Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for his introduction to the Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, I had a feeling that we were being handed the Dominic Cummings vanity project. When I listened to my noble friend on the Front Bench, I thought otherwise. It survives beyond him and very much has a life of its own. I look forward to us helping to define that life.

I also look forward to further contributions from the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. There was much that I think he was planning to say which I look forward to hearing in Committee.

As my noble friend Lord Bethell said, we need to define the essence of what we are dealing with and what we need to get into focus. We certainly need to inject a greater sense of purpose into the legislation. Its purpose is to be different from the rest of the research landscape. There is much we can do in the legislation to make that a little clearer so that it does not duplicate the work of UKRI. There are great projects which are the subject of challenges and missions by UKRI and the research councils. We do not want to see those duplicated.

What is distinctive about ARIA? First, as the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate, mentioned, it is letting go of the Haldane principle—it is not that politicians should be determining the objectives of ARIA, but it should not be bound and controlled by a process of peer review and evaluation. These are missions to be pursued. The project teams may well want to do this in ways that would not necessarily engage the support of their peers. This is why it carries a high risk of failure in the minds of others. In the course of our debates, we need to focus on the legislation and the minds of those who come to run ARIA.

We also need to think about what we do well and where the gaps are in our research landscape. The noble Lord, Lord Patel, referred to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. I declare an interest—I was the MP who represented LMB. It has done a remarkable job and continues to do so. In the area of molecular biology, it has a focus. It did not always necessarily have a specific research objective in mind, but it was clear about its ability to bring together the very best people with the very best ideas to examine the issues. As a consequence, there were some fantastic discoveries —on DNA sequencing, monoclonal antibodies and X-ray crystallography of proteins. It was the recipient of 12 Nobel prizes—more than any other single research institute anywhere in the world.

We must not say that we cannot do this. The question is where and in respect of what should we do it in future? The LMB also gives us a sense of some of the ways in which ARIA could do its job, by bringing together the very best people into project teams and giving them a direct stake in the benefits—including the economic and commercial benefits—derived from their discoveries. The LMB has done this to the point where people have left the laboratory, set up businesses and then come back into LMB in order to undertake further original research with the objective of doing the same thing all over again with some new discovery.

We want to examine and make sure that ARIA as an agency can be an active investor and participant, perhaps even the originating promoter of these enterprises. I believe that this is the Government’s intention. Potentially, the best researchers in the world—in a different area from the LMB, perhaps in artificial intelligence or an information society—would come here to work with ARIA because they knew they would benefit, and we would benefit as a consequence. We really need to focus on this and make sure that this potential lies within ARIA’s remit.

When we come to examine the Bill, we need to look at it very carefully. Clause 3 is distinctive in mentioning what constitutes “particular weight”. What constitutes transformational research, although it is not called that? What do we mean by a high risk of failure? Clearly, we do not mean a 100% risk. I suspect we do not mean 99% either. The noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, had it right. We have to understand the risk-reward relationship. We are looking for projects where, if the chances of failure are relatively high, the rewards for success are transparently potentially even greater. This is why we are prepared to take the risk and to go down this path.

As we think about this, I hope that we do not slavishly copy the DARPA US business model. We should bear in mind the models that have been found to be successful in this country, including LMB. We should look, for example, at where we have deficiencies—such as in engineering and IT, where there are not sufficient opportunities. We should also look at the way in which Germany has used research institutes like LMB more widely in order to give that sense of continuing focus and objectives in a number of different areas of research. I look forward to our debates on the Bill.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Ravensdale (CB)]

My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendment 26 in my name. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Fox and Lord Browne, for their support for these amendments. I declare my interest as a director of Peers for the Planet and as an engineer and project director for Atkins.

There was much discussion at Second Reading of DARPA, the agency that has inspired ARIA. DARPA succeeded in changing the world because it took enormous gambles, failing often but with a few projects that succeeded, more than justifying the payouts and creating trillions of dollars in value. This freedom to take risks and to fail is its most important characteristic. That is exemplified by the second project that DARPA funded, Project Orion: a proposal for a manned spacecraft propelled by nuclear explosions. The head of DARPA at the time astutely stated that one of the main challenges was doing that in such a way that the occupants were not killed. While that particular high-risk project did not succeed, for obvious reasons, many others did: the internet, stealth technology and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, to name but a few.

ARIA certainly takes that lesson from DARPA to heart, as described in the Bill: getting bureaucracy out of the way and giving a high-calibre team based on programme managers the freedom to deliver high-risk, high-reward research. But there is another vital lesson to take from DARPA which I referred to on Second Reading: a clear purpose for the organisation. Everything that DARPA does is defined by its aim of ensuring the technological supremacy of the United States armed forces. In 1958, the USA fortuitously hit upon a combination of factors for a research organisation—a clear purpose, freedom to fail, programme-manager-led—that literally changed the world. The US has taken this purpose-oriented approach in all its DARPA derivatives since, including ARPA-E and HSARPA.

To have the longevity and political staying power that DARPA has demonstrated, ARIA needs to have a purpose, and that purpose needs to be closely coupled to the strategic goals of the nation. Foremost among those strategic goals are the UK’s net-zero and environmental goals. Giving ARIA a broad sustainable purpose will allow a flexible approach to research, while at the same time being aligned with the innovation strategy that highlights the need to direct innovation towards

“our top priority societal missions … like the climate and biodiversity crises”.

It will also ensure that projects and proposals that would be contrary to those strategic goals do not progress.

Attempting to reverse engineer DARPA is not a guaranteed route to success, but we need to take the benefit of real-world experience in learning the lessons of why DARPA succeeded and giving ARIA the best chance of success, which is what we all want.

We know how vital R&D is to achieving our net-zero and environmental targets. For example, the International Energy Agency has stated that almost half the emissions reductions required by 2050 are expected to rely on technologies that have not yet reached the market. In this area, what must be done—the key enabler to make net zero politically possible across the world—is to create green energy at a price point that is cheaper than fossil fuels. So, we need nothing less than revolution in net zero and environmental R&D to make our goals possible.

That brings me to the specifics of my Amendments 1 and 26. Amendment 1 is very simple. It states:

“ARIA’s purpose is to fund projects with high transformational potential in pursuit of a sustainable and resilient society, planet and economy.”


This amendment would give ARIA a broad sustainability purpose in line with the points I have made, and in that sense, I believe, would fulfil the need to orient ARIA towards alignment with the most important strategic goal of the nation, and indeed the world.

