Advanced Research and Invention Agency Bill

Richard Fuller Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 23rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Edward Miliband]

We shall look forward to the Secretary of State getting a satisfactory result. I am not sure that I always got a satisfactory result with the Treasury, although I was in the Treasury at one point, at least as an adviser. This is very important and, as I say, people’s jobs and livelihoods and the scientific base of this country, of which we are all so proud, depend on it.

Let me come to the Bill, which we support. The Bill is important—the Secretary of State said this—because there is incredible work going on in the scientific community, but there is consensus that there is a lack of a mechanism to identify, build and fund truly ambitious, high-risk, high-reward programmes. We recognise the case for an independent agency that operates outside the established research funding mechanisms, but we feel that the Bill requires improvement.

I guess our concerns cohere into a different view about the role of Government and the lessons of DARPA, which my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) talked about, on which in some broad sense—maybe not in the Secretary of State’s mind, but in others’ minds—ARIA is modelled. It is impossible to ignore what we might call the spectre of Dom in this debate. He was at the Science and Technology Committee—chaired by the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells—and he does rather hang over this Bill. He is its sort of governmental godfather. In his telling, DARPA’s success—I think this is important—is simply because the Government got out of the way and let a bunch of buccaneering individuals do what they liked. It is definitely true, as I understand it, that DARPA has important lessons about the need for the culture that I talked about, including higher reward and, of necessity, a higher chance of failure, but it is simply not true that DARPA was somehow totally detached from Government. DARPA had an obvious client—the Department of Defense—a clear mandate around defence-related research, a clear synergy in its work with the procurement power of the US DOD and, incidentally, abided by laws on freedom of information.

I want to suggest that there are two different views about ARIA: one is that we should let the organisation simply do what it wants, relying on the wisdom of a genius chair and chief executive; and the other subtler and, in our view, more sensible approach—one more consistent with the lessons of DARPA—is that Government should set a clear mandate and framework for ARIA and then get out of the way and not interfere with its day-to-day decision-making. I also believe there is a democratic case, because the priority goals for the spending of £800 million over this Parliament should be driven by democratic choices; not about the specific items that it funds, but about the goals and mission.

That takes me to the three points that I want to make: first, about the mandate for ARIA; secondly, about its position in the wider R&D system; and thirdly, about accountability. I will try to emulate the Secretary of State’s brevity—perhaps not exactly his brevity, but as much as I can.

The deputy director of DARPA says about its success that

“having national security as the mission frames everything.”

The Secretary of State said to the right hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells at the Science and Technology Committee:

“If I were in your position, I would be asking what the core missions of ARIA are.”

I think the point that Dominic Cummings made, or I am sure would have made, is that this will be a job for the people we hire who are running the organisation. The Secretary of State went on:

“It will be up to the head of ARIA to decide whether he or she thinks the organisation should adopt what the innovation strategy suggests…or reject it.”

I really understand the wish to give freedom to ARIA, but surely it is for Government to shape and not shirk the setting of priorities, and it is not just DARPA where we can learn that lesson. Moonshot R&D—the Japanese agency established in 2019 to fund challenging R&D—has seven specific moonshot goals set by the Japanese Government, and my understanding from the evidence taken by the Science and Technology Committee is that the UK scientific community agrees with that idea.

I notice the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) putting his head in his hands. He has done that before when I speak, but let me just make this point in seriousness: £800 million is not in the scheme of things a huge amount of money, certainly when compared with UKRI’s budget. The concern is that unless, as the Select Committee said, ARIA focuses on a single or a small number of missions, it will dilute its impact.

Take the net zero challenge. I believe it is a challenge of political will and imagination, but it is also a technological challenge. If it is the No. 1 international challenge, as the PM said last week, and if it is the No. 1 domestic challenge, as I think it is, why would it not be the right mandate for ARIA for at least its first five years? Indeed, Professor Richard Jones and Professor Mariana Mazzucato, who perhaps have even greater claims than Dom to being godfather and godmother of this idea, said that climate change would be an ideal challenge on which an agency such as ARIA would focus. To be clear, providing a mandate does not mean micro-managing decisions, and it would be grossly simplistic to suggest otherwise.

[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

The right hon. Gentleman tempts me to my feet, first, because I think he does a tremendous disservice to Dominic Cummings. Without his inspiration, this Bill would not be before this House. Secondly, I do not know whether the right hon. Gentleman is aware of the chart that Mr Cummings showed while giving evidence to the Select Committee. It showed a large circle of areas with potential for people to investigate and a smaller segment of that, which is where all of the foreign Governments and our Government focus their research, precisely because they are driven by the political decisions, frameworks and missions that politicians set. Does the right hon. Gentleman not think there is some opportunity for us to do something slightly different and without the sticky fingers of Government interfering?

[Edward Miliband]

The hon. Gentleman and I have a respectful disagreement on this: I think it is for the Government of the day and this House to say what are the massive national priorities. Then it is for an organisation such as ARIA to fund the research in the high-risk, high-reward way that I mentioned. That is simply a difference of view. Without a clear policy mission, we risk a fragmented approach.

