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.