In crafting the amendment, I have listened carefully to feedback from the Minister during the progress of the Bill in the other place, in that the Government do not wish to unduly constrain ARIA. That is why the amendment is written around a broad sustainability purpose, not a specific net-zero objective or mission. My amendment is not about saying that other streams of research not specifically related to net zero or the environment cannot progress; just that any such streams must not be contrary to, and preferably support, the core strategic challenges. Having a broad purpose and key priorities in setting the direction of the organisation is what the amendment seeks to achieve, while still retaining the flexibility the Government want for ARIA.

My Amendment 26 would ensure that consideration for our climate and environmental goals is embedded within ARIA’s functions. It is modelled on similar government provisions in other legislation, including most recently in the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill. As noble Lords will be aware, the Committee on Climate Change, given the advice that there is a need for a coherent approach to achieving net zero, has made it a priority recommendation for 2021 to ensure that all government policy decisions are compatible with the Government’s climate commitments.

In this sense, the amendment would align this Bill with other amendments the Government have put forward across a range of recent legislation, such as the skills Bill, the Financial Services Act and the Pension Schemes Act. To meet our goals, we need carefully to consider the systems aspects of net zero and ensure that consideration of these goals is embedded into all government policy and legislation where it is practical to do so.

Given how critical R&D is to achieving our goals, I hope the Government will agree that such considerations really need to be present in this Bill in order to align it with their broader strategy. It is not about stopping projects that are not directly related net zero; rather, it is about ensuring that the impacts in the context of compatibility with our climate commitments have been properly considered and factored into decision-making. It is a question of consistency with other legislation.

In summary, consideration of sustainability goals and functions in the Bill has wide support across the academic community, including from Professor Richard Jones, the science policy expert who has been involved in much of the thinking around the formation of ARIA. The amendment provides an excellent opportunity for the Government to maximise the benefit from the £800 million of funding, to demonstrate to international partners at this critical point post COP a new model for climate and net-zero aligned R&D, and to develop the new technologies that we will need to help the UK and the rest of the world achieve our targets. Finally, it would ensure longevity and long-term political support for the organisation, irrespective of the Government of the day, something the whole of Parliament can get behind. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale. Two of the amendments in this first group are in my name, Amendments 25 and 27, and I want to speak to Amendment 27 first. It is grouped with Amendment 1 because we start by debating, quite properly, the purposes of ARIA as an agency. What is it here to achieve?

As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, said, we are not seeking to replicate DARPA but to learn from it. DARPA said that its sense of mission was part of the reason for its success. However, that mission in this context was originally

“to prevent and create technological surprise”.

That is an interesting concept—to prevent technological surprise happening to the American Government and, at the same time, to create technological surprise on its own part. One might say that you could substitute “create technological advantage” in the latter case. Interestingly, in more recent years, when DARPA staff were asked what they regarded as their mission, they said it was to be part of “shaping the future”. Indeed, I think that is where our starting point should be. We want ARIA as an agency to be part of shaping the future.

My problem with Amendment 1—actually, I do not have a problem with Amendment 1, because you could stretch the language of sustainability anywhere; that is its advantage but also its problem. I am not sure I understand what the board of ARIA, or its leading members, would interpret as being outside the scope of the sustainability criterion. Does it actually help them? I am not sure that it does. If anything, they might feel that it constrains them towards certain missions. The DARPA example we ought to learn from is that, in practice, it set out to define for itself a range of missions within the organisation.

I note that sitting next to the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, is the noble Lord, Lord Broers. I take from his Second Reading speech the thought that the programme managers are at the heart of this system, and the programme managers are chosen in relation to the programmes that DARPA is pursuing. I suspect the same will have to be true for ARIA—that it has to decide, “What are our programmes?” The programmes, in my view, might be mission-led—for example, related to adaptation to climate change—but at the same time they might be technology-led. For example, they might be to pursue AI and the data economy or to look at cell or gene therapy. There is a range of those possibilities. We need to give ARIA, as an organisation, the flexibility to decide the missions that it thinks fulfils its purposes. The missions will develop over time, but the legislation cannot change repeatedly over time, so the legislation should be sufficient to enable ARIA to select the missions it wants for the future.

My Amendment 27 is in this group. A report of July 2016 produced for DARPA about innovation in DARPA isolated four “sources of success”, as it put it, the first of which was the “limited tenure” of the leading executive members

“and the urgency it promotes”—

nobody was appointed for a period exceeding five years. The second was a “sense of mission”, which I was just talking about. The third was “Trust and autonomy”—both giving DARPA autonomy but also within the organisation trusting and giving autonomy to the programme managers in particular. The fourth was:

“Risk-taking and tolerance of failure”,


which of course we are setting out to incorporate into this legislation for ARIA. I add that DARPA interpreted this as meaning “Move fast and take risks”—do not spend a great deal of time trying to assess all the risks, because you could lose the opportunities in the process.

Amendment 27 seeks to replace the language of Clause 3, not because I have any objection to the purposes set out in Clause 3; my objection is to the drafting. It says:

“ARIA may give particular weight”—


I am afraid I do not understand what is meant by “particular weight” or how people who read it subsequently will know what that means in this context—

“to the potential for significant benefits”.

We are all agreed about “significant benefits” and we know what they are because they are in Clause 2(6) above. It then refers to

“research … that carries a high risk of failure.”

It is awfully close to being a piece of legislation that says that ARIA should look for projects that are quite likely to fail because those are likely to give the most significant benefits.

This is not the approach that legislation should take. Legislation should be more deliberate. I thought: what are Ministers actually looking to do in this clause? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, in his Amendment 1. Ministers—and we—are looking for ARIA to seek to have transformational effects. I think we are agreed about that. That is why Amendment 27 refers to “transformational effects”. I have also included a reference to the possibility of technological advance through

“the development and exploitation of … research”.

I do not think that is mentioned elsewhere but I think it is helpful because, actually, many of the advances that have occurred, including in DARPA’s programmes, were not themselves the object of the mission but were the result of the process of discovery and curiosity and the exploitation of research.

