debating today are rather similar to those that we rejected in Committee, but obviously that is how Report works. I will not labour all the same points again, but I will speak briefly on them later in my speech.

Science is cool again, because science has saved us in the past year. It is not just about the vaccines—extraordinary though they are, particularly the mRNA advances. It is also about what we were able to achieve with Sarah Gilbert’s Oxford project, which I am very proud is being manufactured in my constituency at Keele science park in Newcastle-under-Lyme; what we have done scientifically in finding therapeutics through our world-leading recovery trial; and the advances that we have seen in rapid tests to enable the incredible amount of testing that we now have in the UK.

However, I would like to add a note of caution, because covid has also exposed some of the problems we see in science and some of the problems in the networks that the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) spoke about earlier. I am talking particularly about the so-called lab leak hypothesis—the theory that covid emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than from a zoonotic transmission. We saw some of the worst of science and the media over that, but it was essentially shut down by a letter to The Lancet organised by the EcoHealth Alliance and its president, Peter Daszak, which squashed the theory on 18 February last year. Let us face it, the theory was assisted by Donald Trump and Senator Tom Cotton in the States taking the opposite view, and there was this whole politicisation of something that should have been about scientific inquiry. Speaking as a Bayesian, and based on everything I have seen, including the fact that the virus was in Wuhan in the first place, and on everything we have seen since, I believe it probably was a lab leak. I would go as far as to stake an 80% probability on that, and I think we should bear that in mind when we think about what we are asking of ARIA.

We do not want ARIA to get politicised and legalised, and we do not want it to fall into the same group-think that we have seen in some science, with a tendency to defend your mates and the people you know in your network and stick up for the institution rather than the principles behind the science. Instead, the DRASTIC group—the decentralised radical autonomous search team investigating covid-19—a bunch of people on the internet, correspondents and scientifically inquisitive people around the world, have managed to bring the lab leak hypothesis back to public attention to the point where it is clearly being actively considered by our intelligence services and our scientific community. I think we need some of that spirit in ARIA. We need that spirit of inquiry and of people outside the system getting their fair say in the system—the Einsteins in the Patent Office, as others have said.

On the amendments about cronyism, what we saw with the appointment of Kate Bingham was a complete disgrace. That is the sort of thing I worry about with some of the amendments to the Bill. I think “everyday sexism” is the term to describe the abuse she got on her appointment. We had the Runnymede Trust trying to go to court to get her appointment declared unlawful, the so-called Good Law Project seeking to crowdfund against her appointment, the leader of the Liberal Democrat party saying that she must resign and Labour’s deputy leader saying “this cronyism stinks”. The truth is that she was the best qualified person for that job. She was appointed at speed because of the circumstances we were in, and she has delivered in spades. If the rumours about her damehood are correct, she richly deserves it and we all owe her an enormous debt.

[Graham Stringer]

On the Science and Technology Committee, we often share similar views and attitudes to science, and I agree with the hon. Gentleman about the violence of the language that is sometimes used; it is completely unacceptable. When emergency decisions are taken, as they were with the vaccine taskforce and with Test and Trace, there needs to be an assessment afterwards. I hope he agrees that it would be a very different assessment for Test and Trace than it would be for the vaccine taskforce.

[Aaron Bell]

I thank the hon. Gentlemen for raising that. As a member of the Science and Technology Committee, he knows that we were looking at producing further reports into both Test and Trace and the vaccine programme as a result of our inquiry. I think the Test and Trace programme has actually got to a very good place now: the number of tests we are achieving is the envy of many other countries around the world. We could quite happily say that the vaccine taskforce is an exemplar for everything that went well, and that the Test and Trace programme has been more mixed—[Laughter.] The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) on the Opposition Front Bench laughs, but I think that the Test and Trace programme has helped our recovery from the worst of the covid pandemic. It is not the case that all that money has been wasted, as some Opposition Members say, and it is certainly not the case that it has all gone on cronyism; it has gone on the cost of the tests. That is what it has gone on. Contact tracing is hard. Some people do not want to be contact traced, but the role that Test and Trace has played is still significant, although perhaps not as significant as we hoped initially. I am sure we will move on with that in our inquiry.

Returning to what I was saying about the amendments seeking to give ARIA a mission statement, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) gave the House some good reasons to reject them. First, there is no point spending just a little bit of money on things that already have billions thrown at them; we should be looking at the things we do not necessarily even know about yet. I also think we should avoid circumscribing ARIA’s freedom. Likewise, on all the amendments that are trying to impose more bureaucracy on ARIA, the whole point is to do things differently, with freedom from all the usual processes and pressures that act on these sorts of bodies.

We need to empower scientists. My hon. Friend the Member for Ynys Môn (Virginia Crosbie) quoted Professor Bond, who said of freedom of information in his evidence to the Bill Committee:

“In terms of the level of transparency, transparency is a good and wonderful thing in most areas, but if you are asking people to go out on a limb to really push the envelope, I would assert that there is an argument, which has some validity, that you make it psychologically much easier for them if they do not feel that they are under a microscope. Many people tend to step back when they are there.”

Some of the burdens that people are seeking to put on ARIA would potentially circumscribe it and reduce its effectiveness. The Bill does still have a statutory commitment to transparency. We will have regular reports, and I am sure that our Committee will be regularly engaged not only with the Secretary of State, who is in his place, but with the chief executive and the chairman of ARIA, who will come to speak to us as well.

ARIA needs to have the freedom to fail. In that sense, it needs to be a macrocosm of all its individual projects that also need to have the freedom to fail. Let us truly empower ARIA by rejecting these amendments. Let us let ARIA take flight and shoot for the stars, not weigh it down and prevent it from ever reaching the escape velocity it needs and the chance that it has to boldly go—returning to the “Star Trek” references we had in the Bill Committee—not into outer space but to the very cutting edge of scientific research and discovery. If we pass this Bill today, it will be a great day for science in the United Kingdom.