I will make this other point, which is that the chair and chief executive will be in the somewhat unenviable position of having to decide which Government Departments to prioritise. Of course they can work with different Departments, but let us set a clear challenge for the organisation.

The second point is not just about the question of mandate, but how it sits in the life cycle of technological innovation and how it works with other funding streams. ARIA is born of a frustration about the failure to fund high-risk research. We do not disagree with that thinking, but that makes it especially important that it does not duplicate the work of existing funding streams. Let me give an example. Innovate UK, part of UKRI, is supposed to be a funding stream to turn ideas into commercially successful products. I do not know from reading the Government’s statement of intent what Innovate UK would fund that ARIA would not and what ARIA would fund that Innovate UK would not.

The vagueness of the mandate for ARIA is matched by vagueness about where in the innovation cycle it sits. I was not doing Mr Cummings a disservice on this score by the way, because I support the Bill, but he said to the Select Committee:

“My version of it here would be…to accelerate scientific discovery far beyond what is currently normal, and to seek strategic advantage in some fields of science and technology…I would keep it broad and vague like that.”

He went on to say that he would say to the agency:

“Your job is to find people…with ideas that could change civilisation completely”.

I am sorry, but that is too vague, and I do not believe it unreasonable to say that there needs to be greater clarity about where in the life cycle ARIA sits.

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[Stephen Flynn (Aberdeen South) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chair of the Select Committee on Science and Technology. Like other Members, I tuned in, eyes wide open, to hear what was said. I look forward to further instalments of that show in the month to come, as I am sure others do. I place on record my thanks, as other Members have done, for the fantastic work that has been undertaken by scientists in the UK in relation to the vaccine programme. It is something that unites us all. We all know that it will transform our lives, and we are collectively thankful on that front.

I commend the Secretary of State, as he has achieved something that is quite remarkable, certainly during my short tenure in the House. He appears almost to have united everyone in vague or cautious support for the Bill. On the face of it, it is something that we can welcome, but we have concerns, which I shall come on to, and reservations that need to be addressed in a positive manner, and hopefully the Secretary is willing to do that.

Before I deal with that, I am conscious that for my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray), who is sitting to my left, today is his last day in the Chamber, and he will make some valedictory remarks. I wish him the best going forward. As everyone in the Chamber will be well aware, all Scottish nationalists do not want to be here. He is getting away a little sooner than the rest of us, but we wish him well, and I am sure that Members across the Chamber do likewise.

Turning, you will be glad to know, Madam Deputy Speaker, to the substance of the Bill, I hope that, while I have made some positive comments, the Secretary of State will forgive me for saying—perhaps I have picked this up wrongly—that his short speech may reflect the fact that the Bill is incredibly vague on details. The first thing to reflect on in that regard is the wider mission of the Bill. That was addressed at length by the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) and by the Select Committee in its hearing last week. What is the Bill trying to achieve? Is it health outcomes, defence outcomes or transport outcomes? The clarity is not there. I heard what the Chair of the Select Committee said about having a focus on two issues. That is all well and good, but we do not have those answers yet from the Government. We need them moving forward, because there is a real concern and risk that what we have is something that becomes a jack of all trades, but a master of none. The Committee said that it was

“a brand in search of a product”,

which is entirely apt at this stage.

The right hon. Member for Doncaster North has rather stolen my thunder in that regard, because I want to discuss what the Bill could seek to do. It could follow Scotland’s lead. In Scotland, we have the Scottish National Investment Bank, which has a clear purpose to invest in net-zero technologies. Why do we not replicate that in the Bill? Why do the Government not put that front and centre of their agenda? The hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) is shaking his head, and he is more than welcome to intervene, to state why climate change should not be at the forefront of the Bill’s agenda.

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving me a chance to speak. I want to check that we are talking about the same aspects of the Bill, because he is trying, while saying what he thinks in a broad way, rather narrowly to define the scope of what research science projects can be. Does he not accept that there is a tension there, and that the Scottish example is precisely not what this is about?

[Stephen Flynn]

I reject the suggestion that climate change is a narrow focus given that climate change covers a whole host of areas. I see the Secretary of State nodding along with that. Presumably he is in agreement having previously been the Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth. When we look at this, we need to bear in mind DARPA, which has been talked about at length by others. DARPA had that clear focus, and that clear focus has allowed it to excel, in terms of GPS, the internet and the like. We should seek to replicate that, with climate change at the forefront.

It is regrettable that the Government have not simply made that suggestion, but it is not surprising, because, just last week, they sought to invest billions of pounds in new nuclear weapons. They could have said, “Here is £800 million that we are going to invest in trying to save the planet rather than destroy it.” In relation to the mission, therefore, the Secretary of State still has a great deal of work to do.