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My concern is that significant decisions could be made without proper non-executive oversight and agreement. For example, paragraph 17 of Schedule 1 allows for ARIA to enter into partnerships or joint ventures—I have amendments to probe these powers later on. I do not think it would be good governance for the executives to be able to vote on the use of, say, joint venture powers using a quorum which, in extremis, would have a single non-executive member present and clearly could be outvoted. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree with me that that would go against the spirit of requiring a majority of non-executive members on the ARIA board. I beg to move.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I am very glad to follow my noble friend Lady Noakes, who has typically managed to make some penetrating remarks about the prospective corporate governance of ARIA. All the amendments in this group, including mine, are probing amendments; that is the nature of debate at this stage. I hope the Government will take on board some of the things my noble friend has said, think about them carefully and perhaps bring forward their own amendments. What she had to say about the size of the board and the desirability of setting a limit on the number of executive members in order to keep the size of the board as whole under control makes perfect sense, as does the point about committees of the board.

My three amendments in this group also to try to establish how the Government are going to address the membership of ARIA. The first, as my noble friend said, is Amendment 3, which would remove the Chief Scientific Adviser from the board. By the way, this is no reflection on the Chief Scientific Adviser now, in the past or in the future. The point is that if we want ARIA to be independent and autonomy is an essential part of its role, does it make sense for the Chief Scientific Adviser, whoever she or he may be, to be sitting on that board trying to make decisions that are, almost by definition, different from the decisions being made by the rest of the research and innovation landscape? Indeed, the Chief Scientific Adviser is now the head of the new office for science and technology strategy.

If the CSA is leading the strategy for science and technology across the landscape, you might say that surely, they should be there, so that ARIA fits into that strategy. That is precisely the problem: ARIA should not be led in the same strategy as the other parts of the research and innovation landscape. Does it not create an inherent conflict of interest for the Chief Scientific Adviser to be setting the strategy on the one hand and departing from it on another, which is potentially what ARIA will be doing?

Amendments 5 and 7 in my name ask whether the appointment of a chair by the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy should be subject to some scrutiny. I have not gone to the step on this because I do not think the criteria are met for this to be an appointment that is subject to an agreement of or a recommendation from a committee of the House of Commons. However, given the existence of the Science and Technology Select Committee and the work it does in the Commons, it would be extremely helpful for it at least to have a hearing and to make some of its own remarks. That would help in the process of giving some democratic accountability to the initiation of the board itself. ARIA is going to autonomous, relatively independent and determined in large measure by its board. The appointments of the chair and the chief executive in the first instance are very significant in this regard.

Amendment 7 is precisely about the appointment of the first chief executive officer. I think the Government are currently searching for both chair and chief executive. The first chief executive officer appointment is not going to be made by the chair, so it is particularly important that there be a degree of objective scrutiny of that appointment. Subsequent appointments will be a matter for the chair and the non-executive members of the board.

I hope that the Government will at least recognise the potential merit of the Science and Technology Committee having a hearing in each case and offering its views.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I strongly support what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, has said regarding his Amendments 5 and 7. One of the amendments lost to the Committee was drafted very much along the same lines, although mine made it. This is a very important issue. The work of the Select Committee in the House of Commons is superb. The former Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, knows all about it.

This is a very important principle, especially as we are discussing something so new and there is so much about it that we do not yet know. It is essential for the Select Committee to explore these matters with the chair and chief executive designate. I would go further than the noble Lord and make the appointments subject to the agreement of the Select Committee. Indeed, I regard this as an important principle to apply in general across many appointments made by government, many of which could be made subject to the agreement of the appropriate Select Committee.

As to the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I found myself wondering, especially in regard to Amendment 2, whether her remarks about the ideal size of a board apply to the membership of a Committee stage of a Bill. Are we too large a group of people around this table effectively to conduct our business? I have an open mind on that, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister says in reply.

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[Lord Callanan (Con)]

This group of amendments relates to the balance that we need to strike between ARIA’s independence from and accountability to government, which is a difficult balance to draw. I shall begin with the amendments relating to the composition of ARIA’s board.

Amendment 2 from my noble friend Lady Noakes would limit the executives on ARIA’s board to just the CEO and the CFO. I appreciate the spirit of her amendments, trying to ensure that ARIA is an agile body with a streamlined board, but we have decided that the number of executives should be at least four. We have said that in the interests of representing the different executive functions within the organisations. Similarly, we have imposed a maximum number to try to keep it as efficient as possible.

As the majority of the board members need to be non-executives, in our view, that means that the minimum total number of board members will be nine, to ensure a majority of non-executives, and our expected maximum is 15. We believe that this is very much in line with standard practice. It is not usual for legislation to specify quoracy arrangements, and the Bill’s current provisions mirror some of the procedural arrangements that are in the Higher Education and Research Act. I am also happy to confirm that it is not our intention to offer non-executive members pensions or gratuities—I do not want to get into a definition of gratuities—but it is commonplace to ensure that the provision is available.

The drafting that we have used is also found in the Higher Education and Research Act 2017 for UKRI non-executives under paragraph 7(2) of Schedule 9, and indeed in the Energy Act 2013 for the Office for Nuclear Regulation’s non-executives under paragraph 11(3) of Schedule 7. I therefore do not see that Amendment 8 in the name of my noble friend Lady Noakes is necessary.

I turn to Amendment 3. In our view, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser will bring a somewhat unique perspective to the ARIA board in their independent advisory capacity, with awareness of science and technology across government. It is important to emphasise that he or she will be on the board in their capacity as an independent adviser, not in their science and technology strategy capacity. Indeed, it is perfectly possible for there to be two different people in those roles. It is also important to emphasise that they will not do so on a privileged basis. Other non-executives will have been appointed for their expertise, their wide experience and their special knowledge of different facets of the research and development system, and they will equally provide ARIA with independent advice in the best interests of the organisation and its objectives, as the Chief Scientific Adviser will.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Before my noble friend moves off this particular point, he will know, and the Committee will have observed, that in paragraph 18 of Schedule 1 the Government are proposing to take a power to substitute somebody else or some other office for the Chief Scientific Adviser. What my noble friend was just saying gave me the impression that this is something that might be contemplated in circumstances where the two roles that he refers to are held separately.

