Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, like others in the innovation space, I have come strongly to support ARIA. I know from my experience as an Innovations Minister that UK research bodies—UKRI, NIHR and our research charities—are really productive. We mobilise rigorous, independent teams on research investment decisions; we administer research to a very high standard of accountability and efficiency, and we validate results through rigorous peer review—these are very commendable qualities. That research bureaucracy is why the payback from UK investment is very high.

However, I have had lived experience of big gaps in our national capability. Our research bureaucracy moves at its own pace, to its own beat, and is not always aligned with our national priorities. During the pandemic, I found time and again that the very reasons why we are so successful in peacetime are exactly the reasons why we were not good in an urgent situation. Investment decisions took too long, creating consensus around complex challenges was sometimes impossible, and validation processes were sub-scale, inconclusive and took an inordinate amount of time. That is why I strongly support ARIA. In the heat of battle, too often I was tearing my hair out with the committee-led, network-based, consensus-building, “I’ll get round to it in my spare time”, monthly-meeting approach. What I yearned for was a high-risk approach, which is what ARIA brings to the party.

RECOVERY, the Vaccine Taskforce, the Therapeutics Taskforce and the innovations and partnership team within Test and Trace were all unorthodox arrangements that delivered massive results for the country. That is why I agree with the Minister that there is a clear appetite for high-risk, high-reward research with strategic and cultural autonomy. This will usefully challenge the current orthodoxies, and the experiment will usefully inform reforms in how we do research.

I want to echo one concern raised by other noble Lords, about the strategic direction of ARIA. I am gravely concerned that the emphasis on autonomous objective-setting does not give the impetus and direction necessary for success. My experience is that the most impactful returns come when there is a clear outcome from the very beginning. By way of a metaphor, perhaps I may tell you this: I remember when the Prime Minister made generalised appeals for help during the pandemic. The response was often creative, exuberant and completely unfocused. I remember in one instance the NHSBSA having to stand up nearly 3,000 operators to triage and assess the various offers that had come in. When the final analysis was done, it found that only a handful had any value. But when we published our requirements, we frequently had our needs met within days. This principle applies to even the most brilliant research organisations run by the most brilliant research managers.

I appreciate that we are looking at enabling legislation. I have brought enabling legislation through the House myself, so I understand that many practical arrangements will be solved in secondary legislation, but I want to emphasise two higher-order matters that need to be clearly answered by the Minister at this stage. If they are not, I fear that the process of secondary legislation will be a difficult challenge.

First, I would really like the Minister to give a commitment that ARIA will be orientated around a small number of clear, societal challenges, and play a role in stimulating cross-disciplinary innovation. I would like the Minister to talk a little about where in the Bill that commitment could or should be articulated. If that commitment and orientation can be put into the Bill, what will the framework for agreeing those challenges be? I appreciate that this is not the place to make those decisions today, but the Bill needs clarity now from the Minister on how those decisions will be made, how success will be assessed and how they can be updated as ARIA continues its business.

Secondly, there is a question in my mind about what stage in the innovation cycle ARIA will be targeting. In the 21st century there are very few unclimbed mountains in the world and very few apple-drop moments, when a single inventor has a profound brainwave that transforms thinking. During the pandemic, it was my expectation that this global catastrophe would elicit a number of breakthroughs, particularly in the field of pathology. I spent a huge amount of time with Israelis, Singaporeans and South Africans looking at, for instance, spit tests, breath tests, the MIT cough tests, Covid dogs, a test that involved radar and a test from France involving testing wastewater.

In fact, the two biggest breakthroughs involved high-risk strategies and they were programme-led, but they were iterations of two very long-standing technologies. The first, the lateral flow test, was first used in 1956 and is commonplace for pregnancy, HIV and drug tests. It was incredibly tough to find one that worked to our satisfaction, but when we did, we could send out hundreds of millions to catch asymptomatic illness. The second was the good old PCR test, which benefited from an army of robots automating the process, meaning we could get from a few thousand a day to nearly a million a day. These were unromantic iterations, but they were hard-fought and delivered a huge amount of value.

The same could be said of vaccines. It took the Oxford team just three days to essentially retool a malaria vaccine, though it did take them 300 days to prove efficacy and safety. On therapeutics, dexamethasone was first synthesised in 1957, but, after 10,000 clinical trials, it proved to work around the world.

For that reason, I believe ARIA should be focused not on new scientific discoveries but on transformational applications.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Bethell Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

So, finally, I agree with what was said by the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, about the record of the noble Lord, Lord Broers. We will miss him from today and on future occasions.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to the centrality of intellectual property to the Bill and, in particular, on two themes, very briefly. First, on the protection of intellectual property, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, spoke very movingly and interestingly about the concerns that were brought up by George Freeman in the meeting that we had. It was reassuring to hear George Freeman speak so clearly and emphatically. That is why Amendment 2 is very interesting and worth a really good look.

I am very concerned that, in our efforts to build Britain into a science and research superpower, all that we will be is a laboratory for others to borrow from and that we will simply supply the unicorns of the future from overseas. Somehow, we have to capture that value here in the UK.

The second point, which the noble Lord, Lord Broers, spoke so movingly about and selected such a good example of, is about how we encourage the breed of entrepreneurs that I hope will come out of ARIA. We must encourage this. We should not have something like Amendment 17, which somehow suppresses the entrepreneurialism of our researchers and scientists. I have been to Kendall Square on the MIT campus, next to the Harvard campus, which is buzzing with excitement, with start-ups and major new enterprises feeding off the intellectual energy of those great universities. That is what we need to have here in the UK.

On Clause 1, I am torn between my noble friends Lord Lansley and Lady Neville-Rolfe, who both put their arguments so well. I would like to split the difference and agree with the noble Lord, Lord Browne, that these are things that I would like to hear about from George Freeman from the Dispatch Box. That argument has merit.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, I am largely going to speak to and support Amendment 1. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for raising these important issues on the question of ARIA’s ability to impose investment conditions. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, I do not see those as bureaucratic constraints.

One key issue in delivering technology into the market in this country is the commercialisation and translation of that technology. We have seen report after report telling us about that. The UK is a top nation for the global impact of its R&D but not so effective at innovation, where it ranks 11th in the world for knowledge diffusion and 27th for knowledge absorption, according to an October 2021 report by our own BEIS department. The greater risk averseness of the VC and private equity market for technology start-ups in the UK compared to that of the US is common ground in the investment community itself; we need to hang on to our unicorns. As a result, outside fintech, we have seen too many high-technology companies sold to overseas companies at too early a stage. We have heard examples from the noble Lords, Lord Broers and Lord Morse—and, in Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Browne, took the risk of quoting the Daily Telegraph.

The National Security and Investment Act will impact on that to some extent, but in a limited number of sectors involving national security. Without this kind of scale-up support we cannot become—to coin the phrase so often used by this Government—a science and tech superpower by 2030. This excellent amendment will, I hope, ensure that those making decisions about future financing at least have some friction in the system to ensure that they have to think twice about where and how to raise capital for the future; at the same time, it gives ARIA skin in the game to help it do so. The Minister has said in correspondence that he shares the objectives of this amendment, so I hope that he will agree at the last stage to accept it.

As regards the other amendments by the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, in this group, I agree in principle with many of the issues that he has raised and the support for intellectual property rights that should be retained by ARIA in certain circumstances. He had powerful support from the noble Lord, Lord Broers, whose expertise we are certainly going to miss when he retires from the House.

As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, says, we have only this Bill today. We cannot solve all the problems relating to the taking of stakes by companies or our research institutions, but we can put this into ARIA’s terms; I very much hope that we will do so today.