Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Oates Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 17th November 2021 Grand Committee

Amendment 1 aims to tackle what have been called the “wicked problems” preventing the UK and the world from meeting the sustainable development goals, goals that the UK and the whole world are signed up to solving by 2030. So this amendment, or something like it, is truly essential for this Bill in order to set this new agency on the right path, and it should be mission rather than technology led.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 1, 21 and 26. While the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, made a compelling case for his Amendment 27, I would probably part from him on the wider issue of mission. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, who set out quite a few of the issues, and particularly for his underlining once again that the Treasury is at the heart of undermining almost every single good idea that ever occurs to government.

I regret that I was not present for the Second Reading of this Bill as I was on a train en route to the COP conference, but I had a chance to read the record of the debate. Much of it has been reflected in today’s debate, particularly the point, made by a number of noble Lords, that ARIA lacks the clear purpose which they feel will be necessary if it is be successful. Noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, pointed out again today that that purpose was at the heart of the success of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Davies of Brixton, and my noble friend Lord Fox, all gave some guide as to what such a purpose might be in playing a key role in addressing issues of sustainability and climate change.

Amendment 1, as we have heard, would establish a broad sustainability purpose for ARIA. Amendment 21 would set the core mission in a slightly different way, very much focused on net-zero emissions, and Amendment 26 is again different, focusing on ARIA having to give due consideration to the net-zero target and other environmental goals. As this debate has indicated, there are essentially two questions to be determined. The first is whether there should be a specific purpose or mission for this body, and whether such a purpose or mission would help or hinder it in delivering the sort of transformative success that we all hope it will deliver. The second question is, of course, that if we conclude that a sense of mission would assist, what that mission should be.

On the first question, although the Secretary of State and others in the other place were happy to cite DARPA and its successes as the model when extolling the virtues of this proposal, the reluctance to give it the clear focus that DARPA had seems a mistake. DARPA had a clear mission, a purpose: not to be surprised by technology and, hopefully, to surprise others with it. It had a clear focus, which was the threat posed by the Soviet Union and the need to maintain the competitive scientific and research advantage over it that Sputnik and other programmes had caused the US to worry it was losing. That sense of purpose was critical in driving that early success. I fear that without a clear focus for our advanced research agency, it will lack the direction and urgency that DARPA had, and which is required to achieve transformational change.

It is clear to me that a purpose, a mission, will be very important to ARIA’s success. If so, surely there is no more compelling case than to focus the work and energy on the climate and ecological emergency that we face. That is a long-term issue, as the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, pointed out. Tackling those challenges will require massive innovation and ingenuity, and the development of practical applications from that.

If the purpose of DARPA was to protect the national security of the United States by retaining its scientific edge against the threat of the Soviet Union, today, the threat from climate change, although very different, is some orders of magnitude greater. It is an existential threat to all humanity, and to bring a halt to climate change or stop it running completely out of control will test us to our utmost—it will test our ingenuity, our practical application and our ability to deploy all our resources. If we do not harness our advanced research agency to that task, future generations will surely look back on such a decision with a real sense of astonishment.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said that DARPA was really about shaping the future. This agency should be about shaping the future, but we must ensure that there is a future to shape. Unless we tackle the climate and ecological emergency, there will not be.

[Lord Broers (CB)]

My Lords, I shall make just a few comments. I declare my interests, as I did on Second Reading. I spent most of my active life, 40 or 50 years, doing things that ARPA was doing—that we were doing in IBM in the United States—and I have spent more recent years working with the Queen Elizabeth prize and now with the Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States. I declare my membership of that academy, the Chinese academy and the Australian academy, as well as the royal academy here.

The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, raised a lot of cogent points, but the mission of ARIA—I wish “Invention” was replaced by “Innovation”, but that is a small point —must be, to distinguish it from UKRI, to take projects all the way through until they are fully implemented, fully available for people to use, commercially sensible and affordable, and to solve an important problem. A lot of what UKRI does is the essential discovery and understanding of how the world works, and these things should be different.

One thing is very much in common: you need creative people. In ARIA you probably need creative engineers—there will be scientists as well; most of these things are mixed—and creative engineers are no different to creative musicians or creative artists. They do not like being told what to paint, what to compose, how to compose or how to paint. That would turn them all away.

I test my credibility by quoting Donald Rumsfeld. ARIA is all about “unknown unknowns”. I have been sitting down for the last two hours reading all these amendments; we are trying to tie down ARIA so that we understand what it will do, when it will do it, how often it will report on doing it and everything else. That is not what we are trying to create. We will destroy the thing before we ever give birth to it.

I support these amendments, because the challenge that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has come up with, and others have supported, is the climate problem. That is huge and wide. I do not think it is a constraint that will really trouble creative people at the moment. In fact, I have met a lot of people who are very successful in one field of research and have abandoned that and moved into the field of climate and what they can do about it, because they feel that is the best place to apply their creativity and intellect. I urge the Minister and everybody who will take this through: let us not strangle the poor thing before it begins.

Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Lord Oates Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 14th December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

In moving Amendment 5 in my name, I will briefly comment on Amendments 4 and 19. Had there been space in our procedures, I would have attached my name to Amendment 4; I note that it has broad cross-party support. It addresses the Climate Change Act and imposes a legal requirement to comply with the duty of Section 1 of that Act, which concerns net-zero emissions. That is an important and good way of expressing it, and I hope that we will see that eventual outcome.

Amendment 19 talks about ARIA having an ESG strategy. This would not be my preferred way forward. In a way, it is better than nothing, and I see the point that was made by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, about lining up with other vaguely similar institutions. However, we have seen a great deal of criticism of ESG as not always being a very strong or effective tool.

My Amendment 5 calls for ARIA to include sustainable development goals 1, on poverty, 2, on zero hunger, and 3, on health and well-being. These are internationally recognised and accepted goals, with targets within them to which the UK, like every country on this earth, is signed up. Surely these should be the goals of every element of the Government, both direct and arm’s-length parts.

I thank the Minister and his staff for engaging with me in discussions on this, but before I get to that I want to address why it is so important to talk about poverty, health and hunger in this ARIA Bill. When people talk about what ARIA will achieve, very often it sounds as if we are talking about Silicon Fen, often known as the “Cambridge cluster”—the region around Cambridge which has so many high-tech business, including software, electronics and biotechnology. But if you look at the reality of life in Cambridge, the top 6% of earners take home 19% of the wealth generated in the city, and the bottom 20% of earners get 2% of the wealth generated in the city.

I encourage noble Lords, if they have not yet seen it, to have a look at an article in the Guardian by Aditya Chakrabarti, who visited a foodbank in Cambridge recently. In his reflections there, he noted that this is a tiny city with a population half the size of a single London borough, yet in one postcode in Cambridge you can expect to live until 87. In a postcode just down the road, it is 78. This is the kind of development that has delivered a miserable life for many, many people. This is why I tabled this amendment.

In the discussions that I mentioned with the Minister and his staff, which raised some very interesting issues, they pointed me to Clause 2(6) of the Bill, which states that, in exercising its functions,

“ARIA must have regard to the desirability”

of various things. Clause 2(6)(c) states that one of those is

“improving the quality of life in the United Kingdom”.

I would be very interested to hear from any noble and learned Lords who might be able to assist me. I am not a lawyer and I am not quite sure what the legal definition is of “quality of life”. I suggest that it is open to political contention and discussion. More than that, in the context of what I was saying about Cambridge, whose quality of life are we talking about? That is a very important question to ask. In your Lordships’ House, I often comment on the Government’s pursuit of GDP as a goal in itself, but here we are talking about quality of life, which surely has to include a distributional element.

That was my purpose in tabling this amendment. I was asked whether I intended to put it to a vote. Given that I called a Division yesterday, and given that I have not had as much time as I would have liked to devote to thinking it through and finding a form of words that really works, it is not my intention to put it to a vote. However, I would be very interested to hear from the Minister what the Government mean by “quality of life” in Clause 2(6)(c). Do the Government acknowledge that that has to address distribution as well as GDP growth? I cannot see any way that it could not. If the Minister is looking for a way of measuring this, I point him to the Living Standards Framework used in New Zealand, which directs the New Zealand Treasury and the actions of the New Zealand Government. That is a good measure of the quality of life. I beg to move.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 4 and 19 in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Ravensdale and Lord Browne of Ladyton, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and myself. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, in particular for his tireless work on this issue. I too join in the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord Broers, and wish him well in his retirement. I also have some sympathy with the intention behind the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which raises very important and wider questions, but I am going to focus on Amendment 4.

As the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, has said, a number of Acts of Parliament that have gone through this House have had “have regard” amendments relating to climate change made to them. I was pleased to be a signatory to the cross-party amendment to the Financial Services Bill, which the Government substantially accepted in this regard. This point of consistency is extremely important. However, I would have preferred it if the Government had been willing to accept a stronger amendment on the purpose of the organisation, but I recognise that political pragmatism is wise on occasion.

In Committee, we had a very useful discussion about whether the agency would benefit from the sort of mission and focus that helped the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency in the United States—mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale—achieve its success. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, told us that DARPA’s mission had been to not be taken by surprise by new technology and, perhaps by implication, to surprise others with the advanced technology of the United States. That may well have been the mission, but the purpose of the mission was surely what drove DARPA’s success: to maintain the national security of the United States against the threat of Soviet communism. It is that purpose which provided DARPA with its edge, its sense of urgency and an understanding of the stakes of the mission on which it was engaged.

While Soviet communism posed an existential threat to our freedom then, today the threat we face from climate change and ecological destruction is even more acute: an existential threat to life itself. Surely, there can be no more profound purpose to drive our new advanced research agency, no greater focus to inspire research, innovation and the practical application of science, than that of tackling a threat to humanity itself.