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I turn to the amendments spoken to by my noble friend, of which I am very supportive. They impact on the issues which occupy the other place today—maybe we should all stand back and wait to see how they play out there and then adopt whatever the House of Commons now requires of its Members. I support all these amendments, for all the reasons my noble friend explained to the Committee so well.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

The noble Lord was chastising the Explanatory Notes earlier for not explaining. On this occasion, I think the Explanatory Notes explain that the purpose of paragraph 11 of Schedule 3 is to exclude ARIA from the application of the Public Contracts Regulations. It does not include them.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

I apologise for wasting the Grand Committee’s time. I go back to the simple argument I made in relation to Amendment 16; in today’s global arena, setting an environmental, social and governance strategy is seen as an important benchmark of how a responsible organisation operates. This will be a responsible organisation, so it should therefore have that obligation. I do not understand why it should be excluded from passing that obligation on to people to whom it gives public money.

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Moved by

[Lord Lansley]

18: Schedule 1, page 10, line 24, at end insert “and other property”

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

This group consists entirely of amendments in my name. Very helpfully, they have been grouped together so you do not have to hear from me too often. Helpfully, it also groups together amendments which, from my point of view, are about the way in which ARIA acquires, creates, disposes of, retains and shares intellectual property. That is what we are really on about in this group.

Amendment 18 is the simplest and least interesting of them. It bears on this same area of the Bill and the question of the supplementary powers. In Paragraph 17(2)(b), where the power is given to

“acquire and dispose of land”,

the amendment would add the words “and other property”. I may be told that it is unnecessary, but I am not quite sure that I understand why, and why land is referred to while other property is not. Very often in legislation, “land and other property” is referred to.

Amendment 19 is in the same part of the Bill. It adds a further provision, concerning the powers that ARIA would have in connection with the exercise of its functions, for it to be able to

“acquire and license intellectual property”.

Maybe it has the power to do that, but I am not quite sure why other things are referred to as being supplementary powers and why the acquisition and licensing of intellectual property should not be referenced here. The purpose of my amendments generally is to try to give ARIA as much flexibility as possible in the way in which it acquires and uses its intellectual property. This amendment would say that it has the power to acquire and license, so licensing would be a specific power that it was able to exercise.

Amendment 22 gets us back out of the schedule and on to page 2. This is the point at which, under Clause 2, ARIA may attach conditions to the financial support that it gives—so imagine the relationship between ARIA and researchers, institutes, bodies, companies or whoever. Some conditions are referenced in Clause 2(4) about financial support being repaid, property being restored or information being provided. In Amendment 22 I propose that we want to make it clear that intellectual property forms part of those conditions and that it may be held by ARIA itself under those conditions or shared with the beneficiaries of support, obviously in ways that it chooses. From my point of view, ARIA wants to be able to hold on to intellectual property in some circumstances; it definitely wants to be able to share it with the beneficiaries of support in others.

In this context, the beneficiaries of support could include researchers who themselves become part of ARIA for a time. As I mentioned at Second Reading, one of the most notable characteristics of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which used to be in my constituency, was that its researchers were able to generate, from very basic research, some applications that had substantial intellectual property value. For example, Greg Winter was at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and made discoveries that led to monoclonal antibodies. If I remember correctly, he left LMB to form companies and exploit that, and then subsequently came back to LMB to do more research.

This is the kind of interchange that I suspect we want ARIA to be able to undertake. We want it to be able to bring people in and say, “We are going to share intellectual property with you. You will be able to exploit it and we will be able to exploit it. We can set up whatever arrangements are necessary in order to do this.” Amendment 22 would explicitly allow ARIA to enter into those sorts of arrangements with those who are the beneficiaries of its financial support and indeed those who are working directly for it as short-term researchers. The nature of the programme managers and researchers will generally be fixed term and quite short term.

Amendment 28 is in a slightly different part of the Bill—the part that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, was talking about earlier, concerning grants made by the Secretary of State to ARIA itself and the conditions that may be applied. I am suggesting that there should be conditions, but conditions that in this case allow the Secretary of State, having made grants to ARIA, to allow the agency, having acquired intellectual property and value out of that research, to retain and reinvest it. That is a potentially not insignificant provision. On some occasions, for example, the LMB was generating more by way of revenue back to the Medical Research Council than the Medical Research Council was giving it in grants. DARPA in America, if I understand correctly, was investing in messenger RNA for vaccine production from 2013 and that has led to Moderna, which has valuations in the tens of billions of dollars.

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[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, may I ask the noble Lord a question, to be absolutely clear about his Amendment 22? Let us say that ARIA comes up with a fantastic invention. Would his amendment enable ARIA to vest the intellectual property of that invention, which might be worth millions, both in itself and in the researcher or researchers who were personally involved in discovering it?

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

The purpose of Amendment 22 —this is in the part of the Bill about what conditions ARIA might attach to its financial support—is to give ARIA the flexibility to attach whatever conditions it wishes. In some cases, it might give financial support and not seek to retain intellectual property, or it may enter into an arrangement which says that it retains all the intellectual property, or somewhere in between. However, that is for the circumstances of the individual project rather than something mandated in legislation.

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, the more I look at this and listen to the wisdom of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and, previously, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, the more curious paragraph 17(2) of Schedule 1 becomes, because of both what is in it and what is not. I am prepared to accept the thesis of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, that “and other property” would add some copper plating to it.

I hark back to the end of the response of the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, at Second Reading, where I popped up and asked a question about property. The Minister was clear that this would include ARIA purchasing pieces of research equipment. Research equipment can run to many tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds—at least as much as property—yet, somehow, that does not appear to be on this list either. There is perhaps work to be done to understand the objective of this list. I am sure that the Minister will say that it is to afford ARIA the amount of freedom that it needs, but it seems to be quite a selective list, and I wonder what it was based on in the first place.

I turn to the other amendments before us and suggest that perhaps the most important is Amendment 28. It is a great shame that, because of a prior appointment, my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones was not able to be here for this section at least because, when it comes to intellectual property, most of us know that he has a strong expertise. I know that he will read very closely the Hansard report of this and, far from marking the homework of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I am sure that it will be the Minister’s homework that he will be marking. I hope that we can return to it.

Looking at Amendment 28, it seems eminently sensible to legislate for success, because we want this to succeed. If this succeeds, there should be a flow of revenue coming back into ARIA. We need to understand that this will not then become a cash cow for other parts of BEIS or indeed the Treasury. What this amendment therefore seeks to do—and, I think, would achieve—is to put that ring-fence in place; for that, the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, should be congratulated.