The second key area that I would like to pick up on is in relation to the wider leadership on the Bill. Although that has been referred to already, we do need to have clarity about how that process will work. What will be its outcome? Who will be the leader, or the leadership team, that takes this forward? There have been suggestions, indeed by Dominic Cummings himself, in relation to eminent scientists—scientists who, unfortunately, have been excluded from their professional role given the comments that have been made in relation to eugenics and race. Although I appreciate that the Secretary of State may not be in a position to say what the qualifying criteria will be for someone who takes on this role, I expect him to say what the disqualifying criteria will be. I certainly expect that someone who projects views of eugenics would fit into that disqualification category.

My third point relates to resources and accountability. I am very conscious of the fact that much of what I am saying is a repetition of what has already been said, but that is often true of what is said by everyone in this House, and I am sure that there will be more of that to come. I cannot get my head around this notion that we can throw away freedom of information and public contract processes in order to achieve something. I may have incorrectly picked up the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller) on that point he made earlier about being inspired to do that. I do not see it as inspired. I do not think that the public will see it as inspired. They certainly will not see it as inspired coming, as it does, from a Conservative Government, given what we have seen over a number of months in relation to cronyism and the concerns that we all have about that. When it comes to public money, public trust is of paramount importance. Frankly, the Government are not being as clear, transparent and open as they should be about the Bill.

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[Richard Fuller (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is genuinely a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), who speaks with great knowledge on this issue and who of course represents an area where many people will be interested in the Bill.

In common with other hon. Members, I welcome the Bill, but I just want to make sure I am welcoming the same Bill as they are. In many of the contributions today, Members appear to have aimed their guns at destroying those elements of the Bill that are unique, special and different. The shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), who is no longer in his place, started that off by talking about R&D as an example of an industrial strategy. Well, industrial strategies are playthings of Ministers and, as we know, Ministers can change from time to time. The whole design of the Bill is intended to prevent those issues.

The spokesperson for the Scottish nationalists, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn), chided me a little about the importance of the environment and asked whether that should be a focus. I am not denying that the environment and climate change is an important issue, but the point here is that we do not prescribe that that is the only thing that this organisation can research—I am not saying that it should not look into it.

I do not wish to smother at birth the unique characteristics of this organisation. Essentially, the purpose of the Bill is to create an institution that, in Donald Rumsfeld’s terms, would look at the unknown unknowns, and politicians are not in the right place to define what those would be. If I may, I would gently disagree with the Chair of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), when he said that we should choose a couple of focal points for ARIA. That really gets to the point, because the question would then be, did we choose the right focal points? I am not sure that that is something the Bill is seeking to do with this agency.

I want to ask some questions, and perhaps the Minister can cover them in her summing up or perhaps we can cover them in Committee. Many hon. Members have spoken about the importance of the programme manager in DARPA. I looked at the worked case example cited in the policy statement released for ARIA. In it, somebody was recruited on the basis of a £50,000 grant and a three-month project. Subsequently, on review, they would, in this example, be granted £20 million for further research. I would say to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench that there are three key tensions there that we need to tease out.

The first is that that approach places tremendous responsibility on the evaluation of those initial projects, so how do we see that going? What are we thinking about in terms of the framework in which that evaluation will take place? That seems a very thin basis for the initial judgment—it is not wrong, but it is a thin basis.

Secondly, the appointments of the chief executive officer and the chair, which my right hon. and hon. Friends are already considering, also seem to be extremely important, because they will, in such an important way, define the culture of this organisation—certainly for the initial five-year term of the chief executive and at least for the first 10 years of this organisation.

Thirdly, DARPA has been commented on a number of times. It estimates that 25% of its programme managers turn over annually, so there will be quite a large turnover of these key members of staff in the UK. What is our expectation? As the hon. Member for Cambridge said, America can draw on an enormous pool of talent. Is the goal that we will be able to draw on a larger, perhaps global pool of talent to play a role in this agency? That would be a very good aspect of global Britain.

In 2019, 65% of DARPA projects were undertaken by companies, and only 17% by universities. Is that the intention here? If so, I would very much welcome that. Also, there is the opportunity in the Bill for ARIA to create companies and joint ventures, and a document will come out to explain how that will work. However, it would be helpful to know whether it will also include what happens to any returns from those joint ventures and companies, and whether the money will go back into ARIA itself or be returned to the Treasury—I think we all know what the answer to that might be, but it would be interesting to at least pose the question.

The Secretary of State will know that ARPA was set up in the same year—1958, if I can read my writing—as the Small Business Investment Act was enacted in the United States. I would like to close on this point. There is very positive reinforcement between the initiatives being taken in the Bill and encouraging support for venture capital and small businesses. I refer Members to my declaration of interests on the issue of venture capital. There is a tremendous opportunity.

DARPA likes to say that it created the internet, but venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins can point to the fact that it made billions out of Amazon, billions out of Netscape and billions out of Google. That is the essence of the problem we often hear about in this country. We are very good at doing the research, but we are very poor at commercialising it. Can we see further efforts by the Department to ensure that we have the same parallel tracks as the United States had when it successfully launched its equivalent of our initiative, ARPA, in 1958?