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[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend, particularly because, as far as I can tell, we are all agreed that ARIA should have the flexibility to do these things. Where we not quite all in the same place yet is that it seems to me that the legislation can make that clear and it would be helpful if it did. Maybe we will come back to it and my noble friend will enlighten me. She seemed to say that in paragraph 17 of Schedule 1 the reference to property encompasses intangible and intellectual property but the word “property” is not there. That is my point. The word “property” needs to be there in order for intangible and intellectual property to be encompassed within it.

There are circumstances—for example, where the Secretary of State makes grants to ARIA and where ARIA provides financial support—where my noble friend seems to be saying that it will have the flexibility to enter into all these agreements, to share its intellectual property, to secure the benefits and retain them and reinvest them but that does not need to be in the Bill. Yet, we have these places where there are little lists of what the conditions might be like or what the provision might include. They may be non-exhaustive lists but the only things that seem to be listed are things that constrain ARIA, rather than making it clear that intellectual property, which is at the heart of its activity, is something where it should absolutely have this kind of flexibility.

I know the Treasury would hate to have it in the Bill that ARIA can retain intellectual property revenues and reinvest them for its purposes but that is exactly why we should put it in the Bill. I think we will return to this issue. I gladly give way to my noble friend.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

I reassure my noble friend that paragraph 17 is not an exhaustive list. ARIA can develop and exploit scientific knowledge and this covers it getting a patent, under Clause 2(1)(b). The supplementary powers in paragraph 17(1) of Schedule 1 allow acquisition and disposal of property including intellectual property—

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

Paragraph 17(1) allows anything.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Is that not the point?

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[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

Can I ask my noble friend the Minister to ensure that when she comes back she explains the relationship between paragraph 17 in Schedule 1 and Clause 2, which sets up ARIA’s functions but seems to go beyond functions into things it can do? Paragraph 17 then comes and says again the things it can do. I find that confusing and that confusion may be shared by other noble Lords.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

I am grateful to my noble friend. We are going to return to some of these issues and I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 18 withdrawn.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 22nd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Fox (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Browne, for raising this very interesting issue. Without repeating verbatim what I said at Second Reading, one of the highlighted issues in delivering technology into the market in this country is not the invention phase but the scale-up—getting it beyond technology readiness level 7 and then getting it into the market and scaling up.

I discourage the noble Lord from using the phrase “predator” for venture capital. The money has to come from somewhere to deliver that scale-up, and I doubt that the Government will be the provider. The issue and challenge is that the VC industry in the United States is massive compared with what is available in UK-based funds, and thereby comes the lack of centricity about which the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, spoke. We should very much consider looking for a way for businesses that have an invention to take it to market. To some extent, this amendment is looking at the other end of the problem; it stops stuff happening rather than allowing it to happen in a different way. I am not sure that it is the answer, but its spirit is very important.

There is another unintended consequence I would be concerned about. In the event that an entity could avoid a takeover, by taking money from ARIA it would in essence lock itself away from any commercial activity that could be beneficial to it as a company, the country and ARIA’s intentions. A one-size-fits-all approach—“We give you the money and you can’t do any commercial activity”—is not in the spirit of what this seeks to achieve. Looking at this again, we need to find a way to deliver that scale-up story. That is really the issue facing this country, not the invention bit that somehow this agency is focused on.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I very much appreciate that the noble Lord, Lord Browne, has brought forward his Amendment 30 in particular. It is very helpful to our debate and rather complements the discussion we had about ARIA’s ability to exploit the intellectual property it gives rise to and to place the right kind of conditions. We will come back to that on Report; it is important that we do.

I hope the Government can, if not necessarily amend the Bill extensively, certainly make it clear that ARIA, in exercising its functions, should seek not only to promote economic growth and benefit in the United Kingdom but to make sure that—in so far as the public have subscribed through ARIA to the creation of intellectual property—the benefits of that will accrue to ARIA and, potentially, the Government. I would say that they should accrue to ARIA, with the ability to promote follow-on research activity as a result. I am sure the noble Lord is not planning to press his amendment and recognises the risk associated with its structure and the chilling effect it might have on the entities that might otherwise apply for grants, assets or activity.

I will just inject this thought. A number of noble Lords here in Grand Committee were contributors to our discussions on the National Security and Investment Act, and I hope my noble friend the Minister will be able to give us some specific assurances about how Ministers can use National Security and Investment Act powers to secure the protections that the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, is looking for.

I worry that there may be gaps, because the National Security and Investment Act has its own criteria and thresholds, and this may relate to activities, projects and assets that do not fit within those criteria—but we none the less want the intellectual property created by ARIA to be protected in some way. So there may be a gap and we need to explore whether there is one and, if there is, how it might be secured: how ARIA, and Ministers through ARIA, can protect the value that might be derived from the intellectual property to which its projects give rise.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to give the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, the very strongest support. We have talked around the issue of how we can solve the problem of losing our brilliant companies, because it is stunningly serious—and it is not just Arm and Nvidia. I am very pleased because I wrote to the Government about six months to a year ago to plead that the competitive agency should look at that, and it is at least looking at it now. The company Solexa was taken over by Illumina, having pioneered the successful way to decode DNA, and Illumina’s revenue flowed into the many billions—after the key technology had come entirely from the UK. These things should not have happened.

I ask whether we can add to the requirements on ARIA that incentives should somehow be given to our City, which has an appalling record of missing opportunities to invest in UK industries—creative industries in particular. It is all very well to talk about the scale of American venture capital: that is a very good point, but we can be very selective. Then perhaps we would not need a very big scale to look after companies such as Arm and Solexa—there was Verata before them, and several others that have left here almost with the certainty of being successful, and yet somehow we could not find our own funds to support them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill as introduced to the House added ARIA to the lists of reserved bodies within the three devolution Acts. That approach would have conferred on ARIA the same constitutional status as UKRI, which is the UK’s primary public R&D funder. More importantly, it would also have ensured ARIA’s independence by placing it outside the competence of the devolved legislatures.

Since then, my ministerial colleagues and officials have been in close discussions with all three devolved Administrations throughout the passage of the Bill, on the need for legislative consent Motions to be passed in the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly. During those discussions, principled objections were raised to the creation of ARIA as a reserved body. As a result, we have worked—as I am sure the Committee would expect us to do—to develop an alternative way of guaranteeing ARIA’s independence, through something called the “agreement on the independence of ARIA”, which all four Administrations of the UK have said that they will abide by, and which will sit beneath the overarching memorandum of understanding on devolution.

I am delighted that the text of this document has now been agreed by all four Administrations of the UK and that we have been able to share it with noble Lords in advance of this discussion. I apologise for the fact that we were not able to provide the opportunity for noble Lords to consider this document at greater length before the Committee. However, I wanted to share it as soon as possible, albeit fairly shortly in advance, rather than not sharing it at all. I am confident that this agreement will allow ARIA’s important characteristics to be protected. On that basis, I am content to remove, through Amendments 37 and 40, the reservations that we originally placed in the Bill.

ARIA will remain a single UK-wide organisation able to find and fund the most exciting projects in all regions and nations of the UK. Through the agreement, all four Administrations of the UK have committed to upholding the important principles of ARIA’s strategic autonomy, operational autonomy and minimal bureaucracy.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My noble friend referred to the agreement having been shared with us, but I am not aware of having seen it or where it was shared with me.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My noble friend also sent a letter to me following last week’s Committee; that was shared only with the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. My noble friend’s department has form on not sharing widely with those in Committee when things are circulated. Can he go back to his department to ensure that all active members of the Committee get access to all the information circulated in response to its deliberations?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

It was my intention to contribute to this debate briefly. Since the Minister has referred to the agreement, I probably ought to read it and digest it before venturing any additional comments.

I just point out to the Minister that the timing of all this is very odd. As far as I could have seen, and as I understood it in preparing for this debate, as of 9 November the Scottish Minister was not in the position of thinking that there was any agreement with the Government. He wrote to the convener of the Scottish Parliament on 9 November, set out the sequence of events stretching back to March, said that the Scottish Government, like the Welsh Government, were not in a position to agree legislative consent and gave the reasons he would not do so.

These amendments went down on 12 November, I think, so somewhere between 9 and 12 November the Government decided to do this thing. During the course of last week, they must have immediately entered into discussions with the devolved Administrations on the basis that they would give legislative consent. They have made clear all the way through that if it was not reserved, they supported the principle of the Bill and would give legislative consent to it. Now we are presented with this agreement and the consequences.

My noble friend is absolutely right; there are consequences. We had a debate last Wednesday about the role of the Chief Scientific Adviser in relation to the board, and the devolved Administrations have been looking for their chief scientific advisers to have the same status as the United Kingdom Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. I think that is not what they are looking for now; it clearly would be unhelpful were that to be the case. It would have been helpful to have told us about that in the course of that debate last Wednesday and to have prefigured the fact that we come on to this at a later stage.

At the end of the day, they get money. Unless I am missing something, if you shift something from a reserved matter to a devolved competence, Barnett consequentials flow from that. What are they? How is the budget to be divided? Is it to be divided or is it going to be added to by way of the Barnett consequentials? I think we should be told that. Will that therefore mean that we anticipate that the other devolved Administrations will make grants to ARIA? Does this agreement suggest that there will be a pooled budget with grants made by the Secretary of State but that because of the nature of ARIA’s independence the grants will be in a global sum with few, if any, conditions attached to them and the devolved Administrations are agreeing to that? It begs questions. At the moment, I for one cannot debate the consequences of this set of changes because we do not have the information on which to do it. Even if we maybe let it through on the grounds that it helps to get the legislative consents through, I think we may have to return to some of the consequentials on Report.

[Baroness Randerson (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, because he shares some of my concerns. I thank the Minister for communicating the information earlier today. Obviously I will read the actual agreement with great interest, but of course one accepts the noble Lord’s assurance that this agreement stands and will operate effectively.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, raises a good point about the previous objections of the devolved Administrations, which now appear to have been withdrawn. At what date can we expect legislative consent Motions to come forward from the devolved Administrations?

I also have a detailed question. In an earlier debate, my noble friend Lord Fox made the point that having a purpose is not at war with the concept of independence for an organisation. I was thinking of that point as I read the paragraph in the Minister’s communication that says the agreement

“allows for the UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor, and scientific advisors or equivalent representatives on behalf of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to jointly communicate to ARIA the scientific challenges relevant to the policy priorities of their respective administrations. In keeping with ARIA’S autonomy, there will be no obligation for it to direct funding towards these issues.”

That worries me slightly. I am not arguing that ARIA should follow the separate views of the four nations, but if all four nations, via their scientific advisers, were to say to ARIA that one of the most important government priorities should be the road to zero carbon—I very much hope they would say that—would the Government really be happy for ARIA to invest in and champion a technology that increases CO₂ emissions? There are serious, fundamental points, rather than points of detail, that we still need to take into account on ARIA’s purpose and it working with the grain of government policy—not dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” but working with the grain of public policy.

Finally, I underline the concerns and questions about Barnett consequentials. I will not repeat the point; it is absolutely clear that this will have implications. I look forward to the expressed views of the devolved Administrations and the detail of the agreement when it becomes public. Given the information we have been given today, I am sure it will be possible for us to scrutinise it before Report.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

The Minister, I think, wrote in the hope that I might accept the generous offer of a meeting instead of taking this amendment to a vote. This is my position: I gratefully accept, as I am sure other Members will, the invitation to have a meeting with the Science Minister so that these concerns can be addressed. I do not accept, however, that in accepting that offer, I give up the right to ask your Lordships’ House to vote on this amendment. Clearly, the Science Minister wishes to explain how he is going to deal with these concerns in the way set out in the letter. He ought, of course, to do that for us. But much more importantly, he ought to do it from the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons, and I hope that this House will give him the opportunity to do so by agreeing to this amendment.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, said, there are six amendments in this group, five of which have my name. I am grateful to noble Lords who have also put their names to those amendments, including the noble Lords, Lord Browne, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Broers, and the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. I am particularly grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Broers, not least because of the impetus I derive from his contributions in our Committee debates—about the centrality of the acquisition, use and deployment of intellectual property to ARIA’s activities being central to its task. If I may be so presumptuous, I am looking forward to hearing some of the noble Lord’s arguments again, if he has the opportunity, because I am sure he will convey the arguments behind a number of my amendments better than I could. If it is not impertinent on my part, let me say that we will miss his counsel and advice when he retires from the House at the end of this week, and I am glad that we have the opportunity of hearing his advice today before that happens.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to one simple fact: at present, nothing at any place in the Bill refers to intellectual property. It refers to property and rights, and I suppose Ministers might say, entirely correctly, that they are within that thought. But intellectual property is the essence of what ARIA will be doing. As the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, said, the Minister most helpfully sent us a letter explaining the centrality of intellectual property activities. Ministers wish for ARIA to devise its own strategy for the intellectual property it creates. For that to happen, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said, we want the Bill to make it clear to ARIA, in law, what its powers and responsibilities are. The powers it needs in relation to intellectual property need to be specified.

There are other ways in which Ministers have decided to say that ARIA can set conditions for its financial support, but it does not refer to the conditions relating to intellectual property. Ministers can attach conditions to the grants and funding they give to ARIA, but those do not refer to intellectual property; listed in the schedule are the supplementary powers that will be available to ARIA to do various things, including create partnerships and join ventures and companies, but they do not refer to intellectual property.

The purpose of five amendments in this group is to fill those gaps; Amendments 2 and 3 propose that when ARIA is providing financial support to its research projects, among the conditions it can apply are those relating to the acquisition, disposal, retention and assignment of intellectual property. It clearly ought to be able to do those things. Ministers may say that of course it can because it has the necessary powers. So why are other things specified but not this, since it is central to its activity?

When we look, for example, at the supplementary powers in the schedule given to ARIA, various things are mentioned. It can

“borrow money … acquire and dispose of land … accept gifts … form and participate in partnerships … and … form companies;”

but the schedule does not refer to the ability to acquire, retain, assign, license or dispose of intellectual property and related rights. Indeed, even where it refers to acquisition and disposal of land, as we discussed in Committee, it does not refer to land or other property. These, it seems to me, are all the ways we should better define, in legislation, what ARIA’s powers are.

I have left out one amendment. Amendment 8 relates to the Secretary of State providing grant funding to ARIA. Clause 4 says that this may be subject to conditions, and the only condition which is then referenced is the provision under which sums paid by the Secretary of State to ARIA may be repaid with or without payment of interest.

We have not been provided with, is the framework document that will establish the relationship between the Treasury and ARIA as a publicly funded body. That being the case, if we regard something as important enough, should we put it in the legislation so that it has to be addressed in the framework document? When ARIA, as a result of its funding, has rights relating to intellectual property, can it retain the revenue derived from that investment, or does it have to give that revenue back to the Secretary of State? The frame- work document will, I suspect, provide a reference to this; we know this is important.

In my former constituency, the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which the Medical Research Council provided funding to, had major research projects, including with highly talented individuals who created immense value. They were enabled to participate in those projects and retain some rights in that intellectual property, and the LMB itself retained revenues which then, by way of negotiation, served to enhance and sometimes substitute for the grant funding received from the Government. If ARIA is to have a strategy for the funding it receives from the Government, it needs to know in advance whether it can retain revenue derived from investment. Can it retain it, or does it have to give it back to the Government? All Amendment 8 does, essentially, is require the Government, when they provide such grants, to set out under what circumstances that revenue can be retained by ARIA for further investment in additional projects to meet its functions or whether it has to pay it back to the Government.

That is where I want the most specific assurances from my noble friend that the Government will provide that opportunity to ARIA. In the absence of that, at a later stage, when we reach Clause 4, depending on the nature of the assurances I receive from my noble friend, I may wish to test the opinion of the House. But we will leave that for a later moment.

For the moment, I am very glad to express my support for what the noble Lord, Lord Browne, said. There is a wider issue, of course there is, but we do not really know the extent, for example, to which the National Security and Investment Act is enabling Ministers to intervene and to protect intellectual property in this country. In any case, that is in relation only to national security issues, and the intellectual property that we are concerned about here will inevitably go much wider.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Lansley Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 9th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his opening remarks and his comprehensive repetition of what George Freeman, the Minister, said in the other place. To a degree, I am reassured. My concern is how I will know that the Government live up to the undertakings implied in the words of the Minister. I will come back to him in a moment. I intend to be brief.

I particularly thank the Minister for his generous remarks about me, but they ought to be shared by a significant number of Members in all parts of the House who contributed to the debate we had on the amendment. That the House was minded to support the amendment had more to do with Members’ combined advocacy than the way in which I introduced it. I also thank the Minister and his office for earlier this week drawing my attention to the Government’s recent announcement that Dr Peter Highnam has been appointed as ARIA’s first CEO. This man seems uniquely qualified to do this job; I suppose DARPA is the only place that he could have got the experience. He is also uniquely equipped to negotiate the framework agreement with the Government, which will be important to how ARIA works.

I accept that the Commons reason is not challengeable, and I do not intend to debate that or to divide the House on the noble Lord’s Motion. However, as the Minister and his office helpfully reminded me a week ago, while speaking to my amendment on Report, I set out my wish to hear the Science Minister address at the Dispatch Box the issues that prompted the amendment in the first place. At least I should address what he said, and I will do that for a few minutes, with the leave of the House.

In the other place, George Freeman acknowledged the importance of ARIA having a duty to the taxpayer to ensure that the intellectual property generated by its investment in R&D is commercialised to the advantage of the UK economy primarily, and to ensure that it is not

“haemorrhaging intellectual property of value to the UK.”—[Official Report, Commons, 31/1/22; col. 86.]

That reflects what he said to a number of noble Lords who met him before Report. To paraphrase another member of the Government, he gets it and clearly seems to understand the issue. The question is whether the Government have a plan to address this issue and will be able to share the development of the plan with Parliament properly. That is what I want to concentrate on now.

Turning to what the Science Minister said, he first referred to the terms of the amendment and argued that, as drafted, it added only examples of the conditions that ARIA may attach to financial support and, as it already has a general power to do just that, it represented a drafting change that cannot be accepted. There is no merit in this argument. The fact is that the Bill, as already drafted by the Government, already has examples of conditions that ARIA may attach to financial support in Clause 2. They are almost certainly there because the Government want to highlight those powers, not because those examples need to be there to give those powers to ARIA. Our amendment simply adds to their existing list and has a similar motivation—to emphasise and highlight the importance of this power.

On the specific issue of predatory overseas acquisition of IP through foreign takeover of UK businesses where there has been substantial public investment in R&D—there are many past examples of this, to the detriment of the UK economy—the Minister reassured the other place that the National Security and Investment Act 2021, which fully commenced in January, already provides a relevant and sufficient framework for the Government to scrutinise acquisitions on national security grounds. The Minister also referred to a broader strand of work that is under way to enhance that statutory framework, including other unspecified complementary measures designed to help the Government strengthen our protections. Perhaps the Minister can expand on that. He made some general references to it, but I am not clear as to what work is going on. I think the House would benefit if there was further specification. It may not be appropriate to do it now, but maybe it could be spelled out more clearly at some time in the future.

The Minister reassured the House that the Bill already provides the Secretary of State with a broader power of direction over ARIA on issues of national security, but the amendment was never intended to intervene in the Secretary of State’s powers. This is of limited comfort, as my honourable friend Chi Onwurah pointed out, national security in the relevant legislation, the NSI 2021, is narrowly defined, and it does not include economic security, despite attempts by Labour to expand the definition in that Act so that it would include this. It therefore does not address the issue of intellectual property and its economic value.

The Minister then pointed out that the because of the terms of Clause 2(6), ARIA must have regard to economic growth or economic benefit in the UK, and the mechanism for scrutiny by government and Parliament will be in what the Minister refers to as the framework document. This is a weapon which the Government deploy regularly to see off amendments to the Bill. On Report, the Minister used the potential of the framework agreement, and what it could include, five times in debates. The problem is that none of us has seen the outline of the framework document, or even the Government’s bid for the negotiations of what the framework document will include. Until we see that, there is no way that any of us can judge its merit as a mechanism for dealing with the issues that we have raised.

Perhaps during the negotiations that can at least now commence after May, when there is a CEO, the Government will undertake to make regular statements, or at least one statement, to the House about their negotiating position, so that we get some sense of whether the many concerns about this Bill that the House has shared with the Minister can be allayed by the framework agreement or document. There is now a CEO and these negotiations can begin.

Finally, in the debate that took place in the other place, at col. 87, the Minister turned to the question of how ARIA responds to the UK’s strategic interests in science and technology more generally, where these may not fall under national security. I think he played his ace there: drawing attention first to the integrated review, which he did not expand on, and then to the role of the new Office for Science and Technology Strategy and the national science and technology council, and the Government’s ambition to ensure that there is a serious, strategic machinery of government showing a commitment to the strategic industrial advantage of UK science and technology. The Government’s argument is strong: we should be persuaded that this will deal with these issues because the Government have a core to their infrastructure that will drive these ambitions. There is a fundamental difficulty with this, however: it is impossible to find, in any government documents, any information about either the Office for Science and Technology Strategy, or the national science and technology council, which is a sub-committee of the Cabinet, other than that they exist and a very broad outline of the first organisation, which is designed to service the second one. I do not know how we are supposed to evaluate the strategic machinery of government, unless we know what they do.

There is something worrying happening to the accountability in our Government at the moment. There is a proliferation of sub-committees of the Cabinet. We have gone from having about six to having 20 in a matter of months. Almost every area of important public policy now has one or more such sub-committees to deal with it. The pattern appears to be—it certainly is with climate change—a strategic sub-committee and an implementation sub-committee. You can find out nothing about what any of these committees do.

So that we know what the relationship between Parliament and these committees now is, I will quote for the benefit of the House what Alok Sharma, the COP president, said to your Lordships’ Environment and Climate Change Committee in answer to a very reasonable question, in a questionnaire sent by the committee, about these two key pieces of machinery for climate change. The committee asked him:

“Are the two relevant Cabinet Committees”—


that is, the strategy committee and the implementation committee, which he chairs—

“expected to continue in the long-term, and what plans does the Government have to increase transparency around their proceedings?”

The answer to this is in a letter, which is on the committee’s website. I will read it in short, because in the first part Alok Sharma gave the impression that they are intended to continue, but he said:

“With respect to Committee frequency and transparency, it is a long-established precedent that information about the discussions that have taken place in Cabinet and its Committees, and how often they have met, is not normally shared publicly”.


So that is it.

If that is to be it for this infrastructure, which sits at the heart of the development of science and technology and ARIA, we will not find out anything. I honestly have no way of knowing whether I should be reassured by what the Minister said in the other place, if that was his ace card. To paraphrase my honourable friend Chi Onwurah in the other place, the Minister has set out that he shares our concerns, but I am afraid that I cannot really assess whether he has a plan to address them, because there is a whole part of what he intends to do that I will never be allowed to know.

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, I very much appreciate what my noble friend on the Front Bench has said by way of response to the several debates that we had on the Bill about the centrality of intellectual property, and its protection and exploitation by ARIA. Often in your Lordships’ House, we send amendments to the other place, and occasionally—perhaps often—we find that they are not given the weight of debate at the other end that we think they deserve. On this occasion, it did, and I was much reassured by the Science Minister’s response, and by the appointment of Dr Highnam to the chief executive post.

I want to raise one question. In the midst of the many reassuring things that were said, including that the powers exist for ARIA, or through the NS&I Act, the framework document remains. I raised one issue on that in an amendment, which was whether under the framework document ARIA would be able to retain and reinvest the exploitation of intellectual property arising from its investments so as to create a growing activity in support of its mission of disruptive innovation. I hope that will be incorporated in the framework document. It was not referred to, so I hope that my noble friend will take note of it and that the Treasury will allow this to happen.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not detain the House for long, not least because many of the points I wanted to make have been ably made by my noble friend Lord Browne. I welcome much of the Minister’s speech and the appointment of the chief executive-designate. Considering his background, I venture to suggest that by the time he leaves the post he is about to fill, the name of the agency may have changed from ARIA to DARIA. That would reflect his personal background and possibly the way in which developments may move.

I also welcome what was said in another place by the Minister for Science, who the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, referred to. I have a high regard for the Minister for Science and thought that he addressed seriously some of the concerns raised in our debates. However, to echo my noble friend, I point out that the National Security and Investment Act still provides too narrow a basis for protecting what really matters about ARIA, which is the intellectual property that it is going to generate. It is a strange position to be in, but I think that the definition of national security, which does not take into account the economic security of this country and the intellectual property attached to that, would be a mistake and possibly a loophole. I regret the fact that the framework document to which the Minister referred has not yet been seen by anybody, and I hope that in the months and years ahead we will be able to debate that framework and the new scientific architecture, which the Minister rightly referred to, because we are moving into a new era.

It is not often that Governments anywhere launch a new agency with so little idea about what it will do and how it will do it. Nevertheless, I wish it well, and I hope that in the months and years ahead when we come back to discuss ARIA and its development we will be able to see the progress it has made, which I for one hope it will.